Categories
beer in fiction / tv opinion

Real ale as folk horror

It’s a standing joke amongst horror fans that you can make the case for almost anything to be part of the ‘folk horror’ sub-genre. But what about real ale?

This thought started with a conversation I was having on BlueSky about cultural cycles of reaction against technology in which I said:

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the Campaign for Real Ale, The Wicker Man and the English Morris dancing revival all landed at about the same time.

The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy and released in 1973, is arguably the key text in understanding what folk horror means.

It stars Edward Woodward as a mainland policeman sent to a remote island to investigate the disappearance of a girl.

He finds that the people of Summerisle practice a form of paganism and, though they’re a weirdly friendly bunch, he soon discovers that sacrifice plays an important part in their religion.

Other important examples of folk horror include The Blood on Satan’s Claw, directed by Piers Haggard, released in 1971, and the 1973 novel Harvest Home by American writer Thomas Tryon.

For a fuller explanation of what folk horror is, or might be, check out this post from Rowan Lee and, indeed, her entire blog.

The main point is that many of the stories concern secretive cults which are unwelcoming to outsiders and cling to arcane practices and rituals. Which brings us to CAMRA.

Calm down! I’m kidding. Sort of.

If you’ve read Brew Britannia you’ll know that Jess and I made the case there for CAMRA as part of a post-post-war reaction against modernity. After 20 years of space age, atom age technology, including keg beer and concrete pubs, it felt like time to get back to basics – and to nature.

We highlighted connections with preservation movements, protest movements, and E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.

In 1976 CAMRA founder Michael Hardman even wrote a book called Beer Naturally (we have a signed copy) which opens with this statement:

Beer at its best is a reflection of a golden field of barley, a reminder of the rich aroma of a hop garden. Scientists can argue endlessly about the merits of the man-made concoctions which go into much of today’s beer but the proof of the pint is in the drinking… the best of British beer is produced from the gifts that nature gave us and by methods which have been proudly handed down over the centuries. The story of beer is a story of nature and of craftsmanship; a story of farmers and brewers who join forces to create beer naturally.

Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle in an excellent tweed suit. Edward Woodward as Sergeant Howie is behind him. They are in a lush garden.

Now, try reading that in the voice of Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle, whose actual speech goes:

What attracted my grandfather to the island, apart from the profuse source of wiry labor that it promised, was the unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm gulf stream that surrounded it. You see, his experiments had led him to believe that it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he had developed. So, with typical mid-Victorian zeal, he set to work. The best way of accomplishing this, so it seemed to him, was to rouse the people from their apathy by giving them back their joyous old gods, and it is as a result of this worship that the barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance.

We’ve written before about the spooky potential of pubs, including The Green Man in The Wicker Man and, of course, The Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf in London. That’s not generally considered folk horror but those scenes on the Yorkshire moors could definitely be framed that way.

Beer loosens inhibitions. Beer puts people in touch with their animal instincts. Beer is magic.

The crossover between folk + horror + beer is perhaps best captured in a traditional song recorded by Traffic in 1971 as ‘John Barleycorn Must Die’:

“There were three men came out of the West
Their fortunes for to try
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die…”

Just to run over those dates again:

  • The Blood on Satan’s Claw, 1971
  • ‘John Barleycorn Must Die’, 1971
  • CAMRA is founded, 1972
  • The Wicker Man, 1973

Much as I was enjoying my thought experiment, I wanted a sense check, and immediately thought of Lisa Grimm.

She’s a beer blogger and podcaster who I also happen to know enjoys folk horror. She says:

The Venn diagram of real ale, CAMRA, folk horror and – depending on whom you ask, more or less tangentially – mainstream archaeology in the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s is not quite a circle, but there is a huge amount of overlap.

While archaeologists have always liked their beer (I’m pretty sure I learned more about beer than prehistory in my two degrees) popular archaeology fed into the eventual folk horror media landscape starting in 1968, when Richard J. C. Atkinson’s work at Silbury Hill was broadcast on the BBC.

This makes its way into Doctor Who in 1971 in The Daemons, which ticks all the boxes: a traditional pub called The Cloven Hoof, predating The Green Man in The Wicker Man by several years; televised ‘archaeology’ summoning an ancient evil (albeit one from another planet, in this instance) from definitely-not-Silbury Hill; good witchcraft; a maypole; and even some dodgy Morris dancers thrown into the mix.

