Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from insolvency to skinny pizzas.

At the start of the year we made a prediction that 2023 wouldn’t “apocalyptic” when it came to brewery closures. Now, new figures obtained under Freedom of Information from the UK Insolvency Service suggest that as many breweries closed in the first half of 2023 as in the whole of 2022. Jessica Mason has the story for The Drinks Business:

Matt Howard, head of insolvency and recovery at Price Bailey said: “The craft beer market was already oversaturated before the economic fallout from the pandemic tightened its grip. Many breweries were walking a balance sheet tightrope and have been plunged into the red by a combination of soaring overheads and falling demand for premium brands… The sector tends to be highly leveraged and therefore vulnerable to interest rate rises which push up the cost of servicing debt. Even in benign economic conditions small breweries can struggle to turn a profit for a few years but with higher borrowing and raw ingredient costs, coupled with weakening consumer demand, many startups are likely to fold before they get out of the red.”

Now we stand ready to have a debate about the meaning of the word ‘apocalyptic’.

For The Washington Post Ruvani de Silva has written about the rising popularity of foamy beer in the US, inspired by Czech pouring traditions:

Lukr’s uniquely designed “side-pour” tap, introduced in the late 1990s, utilizes a clever ball-valve mechanism that allows servers to regulate the flow speed of beer through the faucet, enabling them to create traditional Czech-style foam-focused pilsner pours with ease and precision. These pours include the hladinka, šnyt and mlíko, which respectively offer three fingers, three-fifths, and a full glass of foam, each delivering a different drinking experience… The mlíko is a carefully poured full glass of soft, sweet, wet foam that resembles milk; hence the name, which translates as “milk pour.”

(This wasn’t behind a paywall for us; you might find it is.)

Here’s all the standout beer and pub writing of the past week, from Burton upon Trent to Belgrade.

First, some (boring) news: there was a Budget on Wednesday and various measures relating to beer and pubs were announced. The summary by Darren at Beer Today did the job for us. TL;DR the Government thinks it’s been very helpful; industry bodies think it’s better than it could be, but still not enough; others think it’s a stitch up designed to help only the biggest operators. We could copy and paste this summary, to be honest.

Despite having been to Burton, we missed The Cooper’s Tavern, which is one of those cult pubs you need to visit before you die and so and so forth. For Pellicle Neil Walker, former beer blogger of the class of 2011, and now SIBA comms man, profiles the pub and explains its significance:

The Coopers Tavern is a true ‘public house’. Once a residential home with narrow doors and tight internal rooms, the large cream sign on the front reads ‘Bass & Cos Coopers Tavern’ in faded brown font, painted directly onto the Victorian brick and revealing its true purpose. Here since the early 1800s it was built to be a head brewer’s house, but a few decades later it was being used as overflow storage for speciality malt by the William Bass Brewery. By 1826 it was cellaring Bass’ famous Imperial Stout and by no small coincidence began being used by senior members of the brewery as their own personal pub.

For The Grocer James Beeson has written about what he calls “the ‘second wave’ of craft brewers” in the UK, providing an interesting perspective on the ebb and flow of the story of British brewing, with input from brewer founders and owners:

London’s Five Points, Brixton and Fourpure all came into being a decade ago, as did Berkshire’s Siren Craft Brew and Yorkshire’s Northern Monk… All five have – at various stages – been listed with national grocers. Two have been bought out by multinational brewers (with one returning to independence last year) and all have played a part in growing the reputation of small, independent British breweries in the last decade… The year 2013 was a good time to get into beer… Craft beer fever was taking hold, and all five of these businesses experienced rapid growth in their first five years of existence. Bermondsey’s Fourpure caught the eye of Australasian outfit Lion, which snapped up the business in 2018 (it returned to independence last year), while Heineken took 49% stakes in both Beavertown and Brixton the same year.

For The Guardian Camilla Bell-Davies has written about the Kafana pub culture of Belgrade, Serbia:

Kafanas are Serbia’s tavernas: a restaurant, pub and music venue operating from morning to late night. Regulars come for a lively breakfast before work, families throw weddings and celebrations here, business deals are cut and sorrow drowned in dark corners. They were so central to people’s daily lives that friends and the postman would come to find you at your local kafana, not your home… Sadly, many traditional kafanas closed down in the 2000s, partly because of their reluctance to prioritise profit-making over letting regulars sit at one table all day. However, much like struggling British pubs turning to gastronomy, kafanas have adapted their offerings to survive, heralding a culinary comeback.

A few years ago, we were all but obsessed with finding out more about Andrew Campbell, author of an important early book about beer called, er, The Book of Beer. Before the days of the British Newspaper Archive we struggled to find reliable information beyond a passing mention of someone involved in the theatre of the same name. Now Gary Gillman has pinned it down and settled the question once and for all. What a relief! (We can’t copy quotes from Gary’s blog, hence the odd break in format here.)

Still on the subject of satisfying resolutions to niggling mysteries, Liam K at Irish Beer History has been trying to identify an Irish brewery from an old picture for years. The breakthrough he needed was to realise that it wasn’t in Ireland at all:

I was scrolling through a website when a painting’s image jumped off the cover of an old book at me. It was an angled photo but it was unmistakably ‘my’ Irish brewery. There it was, with the dray carts and tower, impossible for me to mistake for anything similar as I had spent so much time studying it… The arresting issue was the title of the book. It was a 1980s printed facsimile of A History of Southampton by Reverend John Silvester Davies… Southampton? In England?

