Categories
News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads, 1 July 2017: Smoking, Civil War, Global Chic

Here’s all the beer- and pub-related writing we’ve most enjoyed in the past week, and all the news that’s struck us as important.

First, a small thing that might not be: two chains of upmarket London pubs have effectively merged with the takeover by Draft House of Grand Union. So what? Well, from where we’re sitting, this looks like another step towards Draft House becoming a national chain. It’s a strong brand, ‘well craft’ without being too obnoxious about it, and we can well imagine a branch in every town and city.


A counter from the BA website: 883 breweries have adopted the seal.

Meanwhile, in the US, shot have been fired: the Brewers’ Association, which represents craft breweries as defined here, has announced a new badge to help consumers identify beer from independent breweries. This is intended to counter AB-InBev’s strategy of acquiring smaller local brewers which the BA apparently believes is leaving consumers confused. In retaliation, AB’s High End division, which ties together the craft breweries it has acquired over the past few years, has released a video saying, essentially, ‘The logo looks bad and doesn’t mean anything and we should be banding together to fight wine and spirits anyway and and and…’

For commentary on this we endorse the always thoughtful Jeff Allworth at Beervana: post 1 | post 2.


A no smoking sign on a pub door.

It’s been ten years since the ban on smoking in pubs and other enclosed workplaces came into force and the BBC’s Nick Triggle has attempted an objective assessment of the impact:

With all these factors happening at the same time, BBPA spokesman Neil Williams says it is ‘pretty impossible’ to unpick exactly what the individual impact of the ban has been.

And of course, many pubs have thrived since the smoking ban, changing to focus more on high-quality food and trying to attract families – including those with young children – who would previously have avoided smoky atmospheres.

‘Pubs have had to adapt. We’ve seen those that can invest in food and they’ve made a very good job of it.

‘But some pubs – the traditional street-corner boozer – simply haven’t had the space to do that. They are the ones that have suffered.’

We’ve attempted to address this in our forthcoming book, 20th Century Pub, and reached much the same conclusion: it probably has been bad news for a certain type of booze-led working class pub.


Inside In de Wildeman, Amsterdam.

Reporting from the Carnival Brettanomyces in Amsterdam Martyn Cornell gives us, as you might expect, a bit more than a blow-by-blow wot he dun on his holidays post, taking the opportunity to highlight the historic role of Brettanomyces in brewing, among other points:

[One problem is that] the events themselves cost upwards of €11 each to get into, with the three beer-and-food dinners €60 a plate. That quickly makes a probably already expensive trip to Hamster Jam even more wallet-bending. But hey, you’re getting to try beers that will sometimes be once-in-a-lifetime experiences… Certainly, for me, the punch in the overdraft was utterly worth it: I’ve not enjoyed a beery gathering so much for a long time, lots of great conversations with eager, enthusiastic, experienced, knowledgeable, people…


Illustration: Monocle magazine.
SOURCE: New Republic

Here’s something a bit tangential, but thought-provoking, from New RepublicKyle Chayka‘s reflections on globalist luxury chic as embodied by Monocle magazine. It doesn’t mention beer once, and we’ve never read Monocle, but, gosh, some of it rings great big bells:

It’s as easy to be charmed by Monocle as it is to hate it. Who doesn’t like a good Japanese leather origami bag? But if nationalists have a point in decrying the ‘global citizenship’ that Monocle epitomizes, it lies in the magazine’s subtle approach to cultural homogenization. [Editor Tyler] Brûlé’s stylistic vision has reproduced itself to the point of banality: Whether due to his own efforts or to the changing tide of taste, Danish furniture, clean cafés, shared offices, and artisanal food and clothing can now be found everywhere, attracting a floating tribe of international consumers the way flowers attract bees. The magazine’s worst offense may be that it is boring.

(via Aaron Gilbreath/Longreads.)


If you want some pure blogging to read, as opposed to longreads and news, we’ll take this opportunity to remind you to catch up with Martin Taylor‘s ongoing Good Beer Guide pub crawl. As we’ve said before, there’s rarely any one post that warrants a fanfare, but as an ongoing project themes emerge and incidents accumulate until something like an argument begins to form. This week, we were particularly struck by a Wetherspoon’s moment:

The Thumper tasted a bid odd to me. I said so to the Spoons barmaid, who, unbelievably;

1. Seemed interested in my £1.99 pint

2. Tasted it herself  ‘Just tastes fruity, like it should do’

3. Popped down the cellar to check whether it was the bottom of the barrel (it wasn’t)


And, finally, those who enjoy being appalled at the antics of those wacky craft brewers will enjoy this intel from Joe Stange:

Categories
Beer history pubs videos

VIDEO: Advice for Americans on English Pubs, 1943

We were alerted to the presence of this film on YouTube by Anthony Harper (@anthonymharper) and it’s a corker.