There’s no way the pub in this episode – or, indeed, The Green Man – wouldn’t pass muster with early-years CAMRA. These look like hardcore real-ale spots with aggressively local-rural clientele. The punters literally out of central casting also fit the stereotype – all beards and tankards, no kegged lagers here!

The other thing Lisa flagged is that modern breweries are leaning into this connection.

She highlighted Verdant’s collaboration with the people behind the Weird Walk zine and their Ritual Pale Ale.

This made me think about other ways folk horror, or pagan imagery, or horror imagery, has leaked into beer branding.

Hop Back sprang to mind immediately with its grimacing green man mascot, as did Exmoor Beast.

Oakham also has a sort of green man crossed with a hop – imagine meeting someone wearing that for a mask in a Kentish field at midnight before the harvest!

These days, folk horror has also leaked into the mainstream in some interesting ways.

The Detectorists isn’t horror, it’s a gentle comedy, but its creator Mackenzie Crook clearly knows the tropes. And his Worzel Gummidge was practically The Wicker Man for kids. Both shows feature beer and pubs conspicuously as a benign symbol of Englishness, and of life on the land.

Then there’s Morris dancing, another revived folk tradition that surged in popularity in the 1970s. I recently watched Tim Plester’s interesting 2011 documentary Way of the Morris about the rebirth of Morris dancing in the Oxfordshire village where he grew up, and the role his father and uncles played in the process. It was distinctly beer-soaked and blokey but Plester’s gloss on the story also made it feel somewhat spooky – or, at least, mystical.

Another interesting artefact, from 2018, is this excellent video for the song ‘Apparition’ by Stealing Sheep:

Reframing beard-weirdy finger-in-ear folkiness as something deeper, darker, and more magical is a clever trick.

And it might work in real ale’s favour.

Categories
20th Century Pub london pubs

London’s best pubs in 1968: mini-skirts and toasties

The January 1968 edition of Town magazine (“For men”) includes a guide to pubs in London and the surrounding area. How many are still there, and still good?

The guide is split into sections starting with pub entertainment. The first entry is a theme pub – one of our pet topics:

The Blue Boar, Leicester Square. Cheerfully, blatant subterranean restaurant and bar devoted to the Robin Hood theme: ‘Kindly deposit ye arrows,’ and ‘Knights’ and ‘Dames’ etc. Sounds awful, but is tremendous fun. Mock torches, waitresses in medieval gear, Maid Marian cocktails, free cheese ‘from the Sheriff’s larder’ and cut as much as you want.

Now, how’s that for a flying start? The London Picture Archive has an image from 1975. The magnificent building is still there but is no longer a pub.

There was modern jazz at The Bull’s Head in Barnes with “American stars”. It’s still there, still a pub, and – amazingly – still hosts a jazz club. There’s a pleasing sense of permanence there. 

Other jazz pubs included The Iron Bridge in Poplar (Marylanders on Sunday, New State Jazzband on Monday, Hugh Rainey All Stars on Tuesday and Alan Elsdon’s Jazz Band on Wednesday; demolished) and The Tally Ho in Kentish Town. (Became a punk pub, then demolished.)

If you wanted protest songs and folk music the anonymous author suggests The Horseshoe Hotel on Tottenham Court Road on Sunday evenings. There was apparently also cheap food to be had in the dive bar. This 1976 photo shows it in Ind Coope livery. It was demolished years ago.

We’ve written before about The Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs. As the Town pub guide explains:

Where journalist and TV personality Dan Farson inaugurated the now wildly successful Stars and Garter era of modern East End music hall. Few East Enders in sight but packed for the excellent entertainment.

It’s still there as a pub and boutique hotel, without music hall acts.

The Deuragon Arms in Homerton is described as “the best of the untainted and uncommercialised East End fun palaces” where “Marks and Sparks shirts glitter in the ultra-violet lights”. Snooty! It’s long gone, replaced by flats.

Also mentioned in this section are The Lamb & Flag, Covent Garden; The Prospect of Whitby in Wapping; St Stephen’s Tavern in Westminster; The Samuel Whitbread on Leicester Square; and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street.