Will Hawkes’s marvellous email newsletter about London pubs is also available online, a month behind. The October edition has lots of great stuff, including some gloves-off commentary on Cask Marque. But our favourite item was about Lydia Wood who is drawing every pub in London – quite a big job!

If you had to describe the archetypal London pub based on the ones you’ve drawn so far, what would it look like?

A corner pub, slated roof, a couple of chimneys, bricks on the top half, painted bottom half, leaded windows, lantern lights, pub name signage, swinging sign, double doors, hanging flower baskets, a potted plant either side of the entrance, window reflections of the street opposite.

Finally, from social media, another Christmas gift idea…

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

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs we particularly enjoyed in the past week, from obscure hops to autumnal moods.

First, some news. At VinePair Dave Infante continues his detailed coverage of attempts by workers to buy San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing – or, at least, to buy the brand:

“We’re guessing [$2.5 million] is the lowest number the IP is going to be sold for.” If they can raise that sum from small-dollar investors, their thinking goes, they’ll be able to attract bigger sums from deeper-pocketed ones, or leverage it to draw a bank loan — or both, to be as competitive as possible in securing Anchor’s recipes, trademarks, and branding. Bringing back the old label, which SUSA replaced in 2021 in a widely panned rebrand, is a top priority for the co-op. As is reinstituting Our Special Ale, says [brewer Patrick] Machel. “That’s a ‘for sure.’”

Pellicle has the semi-magical story of the emergence of a new hop variety in the Kent, as told by Adam Peirce:

So steeped is Little Scotney Farm in the traditional ways of picking and drying hops that the last thing you would expect are experimental hop varieties with very different flavours to what traditional English hops are known for. In 2015, David Goodsel, who has been working on the farm since before Ian took over, noticed a group of seven different looking hops at the end of a row of Whitbread Goldings Variety (WGV). It’s not known how long they’d been growing in the ground, nor how they came into existence so beyond this. The story is lost to the mists in the valley of the River Bewl.

Adrian Tierney-Jones has been sitting in pubs again, thinking about the passage of time again, and letting his consciousness stream:

This is a consume-at-all-costs war, but is also an undemanding slumbering conflict into which it is easy to fall, as in the mall that one has uneasily and warily come to in search of goods that slam the cost of living crisis into a wall, with the ease of Joe Marler tossing aside Faf de Klerk. Yes, when you were young and the world seemed as bright as the light that lit up the family lounge and your parents were alive and still married, you really wished it could be Christmas every day and now your dream has come true and from early November it really is. But it is too late and love left on a boat without even a farewell sometime ago.

Stan Hieronymus has written about one of his beers of the year – an American kveik beer inspired by the work of Lars Marius Garshol. Here’s what struck us as most interesting – the impact a good book can have:

A Better Burden is a collaboration between Narrow Path and Nine Giant Brewing, and Powers and Mike Albarella have brewed it together at Narrow Path the past three years… They had both read ”Historical Brewing Techniques” by Lars Marius Garshol right when the book became available. They wrote the initial recipe together and have subtly changed it each year. The base malt and the alder wood smoked malt come from Sugar Creek Malt Co. in Indiana. “We knew that Caleb (Michalke) had built a Såinnhus, and we wanted to use ingredients that were as local as possible and that were produced as traditionally as possible,” Powers said.

Liam K at Irish Beer History continues his exploration of the objects that tell the national beer story by turning his attention to a 1970s Guinness bottle opener:

There is a relatively famous (in certain circles at least) archive film from RTE that reports on the ceasing of the cork-bunged Guinness bottle by orders of the brewery, as it was to be completely replaced by a seemingly unpopular bottle closer – the metal cap. In that piece of recorded Irish beer history from 1969, which incidentally shows both the insertion and extracting of corks, there are a few stout drinkers quite unhappy with this change from what was seen as the traditional method of sealing beer bottles in this country. The interviewees argued that cork-sealed stout bottles tasted better than those using a metal cap, with one drinker being shown to be able to pick out the one corked bottle from a row of poured stouts, allegedly based on taste alone. 

Who likes a mystery? Andreas Krennmair has returned to Bamberg mapping the 41 breweries it had in 1876, and digging into the vague connection between Keesman and Mahrs:

Talking about Mahrs Bräu in Wunderburg, I came across something strange: the Mahr pub (building 702) is listed as “Brenner” with owner Ambros Mahr, while the “Brenner” brewery is listed with owner Karl Mahr (building 736½ on modern Holzgartenstraße, probably no. 29). But there is a second pub with the name “Brenner” listed, building 708, across the road from Ambros Mahr’s pub, with owner Adam Keesmann. Interestingly, Keesmann is not listed as a brewery (it was officially founded in 1867), and I still don’t understand the supposed connection of Keesmann and Mahr… Georg Keesmann, the person most often mentioned these days in connection with the foundation of Keesmann brewery (he was a butcher and allegedly finished his brewing education at age 51 to start his own brewery), is listed as a restaurant owner in a different section of the address book, not a brewery owner, for building 708. How are Georg and Adam related?

Finally, some photos, from a new book called East End Pubs by Tim George, as shared at Creative Boom:

For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.