Schooner schooner schooner schooner

Writing about other blogs can become a self-referential circle of self-congratulation or self-immolation (take your pick and it’s of course entirely the views of myself), but I’m amused about the schooner stuff which has been covered here, here and here. Like the writers I think it’s a positive move, a contemporary take on beer glassware that — lord of lords — has been proposed by the government (aided and abetted of course by those stirling folk at BrewDog); this sort of take on glassware (as opposed to gimmick glassware for women, ‘young folk’ and whoever else the brewing industry has decided needs to be herded into a segment entitled ‘new beer drinkers’) is something that I’ve heard discussed on and off in beer writing circles for years. The half pint, especially when it’s dimpled or the mini nonic, is a paltry thing of such ugliness that you might as well drink out of a thimble, while the pint, as rightly observed, can be too much if you’ve got some St Petersburg or Dark Star’s Tripel on the go (though some of us do soldier on manfully sometimes). So well done for the introduction of the schooner (which according to Michael Jackson in the English Pub was a term occasionally used by northern drinkers to describe their glass). One thing puzzles me: I’ve yet to see anyone writing about the death of the pint (or the dearth even) — maybe it’s just a letter in the Daily Express that has been expanded to become a massive media myth, a case of dragons needed to be slain.