Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

greatest offender in the use of "punk" to describe food & drink are surely Brewdog. the beer is great but this is the label for their "Punk IPA":

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dPvDDO8DKjo/SQCcfARAAaI/AAAAAAAAB-o/uLTq2LC7EcQ/s400/punk+ipa4.JPG

This beer, handcrafted on a busy Camden corner one Saturday afternoon, will seek you out and fight you if you so much as conform.

you non-punk-wock sheeple will never understand our bonkers crazy revolutionary beer!

- Bob Marley

It's the phrase "this rebellious little beer" that reveals the Innocent Smoothie twee kid behind the snarling punk posturing. Bobby Gillespie IPA more like.

i am so ashamed of all brewdog's marketing, logos, social media campaigns, and even the design of their bars.

this is hard because i fucking love their beer and think their success is an absolutely brilliant thing. maybe the dumb marketing is why they're so big - they do support other smaller breweries too.

xpost that's exactly it, i've always thought it's the reverse innocent smoothie. proof if you ever needed it that "anti-spin" and "spin" are two sides of the same coin.

i rip the labels off when i drink it in case someone thinks i identify as a punk.

#nonemorepunk

What blows my mind about Punk IPA has always been its aggressiveness. It's a taste that's existed in my brain since before I can remember, like the Mario theme or the Crossfire commercial. What's so spectacular about this beer is that it's not a lowest common denominator which almost no beer even begins to touch (besides Sunny Day Real Estate). The reason no one touches it is because we just don't care if you like it or not.

They are a load of wacky student* dicks with a dreadful brand, a couple of genuinely nice beers, a few so-so beers and a load of irritating stunt shit. But their wacky marketing is definitely a part of their success, people lap that shit up.

*In spirit if not literally.

yeah I love the beer too, but the stripped warehouse look of the bars and general insufferable posturing is all very tedious. Correct re. Innocent comparison, I was trying to think of how to make the link between the off-putting marketing strategies of both companies.

I might put out a Darkwave IPA where the packaging is just covered with memorably insane DJ Martian quotes.

With Brew Dog you get the feeling they should know better, as they call out a lot of the lazy misogynist small breweries on their own pump clips, but then they have their own brand which is almost as lame and lazy in a different way. They seem to have a certain generic punk rocker look for their bar staff, with fake Brewdog transfer tattoos etc. I think their beer is nearly OK as well, not as interesting as they would lead you to believe.

Mearly OK that should read.

Damnit, you know what I mean.

Luckily beer-wise a Craft Beer Co has opened just near where I work, for all my insanely strong IPA needs.

As a session beer or like, a craft brewery whose prodcts you can buy in Tesco (which they now are) I am delighted with the quality. They are nicer than all of the London pale ales for me, except Kernel.

Brewdog beer, is that?

yeah

i also like some of the seemingly gimmicky ones, they are actually good. the really strong ones like tokyo dark star are really good as an after-dinner drink if you have some mates around.

Punk IPA. I once met somebody who proudly proclaimed his life values were encapsulaed by the label copy on that beer.

John Lydon?

bloody pricey though, non?

you met mahatma gandhi?

That label works perfectly if you imagine it as read by VS Naipaul.

it still amazes me that aung san suu kyi is such a fan of punk ipa

Re Tonkotsu ramen Ronan, do you mean the place called that in Soho? I made it there for their soft launch. Great noodles and egg, but the broth was far too thin compared to the Tonkotsu I had on my trip to Japan, and which I've made a few times myself, but I got the feeling they were having some teething problems. What's it like now, and do you know any other aces which do Tonkotsu?

Places. Sorry, I'm touch screen typing today.

i took it to the london restaurants thread:

london restaurants

Boycotting Starbucks? What's the best-tasting alternative?

Where should you head if you're unhappy with the company's policy on corporation tax? Our reporter samples the options

in which the guardian send some dork to buy coffee at mcdonalds

They always smile at you in Pret. I smiled back this time, and a lady called Mia refused to charge me for the drink. I insisted. We compromised and I put the cost of the coffee into the charity box. (I'd heard that Pret do this, but it's never happened to me before. It's called a "joy giveaway", alarmingly.)

wait, really?

My colleague proudly walked into the office with her free Pret coffee just the other day.

i happened into pret yesterday and found it a bit awkward as the cashier didn't seem capable of sentences longer than two words. "take out?" "receipt?" no charming innocent-esque joy giveaways for me.

dunno how to break this to u but u got joy takeawayed blud

my tesco has been doing a 4-bottles-for-6-pounds deal of brewdog's 9% "American IPA" for what seems like months now and it has turned me into a docile addict of their product

I am pretty sure i saw Gerry Adams in Cafe Nero last week. Not sure if that boosts its leftist credentials or not.

my tesco has been doing a 4-bottles-for-6-pounds deal of brewdog's 9% "American IPA" for what seems like months now and it has turned me into a docile addict of their product

Sparky punky free-thinker, surely?

I get the impression that those people really are a wunch of bankers, fwiw. In this case iw not very much really but the point remains.

the supermarkets do have great deals on brewdog. think 660ml punk ipa bottles are about £1.80 or something.

i was going to say that this whole conversation was off-topic but i looked at the thread title again and, y'know

A few months ago, I got 2 free "choco-wafflewafer' things given, for the kids. Nice of them, but they were not good...

Ronan, as far as I can remember, that price is for the 330ml bottle (at least it is in Sainos).

The coffee thing in the G2 infuriated me. It's coffee. Just coffee. Who cares*.

* I am fully aware that I should stop taking the G2 into the toilet with me at work, it only enrages me. Maybe I'll read Monocle instead. LOL!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/dec/15/becca-bland-estranged-parents

read this through three times now and it doesn't say anything about why the author is estranged from her parents, or even hint at it. which makes it really puzzling to try and get a handle on

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/16/kraftwerk-at-tate-modern

haha this surely was specifically commissioned to earn a place in 'Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?'

read all the way to the end

should point out that that was actually in the comment section of the print edition of the Observer today - it's not just some CiF thing

Yeah, take it to the "Is the Observer worse than it used to be" thread, EK!

"It certainly gave me a few wry chuckles; and I feel much better now about not getting tickets. They sound like a modem! Ouch! Take that, electronic music!"

Where have all these so-called Kraftwerk fans come from? Fuck off and go and watch Mumford & Sons, you cunts!!!!!!!!!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/labout-address-migration-impact-britain

This is pretty infuriating.

Deliberately dishonest, factually inaccurate tosh that sees pushing even further to the right than Blair / Brown / Straw / Blunkett as 'opening a dialogue that wasn't previously being addressed' or similar nonsense. Ugh.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/dec/20/tv-review-young-apprentice

Patrick's idea is this: a choir of middle-aged women, singing Lady Gaga's Poker Face, in a shopping centre... They wander out among the shoppers. They sing about their poker faces.

Or, as I believe the young people call the song, 'Bad Romance'. Which is jam packed with references to poker faces.

I tell a lie, they had a second go at it which was Poker Face.

Is aldo worse that he used to be?