LP cover for "The Entertainers" featuring a warm Victorian pub interior.
A 1960s record featuring the interior of the Waterman’s Arms.

City of London pubs in 1968

This section features a lot of wine bars, chophouses, and quasi-pubs. But there is one excellent sounding theme pub:

Square Rigger, King William Street, EC3. A modern pub with a yo-ho-ho theme, as befits a boozer only a stone’s throw from the Pool of London. Canned noise of the sea, ship’s timbers, etc, but none the worse for it considering the large number of dirty and characterless pubs in the City.

From the outside it was a concrete booze bunker and was demolished in the 1980s.

Engraved glass on the door of a pub with Restaurant and Saloon Bar.
The Antelope in 2017.

The pubs of Belgravia

This section has a list of familiar classics, many of which we’ve visited, and some of which we wrote about back in 2017.

The Antelope on Eaton Terrace, the guide says, is “a male pub, full of beer swillers and hearties”. The Duke of Wellington, also on Eaton Terrace, is “full of the classier flat dwellers” and “Lots of lovely girls” The Grenadier on Wilton Row has been in every single pub guide for decades, as far as we can tell. Here we’re told it has “the ghost of a grenadier flogged to death” and “classy birds, but usually accompanied”. The Wilton Arms on Kinnerton Street “claims to be the smallest pub in London” where you can “get served by one of the miniest skirts”. All four of these pubs are still there and still trading, in one form or another.

The Red Lion in Pimlico is an unusual entry. It’s described as “a fine modern pub built into a block of GLC flats”. You’re probably wondering about “the birds” aren’t you? This being a less posh neighbourhood at the time the author got in a dig alongside his sexism: “a little more obviously bleached”. This became The Belgravia which, oddly enough, was one of the pubs Jess drank in a lot after work during the noughties. It’s now a restaurant.

An ornate Art Nouveau pub at night.
The Black Friar.

Quirky architecture and vibe

The section called ‘Character pubs’ starts The Black Friar at Blackfriars with its unique Art Nouveau decor which was literally a cause célèbre in the 1960s. It’s still there, still beautiful, but perhaps not a great place to drink these days.

Carrs on the Strand grabbed our interest with mention of its new “German Schloss Keller” with “Lowenbrau and Bavarian snacks served by mini-skirted waitresses”. There was a trend for this back in the 1960s and 70s which we wrote about for CAMRA’s BEER magazine. That piece is collected in our book Balmy Nectar if you want to read it.

The Surrey Tavern on Surrey Street also rang a bell and that’s because it was the Australian pub in London in the 1960s: “If you want to know what Australia’s like skip the pamphlets and come here.” It’s not only gone but doesn’t seem to have left much of a trace on the usual pub history websites.

The others mentioned in this section are The York Minster in Soho (AKA The French House), which is still going, and a bunch of wine bars like El Vino.

An illustration of some pies adapted from an old cook book.

Pub grub

There’s a relatively small list of pubs chiefly known for decent food. Fittingly, one is The Earl of Sandwich in the West End where “they commemorate their namesake by selling at 9d a round some of the cheapest sandwiches in London”. It was apparently opposite The Garrick Theatre. Does anybody know exactly where?

The Museum Tavern in Bloomsbury gets in because it had cheap student meals. It’s still there although we’ve not been for a while and don’t know if it still serves Old Peculier as a regular beer.

The Albion at Ludgate Circus gets a positive rave review for food “deliriously superior to usual pub fare” including toasted sandwiches and home-made pies. Toasties and pies! That’s really all we ask. It’s still there and looks rather handsome. Why have we never noticed it before? Despite this being another part of town where Jess hung out a lot 20 years ago, she doesn’t recall ever drinking there.

Beyond the boozer

For additional context, the same issue also has Cyril Ray’s pick of the wines, including Grande Fine Champagne 1948 at £6 a bottle; a recommendation for the film the Dutchman starring Laurence Harvey; and high praise for Dusty Springfield’s album Where Am I Going.

Why write a post like this?

That’s a good question. It’s mostly so that if someone is researching any of the pubs above they might find a nugget or two of useful information via Google.

Increasingly, we think of this now rather ancient blog as, among other things, a sort of index to our library of books, magazines and cuttings about beer and pubs.

