Martyn Cornell and I agreed on the main reason for exposing inaccuracies in the Oxford Companion to Beer. That it would be assumed to be authoritative and any errors in it would be endlessly repeated. If left uncorrected, they could do untold harm.
And here it is. My first spotting of the OCB being used as a reference. Alright, it's only in wikipedia. But you get my point. It's just the start.
Though there's some irony in it being the Porter article from the OCB that's used as a reference. The OCB article having listed my book "Porter!" in its references.
Horst Dornbusch being cited as a reliable source in an encyclopaedia. Christ on a bike.
ReplyDeleteYes, and some fuckwit on Wikipedia has already misinterpreted the (confusingly written) OCB entry on porter to claim that "The name [porter] was first used in the 18th century and may have been a result of the drink's popularity with the street and river porters of London, however there is little evidence to support this theory." There is, in fact, almost a century's worth of compellingly solid evidence from 1726 to 1820 to support precisely that conclusion and that conclusion only - even Feltham in 1802 agreed that it "obtained the name porter" because it was "very suitable for porters and other working people".
ReplyDeleteWhoa - scarcely had I complained about this on the Wikipedia discussion page for the "porter" entry than someone reverted it. Anyway, I have now added a source for the name claim.
ReplyDeleteAlso the wiki and other keep leaving out that Guinness used amber malt along with pale and patent
ReplyDeletealong with Murphy'sulin to will at least the 1940's