It was made as a joint production of the US and UK governments and was intended, in short, to prevent American soldiers acting like dickheads in Britain. The host is Burgess Meredith (BatmanRocky) and he spends the first third of the film — about ten minutes — in an English country pub:

We’re not trying to show you the perfect way to behave in a pub. We’re only trying to point out that some of these people are a little more reserved than some of us. If you take it easy a little bit, just at the beginning… you’ll make some damn good friends.

It’s staged with the interior filmed on a studio set but, as it’s intended to be educational rather than propaganda, we can probably assume it’s a fairly accurate portrayal. In fact, the advice is still good, on the whole:

What’s that? What’s the difference between bitter and mild? I don’t know. One’s bitter and one’s mild. You’d better find out for yourself…

Categories
News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads 24 June 2017: Markets, Marketing, Manchester

Here’s all the beer- and pub-related reading that’s entertained, educated or amused us in the last seven days, from football lagers to Mancunian tap-rooms.

Every now and then the Guardian does a really great piece on pubs and this week it’s Jessica Furseth on the endangered sub-species of market pubs — long a staple of Quirky London writing with their perverse opening hours and lingering earthiness in an ever glossier city.

Walk into a pub at 7am and you’ll meet construction workers, police, nurses and paramedics, people from the media industry and other office workers. Giulia Barbos, who tends bar at the Fox and Anchor [in London], says the rising price of a stout and full English has meant the crowds have moved from market workers towards office workers, who might have a bit more money to spend. ‘Now, people sometimes come in just to have breakfast,’ she says.


Red Devil Lager
SOURCE: Latas Futebol Clube

For Vice Sports Ryan Herman has unearthed the story of how several English football clubs attempted to launch their own lagers in the 1980s only to face a tabloid backlash:

On 1 December 1987, Manchester United held a launch party for Red Devil Lager at Old Trafford. Members of a team famed for its drinking culture, including Kevin Moran, Norman Whiteside and Paul McGrath, turned up alongside a collection of celebrities ‘du jour’… Indeed no party at that time and in that venue would have been complete without Coronation Street stars Michael Le Vell (aka Kevin Webster), Kevin Kennedy (Curly Watts) and Nigel Pivarro (Terry Duckworth)… What could possibly go wrong?

(Via @JimbaudTurner)

If you found this interesting then note that the site from which we took the picture, Latas Futebol Clubeis run by a collector of football-club-branded beer packaging. It’s in Portugese but easy enough to navigate.


The Black Jack tap room.

It’s Manchester Beer Week (23/06-02/07) and a couple of posts from Mancunian bloggers caught our eye. First, from Kaleigh, there comes a useful guide to the city’s brewery taprooms which looks worth bookmarking for future reference. ‘If I find myself in Manchester city centre on a Saturday, I generally end up in a brewery’, she says, which we know to be true from following her on Twitter.

Secondly, there’s a bit of PR from the event organisers. We normally shrug at press releases but this has some interesting numbers based on commissioned research:

The Manchester Beer Audit 2017 found 411 different cask ales on sale in venues throughout the Manchester City Council area, beating nearest rival Sheffield, which boasted 385 beers in its last survey, as well as Nottingham (334), York (281), Norwich (254), Derby (213), and Leeds (211)… The survey also confirmed that Manchester is leading other cities in kegged “craft” beers too, with 234 different beers on sale throughout the city, an increase in variety that has been sparked by the recent boom in craft brewing.

This was prompted, we assume, by similar claims made by Sheffield last year and greeted with some consternation by Leodensians, Mancunians, Londoners… In other words, a pissing match has commenced. Instinctively we groan at this — ‘My city’s better than your city’ is a tedious, more or less unwinnable argument — but, actually, a bit of competition probably won’t do any harm, and certainly generates attention.


Charles from Ards Brewing.

We’re always nagging people to write about smaller, less well-known, basically shy breweries, which is why we pounced on this piece by the Dirty Hallion. It profiles the the Ards Brewing Company of Northern Ireland which ‘has no website for… and a very limited social media presence’. We’d certainly never heard of it. There’s not much drama here but the origin story is interestingly typical and refreshingly free from Grand Passions:

Charles… was a successful architect but like many people involved in the construction industry, myself included, the recession forced a career change… A friend actually suggested brewing and despite no real experience in brewing, he was interested. The same friend taught him the basics and that was it, he was hooked. Shortly after he bought the equipment and started homebrewing. From there he expanded and built the brewery he now uses.

(This was actually posted last week but we only spotted it on Sunday.)


BrewDog Beers on a shelf.

Freshness continues to be the hot topic among antipodean commentators. This week Luke Robertson at Ale of a Time asks a fundamental question: is the long shelf-life demanded by the industrial beer distribution model fundamentally at odds with exciting, zingy beer? Well, that’s our reading, but here’s a bit of what he actually says:

The distribution model and marketplace for beer simply isn’t designed for volatile IPAs or unpasteurized lagers. The history of this model is all tied into pasteurization and refrigeration. While refrigeration is still just as important, pasteurization is a dirty word amongst small brewers. When sending your beer out of the brewery you can almost guarantee that your beer is going to end up old, and probably on a warm shelf.


