Top all-time · #19701
Shut up about Barclay Perkins
Personal blog · barclayperkins.blogspot.comhistoryculture
Shut up about Barclay Perkins is a personal blog at barclayperkins.blogspot.com about history and culture. Since 2017, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its posts on historical British beer, such as old brewing records and recipes. One commenter says the author writes something most days, mostly about beer.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
There are a lot of historical records that you'd never expect to have survived for so long in various archives. There are massive archives of historical brewing data from various breweries in the UK dating back to the 1800s, this guy has a blog all about old British beer: http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com There are also parish records for births, deaths, and marriages going back centuries in the UK as well as taxat…
Comment linking /
on “132 year old message in a bottle found on West Australian beach”Seemingly not, from a hasty look for data. [1] shows the price of a pint of lager across 1973 - 2017 increasing from 17p to 358p while the Bank of England calculator [2] shows an increase in line with inflation would have been 138p. Of course pure inflation doesn't directly match changes in consumer spending ability, but crudely it suggests pub beer has become relatively more than twice as expensive, possibly becaus…
Comment linking /2018/01/average-uk-draught-beer-prices-1973-2017.html
on “Number of pubs in England and Wales falls to record low”Additionally, recipes change overtime to accommodate any number of environmental factors: better tech, lower or higher cost/availability of raw materials (e.g. bad harvest, war). One benefit of keeping the recipe 'secret' is ability to continually tweak it. So, it's more a question of the recipe from when (and perhaps even where). This is very evident in the history of beer. Here's just one small example: http://bar…
Comment linking /2013/02/tetley-porter-1858-1896.html
on “Being Unpredictable Is a Bad Strategy”Actually, the Shutup about Barlcay Perkins link should have gone directly to the blog's homepage. The author writes something every day, not always exclusively about beer but mostly related to it. https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Recreating Medieval English Ales”If you’re into this kind of thing, I’d like to recommend Historic Brewing Techniques, The Lost Art of Farmhouse Brewing by Lars Marius Garshol.[1] Absolutely fascinating and practical. It does focus on Norway to a large extent, but covers a little from other north-eastern European countries too. His associated blog is also great reading.[2] The author was really instrumental in the mainstream exposure of kveik yeast…
Comment linking /2022/?m=1
on “Recreating Medieval English Ales”