Categories
pubs

All the pubs we didn’t go to

I’ll always think of 2024 as the year Dad died. Four months on, it hurts less – but it’s often in the pub I find myself dwelling on the loss.

In the immediate, horrible aftermath of Dad’s death, I wrote something like a formal obituary. Then, a little later, I wrote about how we bonded over pubs and beer.

But of course I’m never going to stop thinking about Dad, or run out of things to say about him.

Last month, the day after what would have been his 76th birthday, what remains of the family gathered in Bristol for lunch. Afterwards, we drifted to The Strawberry Thief, a Belgian-style cafe-bar.

It felt like the right place to go for a couple of reasons.

First, they served Brugse Zot – a fairly unremarkable Belgian blonde beer that was Dad’s favourite. He discovered it on a trip to Bruges more than a decade ago and got a case from my brother for Christmas every year since.

Mum and I toasted him, raised our glasses, and enjoyed every drop of what Dad always called ‘That Zot’.

Secondly, The Strawberry Thief is a reminder that you can’t make assumptions about what people will or won’t like based on their social class. Dad was working class and never became, or aspired to be, anything else. That didn’t stop him deciding he liked citrusy, piney craft beers, or taprooms, or vaguely pretentious bars like The Strawberry Thief.

Equally, he might decide he hated them. That was half the fun of a session with Dad.

This weekend, I braved Storm Darragh to visit Mum in Somerset. “Maybe we can pop round to the pub?” I said and, somewhat to my surprise, she said yes. I was even more surprised when she ordered a pint of Bath Ales (St Austell) Gem, having not seen her drink a pint in years.

The village isn’t cute – it’s one of those collections of former council houses, farm buildings and industrial units along a main road. The pub isn’t cute either, with a public bar dominated by working men in hi-viz jackets and muddy boots who spend most of their time smoking outside the front door.

I’d always got the impression Dad didn’t like the pub much but Mum told me that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, after their first visit, he said he was worried that, in retirement, it might be a bit too easy to end up there every lunchtime spending money they didn’t have on booze that wouldn’t do them any good. So he avoided it altogether.

Mum and I had been there a while, one round in, before we noticed that both of us were bopping along to the jukebox. It was non-stop blues music – not exactly the kind of songs Dad would have chosen himself, but not far off. We shivered. It felt spooky.

The landlord popped in to ask Mum how she was, glancing around to look for Dad. He obviously hadn’t heard the news. Mum told him and, in his gruff, unpretentious way, he expressed his sympathy. He seemed quite moved.

After a couple of pints, Mum began to reminisce about the drinking she and Dad did in their twenties, crawling through Bridgwater, playing euchre in The Cobblestones, Dad being presented with his own glass by the landlord and landlady…

The booze eventually made us maudlin, especially when we returned to a house where Dad wasn’t, but where his bass guitar still leans against the wall.

Another small problem is that every pub I go to in Bristol has either some memory of Dad, or is somewhere we hoped to take him “when he gets a bit better”.

For the past couple of years we’d talked about a taproom tour, even if we had to get cabs between them.

That now puts me in the ridiculous position of feeling faintly melancholy every time I go to Lost & Grounded, surrounded by plastic tubing, stainless steel, and people with beanie hats very high on their heads.

We never took him to The Star in Fishponds, which I’m sure he’d have loved, or to the Board Mill Social Club, with which he was fascinated.

My brother has spoken about feeling ambushed by things that make him think about Dad.

Personally, I’m constantly being emotionally tripwired by posters advertising upcoming gigs by pub blues bands: “Ooh, blues night at The Stillage, I really must tell Dad about tha– oh, fuck.”

Christmas is going to be weird because there won’t be a Christmas Day pint with Dad. There hasn’t been the past few years, to be honest, because he wasn’t well enough to make the short walk.

There was always the promise of it happening, though, even if we ended up drinking bottled beer on the sofa.

Maybe I’ll take Mum to the pub instead, while my brother cooks. Or perhaps I won’t. It might just be another way of pricking my heart and I don’t know if that’s helpful.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 7 December 2024: Ceremony of Carols

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from Guinness to barley wine, via dark mild.

First, news of the ongoing hype – hype! – around Guinness.

Will Hawkes spotted this story in The New York Times about the rising popularity of Guinness in the US: “Oran McGonagle, an owner of the Dubliner, a two-year-old pub in Boston. In 2023, his bar sold more Guinness than any other bar or restaurant in the city. And this year, the Dubliner’s purchasing volume of the stout is up 63 percent to meet rocketing demand.” (Paywalled, but the link worked for us the first time.)