Painting of a bearded Victorian.
William Everard

Only a few weeks after Charles Wells announced that it was selling its brewing operation and most brands to Marston’s comes another jolt: Everard’s of Leicester is handing off production of its beer to Robinson’s and Joule’s. You won’t find many beer geeks — even the traditionalists — with a lot of gushing kind words for Everard’s beer but this is nonetheless another worrying development in the health of Britain’s family brewing tradition. (Via @robsterowski.)


And, finally, here’s a thought-provoking Tweet from Joe Stange which is of course a generalisation and a simplification but…

Categories
pubs

First Contact

Adapted from ‘The George at Cley’ by Dun.can from Flickr under Creative Commons.

A glamorous, terrifying whirl of light, lushness and noise — that’s my earliest memory of The Pub.

I was about seven or eight and on a family holiday in Cley next the Sea, Norfolk. We usually stayed in slightly scary bed-and-breakfasts (out by ten and don’t come back until tea time) but that year, for some reason, we were in the George Hotel. My memories are of gorgeously deep red carpets and a baronial fireplace whose scale and richness are probably being exaggerated in the data recall process.

The moment I recall most vividly, the instance when my crush on The Pub was formed, is from after dark. I’d been put to bed and told to stay there with a warning: under no circumstances was I to come down to the public bar. But I needed something, in the way only small children can need something, and so I had to go down to where I could hear everyone laughing and having fun without me.

I was awed by the experience. Everything was sparkling and everyone was aglow, including my parents, surrounded by friends and gently, sociably tipsy, in the midst of a crowd of merry strangers.

The illusion was shattered when they spotted me and, in a half-panic, bundled me back upstairs with a telling off, but it was too late.

I’d seen where adults went to play, and I liked it, and thirty years on, I still do.

Categories
Beer history london pubs

Guinness in London, 1965

Which London pub was the best place for a pint of Guinness in London in the 1960s? None of them, really, according to Gerard Fay.

His article ‘My Goodness…’ collected in The Compleat Imbiber Vol. 8, published in 1965 and edited by Cyril Ray, is another source of information on a subject we’ve been circling round and prodding at for a couple of years now: Irish pubs before ‘Irish Pubs’ and the high status of Guinness before Guinness®. There have been a few blog posts here, a substantial article at All About Beer, and there’s also a bit on this in the upcoming book, 20th Century Pub. (Although we cut a lot from that section in the final edit.) But it’s always good to have new nuggets of information.

Fay was London editor of the Guardian until 1966 and died in 1969 at the age of 55. Their obituary for him is weirdly vague about his origins (‘of Irish stock with strong Lancashire connections’) but he seems to have spent most of his childhood in Dublin and certainly described himself as a ‘Dublin boy’. As a Fleet Street diehard he worked in the vicinity of some of the best-known Irish pubs in London and here’s what he had to say about them:

There were once three Mooneys near each other in London — Holborn, Fleet Street and, to fortify the walker’s spirits between the two, Fetter Lane. Before the coming of Formica the Fleet Street one was distinguished by being more like a genuine Dublin pub than anything left in the City of Dublin itself — neither Fetter Lane nor Holborn was of the right shape. The argument often raged about which of the three produced the best pint of Guinness, and the verdict usually went to Fetter lane because of some virtue in the cellarage. To a coarse palate the Fetter Lane pint seemed as smooth as any drawn in any Dublin pub chosen by serious-minded drinkers as a ‘good house for a pint’. Visiting Dubliners denied this and would have none of the English blarney about Park Royal brewery being the equal of St James’s Gate.

Tipperary back bar.

Once again, there’s a suggestion of mysticism and magic around Guinness, and especially the stuff from Dublin rather than the London-brewed (Park Royal) product. Fifty years on this kind of thing is still heard even though the time when Guinness was anything other than a standardised product was in the process of passing even as Fay was writing:

As Guinness is beer, it is subject to all the complications of cellerage and of being properly kept — though the introduction of metal casks has done away with a lot of this… [The] argument is seldom heard now — the Holborn Mooney’s closed when the lease expired: the others both use metal containers and continue to sell their large and increasing quota.

The Fetter Lane Mooney’s, AKA The Shamrock AKA The Magpie & Stump, is long gone but the Fleet Street branch — The Tipperary — is still there. When we visited a couple of years ago we rather liked it. It looks like a tourist trap but, with veteran Irish staff and mostly Irish customers, didn’t feel like one, and is rather gorgeously decorated, having reverted to something like its pre-Formica look. It’s at least worth sticking your nose in the door next time you pass, even if Guinness isn’t quite the draw it used to be.