Jon Russell Brown, a stalwart CAMRA supporter from the East London & City branch, died peacefully on 3 October 2023 in the Royal London Hospital. He had been unwell with cancer for several years. In particular, Jon worked on the foreign beer bar at beer festivals, mostly in the 1990s and 2000\u2019s. He had an exceptional knowledge of his subject, which he took to the Great British Beer Festival and local festivals such as Pig\u2019s Ear, Ealing, London Drinker and many others. At some, he selected and ordered the beers and wrote the tasting notes. To obtain this knowledge he roamed the beer producing areas of northern Europe, principally Belgium, the Netherlands, and Alsace-Lorraine, with occasional trips to Germany. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
These trips were made on his Kawasaki 750 which he also used for his day job as a motorcycle courier.
Apart from beer, Jon was an ardent supporter and attender of jazz gigs. He was a long-time volunteer at the Vortex Jazz Club where he worked behind the bar! In his later years his interest turned to Improv Jazz. He played bass guitar but never joined a band.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jon was an active socialist and was one of the first members of the Wilfrid Housing Co-operative in Bow and he was their works manager for many years. He had also been interested in art from an early age, with very catholic tastes; he was a regular at specialist exhibitions at the Tate. A major part of Jon\u2019s life was listening to recorded music. For this he had some very High Fi equipment and was an expert on many aspects of recording and reproduction, such as clean power supplies, valve amplifiers, moving coil transducers and the like. He has left an enormous collection of CDs (99% of them jazz), along with a similar quantity of cassettes (recorded off-air) and LPs. No digitizing for Jon! He specified that there should be no service of any kind. As a friend described him, he was gentle, kind, and courteous and he made many friends over a glass or two of ale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The celebration of John\u2019s life will be held on Tuesday 13 February at the Vortex Jazz Club, 11 Gillett Square, London N16 8A from 6pm to 10pm. The nearest station is Dalston Kingsland (Overground). If you wish to attend, please contact me (Jon’s brother) on jemrb@yahoo.co.uk<\/a>, otherwise you won’t get in! The venue has a limited capacity. Jon Russell Brown, a stalwart CAMRA supporter from the East London & City branch, died peacefully on 3 October 2023 in the Royal London Hospital. He had been unwell with… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3972,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tribute"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3971"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4116,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3971\/revisions\/4116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Jem Russell Brown<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"