And on this side of the Atlantic Diageo is reportedly limiting supplies of Guinness because of rising demand in the run up to Christmas: “While overall beer drinking was slightly down between July and October, the volume of Guinness consumed from kegs was up more than fifth.” The last thing Diageo would want you to do, of course, is panic buy.


A red brick pub with a sign that reads The Royal Oak.
The Royal Oak, Chapel Ash, Wolverhampton. SOURCE: British Beer Breaks.

For British Beer Breaks Phil Mellows has been considering what the discontinuation of Banks’s Mild on cask means for pubs which have made a name supplying it:

At the Royal Oak, Chapel Ash, however, the matter is more than an academic debate. Run by Emma and Terry Cole, the Royal Oak is a brilliant community pub that cares about local people and understands the role a pub plays in their lives. It’s also proud that it keeps a great pint of Banks’s Mild only a few hundred yards from where it’s made at CMBC’s Wolverhampton brewery, serving up to 200 pints a week… In fact, since we learned the brand was in its final days, the pub has been especially busy, Terry reports, with people coming in for what might be their last ever cask Banks’s Mild.


The City Arms, a Victorian pub in central Manchester.

For the blog of a homebrewing supplier Matthew Curtis has written his list of the best beer cities in the UK. If he was expecting furious disagreement, he might have been disappointed, because the chat online was unusually constructive and harmonious, with most people broadly agreeing with his judgement – or at least understanding his rationale. We didn’t find much with which to argue, either, including this bit on Bristol (at number 5):

What makes the scene great here is each of its many different layers. You’ve got genuinely world class breweries – the aforementioned Left Handed Giant for starters – but also Lost and Grounded, Wiper and True, and several more besides… The only funny thing about Bristol is that its scene is quite insular. It can be difficult to find a variety of interesting beer that isn’t made in Bristol sometimes, because here is a city that prefers to look after its own. When the offer is as good as that of the breweries I mentioned earlier, however, you can see why it’s one of the best cities for beer in the country.


A bottle of Gordon Xmas beer in a Christmassy bar.
SOURCE: Eoghan Walsh.

Eoghan Walsh has been to “the most Christmassy pub in Brussels” and now, of course, we want to go there too:

I must have walked past Le Saint Nicolas, on the narrow Little Butter Street just downhill from Brussels’ Grand Place, innumerable times and never noticed it. The café is opposite the compact St Nicolas church, and its entrance is overshadowed by the large rainbow flag hanging outside a neighbouring LGBT bar. Whether it was named for the church or the Greek saint who delivers pepernoten and mandarins to good Low Countries children in early December is immaterial, because the owners have leaned fully into the latter as Le Saint Nicolas’ overriding leitmotif. A sign hanging over the entrance has Sinterklaas in white beard and red mitre painted on it, and the rest of the bar takes its cue from there.


A smiling person with white-grey hair and a hi-viz jacket working in a brewery.
Derek Prentice brewing Thomas Hardy Ale. SOURCE: Ed Wray.

It’s easy to think that Thomas Hardy Ale just materialises under one owner or another every year, or every few years. But Ed Wray has shared some insider info on when he was involved in producing a batch a few years ago:

The last is of particular interest to me as I worked at Hepworths when production moved there. For this legendary beer another beer legend, Derek Prentice, is the brewing consultant employed by the brand owner and we worked with him to bring the beer back again… I wasn’t doing much actual brewing by that stage of my work at Hepworths but I made sure I brewed one of the batches of Thomas Hardy. Oh yes, I wasn’t going to miss that opportunity. Unlike at Eldridge Pope it’s brewed as a single gyle and it proved to be surprisingly problematic… We had to throw everything we could at it to get the beer down to target gravity and the ABV up to the strength we wanted. It spent a long, long time in tank.


A pair of Tennents Lager branded socks.
SOURCE: Tennent’s.

Katie Mather has some helpful suggestions for your relatives on what to buy you for Christmas, instead of the gift set of world lagers they’ve currently got their eye on. You might want to print it out and leave it lying around. This is a particularly good idea:

Put Money Behind Their Favourite Bar… Genuinely, genuinely do this if you’re feeling generous. Instead of getting a gift card for an online beer company or buying them a crate of something they might not like, go to their favourite pub or bar and put some money on tick for them… Not only will the bar absolutely love you for giving them a little cash boost at an important time of year, your mate will love you because they can go in and get pints whenever they want for free until the money runs out… From personal experience as a bar owner, this also encourages people to try things they wouldn’t normally buy, which is also a brilliant thing.