And if nothing else, it was fun to spend an hour or two in 1968, where things were different, but also the same.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 23 March 2024: Riding High

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer, pubs and brewing. This week, it’s been unusually emotional.

Let’s start this post with some scene-setting news via Darren Norbury at Beer Today: UK brewery insolvencies nearly doubled in 2023, according to a new report from accountancy firm Mazars. The numbers are still relatively small – up from 38 in 2022 to 69 in 2023 – but it’s a definite move of the dial.

And from the world of mergers and takeovers there’s a story that’s caused some concern: ‘parts of’ craft beer distributor Eebria have been bought by Beer52 leaving many suppliers with invoices unlikely to be paid. We had an email from one of those suppliers writing that “we have been informed that all orders placed with us through Eebria that haven’t been paid (essentially all orders in the last 4 weeks) will likely not be paid out to us, and won’t be the responsibility of the new owners”. At The Grocer James Beeson provides insight into the practicalities and ethics of the pre-pack administration model:

“Proponents argue it allows an otherwise doomed business to continue with minimal disruption, and protects jobs that would otherwise be lost… Critics, however, argue pre-packs let previous management off the hook for running a business into the ground, allowing them to stiff creditors and investors in turn.”


1905 illustration: Siberian Red crab apples.

Katie Mather and her husband, Tom, opened a bar in 2019 and kept it afloat through perhaps the most challenging time for hospitality since World War II. Then, in 2023, they closed it and stepped away. For Pellicle she writes about how picking apples for cider helped them overcome their sense of grief at losing their dream business and, at the same time, a friend:

What I didn’t consider when I signed up to do orchard work was how much time I would have alone with my thoughts. Perhaps it was too early. I could have used a month or so of decompression time before I tried to deal with stress and grief head-on. But how long are you supposed to sit in it for? When does it feel easier to tackle? Harvesting in vineyards has been some of my happiest times. Being useful. Being outside. Working. I hoped it would be the same here… The repetitive action of picking apples sends me deep into myself. For hours at a time I’m silent, although I don’t realise it—the noise inside my head is a deafening cacophony of musical earworms, repetitive thoughts, and intrusive imaginary scenarios. I see faces. I hear voices.


The word 'wild' in an antique-style font over a woodcut illustration of winds and cloud.

For Punch Tony Rehagen tells the story of a brewer whose unique yeast strain, captured from the air of a small town in Missouri, is his only link with his late father, after who the strain is named:

By all accounts, Robert Schaaf was a character. Raising his family in conservative 1980s small-town Missouri, he loved Motown music and dressed in drag for Halloween. He leaned into his ne’er-do-well reputation by giving himself the nickname Tomcat… In April 2015, [DeWayne] Schaaf’s father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Schaaf sought refuge in his own backyard. He brewed up a 5-gallon batch of wort, added hops to fend off bacteria, and poured the boil into hotel cooking pans as a makeshift open-fermentation vessel (what he calls a “hillbilly coolship”). He covered it with a cheesecloth to keep out leaves and other detritus, and let it sit overnight, collecting microbes from the breeze blowing off the Mississippi River.


A detail from an old book with the word 'Yeast' beneath a drawing of yeast cells.

Sticking with yeast beer historian Andreas Krennmair asks exasperatedly why he even bothers with liquid yeast in his homebrewing:

It’s March 2024, and I spent €11.49 on a pack of liquid yeast, allegedly the Pilsner Urquell “D” strain, for which I had to create a starter using malt extract to multiply its cell count and improve its vitality. What really happened though was that the yeast was dead, completely dead, and I only noticed it when the starter did not elicit any fermentation activity whatsoever after more than 24 hours on the stir plate… Instead, I had to resort to my backup plan and rehydrated and pitched two sachets of W-34/70, probably the most widespread bottom-fermenting yeast strain these days. Full disclosure: I got these two sachets for free from a friend who in turn had gotten them at BrauBeviale last December, but if I had had to buy it myself, it would have cost me €9.98. Not much cheaper, but a lot less hassle, because that W-34/70 was rehydrated and noticeably very active in less than 40 minutes…


An Art Deco illuminated sign advertising Gueueze Mort Subite hanging from the ceiling of the eponymous Brussels cafe.

