Jon Henley (The aggressive, outrageous, infuriating (and ingenious) rise of BrewDog, 24 March) tells the story of craft brewing elegantly but through the usual suspects, BrewDog and the Campaign for Real Ale – and all with only one passing reference to women.
This is despite women being responsible for brewing beer as part of household management, until the rise of the modern industrial brewing that Camra and BrewDog kick against; and despite the importance of women in the contemporary British and European craft brewing scene – Jean Merrick at Beavertown in London, Jaega Wise at Wild Card in Walthamstow, Gwen Sanchirico at Sacre Brew in Wolverhampton, Jessica Heidrich at St Erik’s in Stockholm. It’s a long and skilled list.
Shame that this other story wasn’t told, or even acknowledged – it’s a lot more significant and interesting than debates about whether BrewDog’s noisy owners are true punks or not.
Dr Scott Taylor
Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham
• Jon Henley focuses not unreasonably on hype and marketing. Ultimately however it is about the beer. James Watt is right to suggest that BrewDog have done a good bit to broaden beer drinking tastes beyond industrial lagers and conservative cask beers. As a member of Camra since 1975 I often stop by BrewDog bars and here the test is: is the beer any good?
The answer is that sometimes it’s excellent, sometimes less so, depending on style and personal taste. There are better brewers of cask and keg beer in the UK than BrewDog but none who have done as much to take good beer to locations well beyond the kind of beer and beard bars I tend to frequent.
Keith Flett
London
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