Eoghan Walsh continues his consideration of his own solo drinking habits in Brussels by asking why he likes one cafe, but not another, when both are so similar on paper:

The Greenwich was unknown to me, an uncharted spot on my mental map of downtown Brussels cafés. But what had I to lose? I stopped hokey cokey-ing and crossed the threshold… It’s nice here, and while I drink I write in my notebook: “why have I not been here before?” How, despite its reputation and its location, had I not been in for a drink in over a decade, when I’ve pretty much gone to every single bar within a 300 metre radius of its entrance. Well, I’d never been there because I’d never been there, if that makes sense? When I first arrived in Brussels and undertook my cartographical survey of its downtown bars, unconsciously compiling the collection of places I would rotate through over the next decade, I’d failed to even consider the Greenwich.

Top marks for the headline on this one, too: “Greenwich Me Time”.


The Adnams brewery logo mounted on a stone wall in Southwold.

Veteran beer writer Roger Protz has been following the story of British real ale for decades. He posts his regular columns for CAMRA on his blog a little while after they’ve featured in What’s Brewing. This week he shared thoughts on Adnams whose recent financial difficulties he calls “an arrow in the heart”:

The major cause of the problems was a 25 per cent decline in sales of cask beer since 2019 and the impact of the Covid pandemic and pub lockdowns. As a result, its operating losses in the first half of the last financial year rose to £2.4 million. Its shares fell by 50 per cent and their value dropped by almost two-thirds… A glimmer of hope comes in its report of improved trading this year but there’s clearly a long and slow road to recovery. Adnams won’t go out of business – it’s too big and respected for that to happen. It’s call for help will be met and let’s hope it won’t be in the form of hedge funds or investment companies looking for a quick buck with some asset stripping thrown in for good measure… The brewery runs 45 pubs, inns and other properties and it might be tempting for the wrong sort of new investor to say that some of that real estate should be sold to help pay off the debt.


Finally, from BlueSky, a fantastic photo of a pub in which we have a particular interest

A post from Adrian Tierney-Jones with a faded 1950s photo of a pub called The Britannia: "Going through a photo album of a late great aunt and found this pic of her outside the Whitbread Britannia in Brussels, which was part of the 1958 Expo".

For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.

Categories
Beer history Generalisations about beer culture

What is the evolutionary advantage of booze?

A fun question to ask of any apparently irrational human behaviour is “What’s the evolutionary advantage?” Consider drunkenness, for example.

Ray recently read William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors. It’s about a band of Neanderthals struggling for survival in the forests of prehistoric Europe as a new threat emerges – Homo sapiens, AKA modern man, AKA us.

It’s an extremely thought-provoking book in many ways as Golding attempts to demonstrate that the seeds of modern human behaviour, from war to capitalism, have long roots. But of course the thing that stood out for Ray, and that got us talking, is its treatment of drinking.

The Neanderthals (who think of themselves as “the people”) don’t drink alcohol because they don’t have the technology to make it, sophisticated as they are in many ways.

When “the new people” turn up, however, two Neanderthals, Lok and Fa, observe them as they gather round their campfire at night after a day’s trekking. We see what’s going on through Lok’s eyes:

His nose caught the scent of what they drank. It was sweeter and fiercer than the other water, it was like the fire and the fall. It was a bee-water, smelling of honey and wax and decay, it drew toward and repelled, it frightened and excited like the people themselves… The girl Tanakil was lying in front of one of the caves, flat on her back as if she were dead. A man and a woman were fighting and kissing and screeching and another man was crawling round and round the fire like a moth with a burnt wing. Round and round he went, crawling, and the other people took no notice of him but went on with their noise.

They’re drinking some form of mead from beakers – which the Neandarthals, who don’t even have the simple technology of cups, conceive of as round stones. This orgy of drunkenness continues for several pages until the humans drift off to their caves, or sneak off to shag in the woods.

It’s easy to imagine Golding making observations, and taking notes, in the pubs of Salisbury on Saturday night. He was also an alcoholic and had plenty of personal experience of how it felt to binge yourself silly.

Later in the book, Lok and Fa find a jar of mead abandoned in a human camp and get drunk themselves. Golding reiterates the point that the liquid is repellent and attractive at the same time. It burns, but in a way that is strangely addictive.

Having previously been peaceful, rather gentle creatures, the mead also immediately makes them aggressive, competitive, bold, and – this seems important – visionary. Lok finds himself having big ideas, and envisioning great success, the limits of his mind having expanded.

Unfortunately, he also finds that he cannot walk in a straight line and that the trees themselves have become unstable. And the next morning, he has his first hangover: “Lok opened his eyes and yelped with pain for he seemed to be looking straight into the sun.”

Why did we evolve to get drunk?

Golding’s book is fiction, and it’s old. To answer this question we sought some more recent, more academic texts.

Unsurprisingly, it’s been much discussed, often with a focus on understanding why people today (like Golding) might be driven to drink so much, and so often, that it becomes harmful.

This paper from 2023 describes it as an ‘evolutionary’ mismatch: something that was useful in the early days of the species, when resources were scarce, is less helpful in an age of abundance.

This is also the argument for why we crave sugar and fat, both of which are bad for us. In the deep past, we evolved to consume as much as sugar and fat as possible, when it was available, to see us through winter, or periods of famine.

In the case of booze, the suggestion is that perhaps we evolved to be attracted to the smell of ethanol because it might help us find rotting fruit, and so find the trees from which it had fallen. Or, related to the point above, eating rotten, alcoholic fruit might have given us the munchies, stimulating our appetites, so we would consume even more fat and sugar.

Another suggestion is that the ability to process ethanol was itself an evolutionary advantage, meaning that some of our ancestors could eat the ‘bad’ fruit that had fallen on the ground. 

Individuals who could “metabolise ethanol” could eat more, and continue to function while pissed. So, at a very fundamental level, we learned to associate drunkenness with pleasure and satisfaction.

But what about getting drunk together, as a social activity?

But why did we evolve to go to the pub together?

One paper from 2017 suggests that there are multiple benefits attached to getting drunk deliberately, together:

[There] is an implicit assumption that its hedonic (physiological reward) and anxiolytic (reduction of anxiety or stress) properties are the main reasons for its universal use. However, alcohol also plays an important role in social contexts by reducing our social inhibitions, as well as being a potent trigger of the endorphin system… In other words, it functions much like the many other behavioural mechanisms (including laughter, singing, dancing and storytelling…) that are used to trigger the endorphin system so as to facilitate large-scale (i.e. communal as opposed to dyadic) social bonding. The other possibility is that alcohol in some way affects our social or cognitive skills in ways that allow us to function more effectively in social situations.

We think this can be interpreted to mean that societies which drink together become stronger overall, as a unit, and so gain a competitive advantage over other ‘tribes’.

From our own perspective, as generally well-behaved, rather uptight 20th century specimens, there’s something in this.

When we’re tipsy with friends and relatives, we express our feelings more freely. It helps us resolve conflicts and strengthen connections.

And, of course, we know many couples who got together after, in effect, drinking mead together around the campfire before sneaking off into the woods.

Main image adapted from the profile of the restoration of the head of a Neanderthal man via the Wellcome Collection.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 16 March 2023: Hole in my Shoe

Every Saturday we round up the best beer writing from the past week. This time, we’ve got pandemic memories, solo drinking, and Dublin pubs.

First, some news, from the ever-reliable Beer Today: Rooster’s has acquired Daleside, another brewery of a similar vintage, also based in Harrogate. Why is this interesting? Because small real-ale focused breweries don’t often merge or take each other over, even though it might make sense for them to do so. Daleside used to have quite a reputation back in the days of Michael Jackson. We occasionally found their beers in corner shops in East London. But they’ve disappeared from the scene somewhat in recent years, and now it seems their management team is ready to retire. We expect more of this in years to come.


Shutters with a paper sign attached with tape: "Sorry, closed until further notice".

“Four years ago,” writes Jeff Alworth at Beervana, “the world stopped.” In his post reflecting on the pandemic he considers the longer-term changes it seems to have made to hospitality and our drinking habits:

This is a blog about beer, so let me use this small part of society to illustrate what I mean… The multi-year shift to packaged beer sparked a wholesale conversion to cans from bottles, which are nearly extinct now… Drinking habits changed, and draft remains well below its 2019 baseline. Consumption may be down overall… Younger drinkers who never had the party-hearty experiences of early generations may never fully embrace alcohol… Delayed by government intervention, far fewer breweries closed than expected, but even four years on, Covid closures continue… Thanks to service industry staff getting tagged “essential workers,” many left the industry. That sparked a sharp wage spike that was long overdue, but it did impact breweries already struggling with dropping sales…

We’ve been thinking about some of this, too, especially in relation to young people and their relationship to alcohol, and the fact that people in the UK now routinely drink outdoors even in winter.


A fancy old-fashioned shoe.

Subscribers to our Patreon now get footnotes and/or extra links in a weekly ‘footnotes’ post. Do consider signing up.


Generic beer pumps in photocopy style.

David Jesudason has written something of an exposé of the management culture at an unnamed pub where multiple staff have spoken to him about shocking behaviour and policy:

Staff say they felt intimidated by management with several reports of workers being shouted at in front of customers, told off for taking breaks and humiliated by a laddish culture… One source claimed that they worked with a manager who boasted about employing a homeless man to clear glasses in exchange for inedible food and say they reported this manager to the management at the time… One source, who is black, claimed they were called a thief by a manager for taking a company T-shirt to use on his shift, while another person of colour alleged that management ignored racist taunts by a customer and instead ordered the staff member to serve him.

Of course it’s frustrating that David can’t name the pub but shouting “Name and shame!” isn’t helpful. He doesn’t have a legal team behind him and can’t afford to be sued. And some of the behaviour he describes is probably more common than we’d like to think, so perhaps keeping it vague is a helpful reminder that this could be happening almost anywhere.


Roadworks in Brussels.

Eoghan Walsh has got into the habit of having one or two beers at the same Brussels bar every Friday night while his kids are swimming. This has set him thinking about what it means to be ‘a regular’, the desire to be alone versus the desire for company, and the importance of routine more generally:

These are not the thoughts of an ordered mind, and it’s not an attitude that has served me very well; I know I’m missing out on some essential aspect of pub drinking. So part of committing to this routine is to confront this way of thinking and overcome it – exposure therapy, if you’d like. But also, alongside my desire to be left alone I also have a contradictory one whereby sometimes I do want people to come up to me. I know there’s a vanity to this, wanting other people to make the effort but being unwilling or unable to reciprocate. Where that comes from, beyond vanity, I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s a desire to be around people but not among them; to put myself into a situation where the latent potential for talk is there if I want it, but it comes with no obligations. And that’s what this place provides.


A pub pool table with bright green baize.

At Oh Good Ale Phil Edwards has been interviewed by a song. Which is to say that ‘Favorite Bar’ by the Magnetic Fields asks a series of questions which Phil has attempted to answer:

Do you have a favourite bar
Where you can play pool with strangers
Maybe wear some lipstick and not be in danger
Of getting beat up in the men’s room

Feeling safe is important in a pub. (Being safe is, too, but in the nature of things you only generally find out if that’s not the case a lot later.) I generally do feel safe in pubs these days, but then (a) I’m White, male and middle-aged and (b) I very rarely go anywhere even slightly rough (Holt’s pubs in the suburbs, on CAMRA crawls, are probably as close as I get). I can remember being in a few places where I felt it would be inadvisable to stay for another, but this is going back a bit – I think at the time my youth was as much a factor as being a posh Southerner. I also think one effect of the general decline in pub-going – and the broader decline in all-male socialising – is that it’s harder to find pubs that are likely to get seriously lairy, or at least easier to avoid them.


The interior of a pub with wooden panelling and dividers, dark red walls, and a couple of drinkers.

Lisa Grimm’s Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs continues with a trip to the famous Fagan’s and some nods to the strange relationship between America and Irishness:

Bill Clinton wuz here. And you’re not likely to forget it, as he seems to be on every wall in Fagan’s, somewhere… Of course, to Dubliners, Fagan’s is better known for its Bertie Ahern connections, but I think it’s the Clintoniana I’ve always found a little bit off-putting; in short, for us Gen X folk of all political and national stripes, that aspect of the décor can seem a bit, well, Boomer. However, it’s not every pub in Dublin that’s had national and world leaders enjoy a Guinness (or other beverage) there, so it’s entirely understandable that there would be more than a few clippings on the wall… And, to be fair, it’s not truly throughout the entire pub, as Fagan’s is enormous.


Finally, from Instagram, a particularly alluring looking pint…

For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.