Finally, from BlueSky, a snapshot of a brilliant pub…

Great night at the Dog and Bell. One of London’s most unique pubs.

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— Will Hawkes (@willhawkes.bsky.social) November 30, 2024 at 8:44 AM

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

Categories
Beer history breweries

On the brief lives of beer brands

How long can any beer brand expect to remain on the market? And what are the oldest cask ale brands in the UK today?

Carslberg-Marstons announced last week that it was ceasing production of a number of notable cask ales. How bothered you are might depend on how you think about ‘brands’.

Broadly speaking, we’re in camp ‘Who cares?’

None of the beers on the list were among our favourites.

They aren’t, as beers, especially interesting or distinctive. And most of them weren’t especially old brands, either.

Of course ‘Who cares?’ is a massively flippant oversimplification.

As Pete Brown sets out here, the importance of the story is in what it says about the market for cask ale, and the attitudes of those who supply it.

And as Matthew Curtis has observed, the loss of local brands has emotional meaning, too.

The thing is, if you study beer history, you get used to the idea that breweries – especially big ones – simply do not care about these things.

Beers and their brands come and go constantly as the market shifts. It’s subject to fads, trends, and changes in public taste. Beers that seem cool in one decade feel tragically unhip 20 years later.

A sign on the exterior wall of a brewery: "Make Mine a Marston's."

Dating cask ale brands

Looking at the cask brands on the CMBCo axe-list we can see that most were relatively new to the market, at least with their current brand names.

  • Jennings Cumberland Ale – launched as ‘Cumbria Pale Ale’, we think, c.1979
  • Ringwood Old Thumper – 1979
  • Bombardier (keg) – 1980
  • Eagle IPA – c.1980 
  • Ringwood Boondoggle – 1997
  • Marston’s Old Empire – 2003
  • Banks’s Sunbeam – 2011
  • Marston’s 61 Deep – 2016

There’s also Banks’s Mild, a version of which was presumably first brewed in the mid-1870s, but that’s arguably not a brand. It’s a description: Brewery X’s Beer of Type Y.

45 years feels to us like a remarkably long time for a beer brand to survive, riding out the real ale revolution, the golden ale and guest beer trends of the 1990s, and the craft beer boom of the 2000s to 2010s.

When we think of cask ale brands that have been around longer than that a few contenders spring to mind.

Hook Norton Old Hooky dates back only to 1977. Adnams Broadside was launched in 1972. Fuller’s London Pride came to the market in 1959. And Marston’s Pedigree was introduced in 1952.

You might make an argument for Bass which is not only still available but also having something of a resurgence in popularity. But it’s also, really, just the name of a defunct brewery. And that famous ‘first trademark’ was actually for ‘Bass & Co’s Pale Ale’, which is not what’s on the pump clips today.

Branding cask beers in the modern style was, broadly speaking, a post-World-War-II trend, driven by the growth of the advertising industry and the volatility of the market. With breweries closing and being acquired at a startling rate ‘Bloggs’s Bitter’ no longer seemed to cut it.

Never mind the brand, what about the beer?

OK, so most of the brands are relatively new in the grand scheme of things – but what about the beer? Isn’t that what matters?

Well, we know that recipes and ingredients change. Many beers with apparent longevity are actually quite different products now than when they launched.

The 2024 model of Bass, for example, doesn’t bear much relation to the product people knew and drank in the 19th century.

Most beers have smaller tweaks throughout their lives, sometimes to retain apparent consistency, or to adapt to changes in consumer taste, or to take advantage of shifting beer duty thresholds.

Is the current version of Ringwood Old Thumper at 5.1% the same beer as the 6% strong ale released in the 1970s?

Then there’s the local connection, as highlighted by Matt Curtis. But the problem there is that many of the cask brands on the CMBCo list had already been cut adrift from the places to which they were nominally connected.

Jennings beers have been brewed in Burton since 2022, for example, and the Ringwood brewery closed earlier this year.

The circle of life

While we understand the emotion and concern these corporate manoeuvres prompt we still feel that, in terms of the big picture, it’s all part of the circle of life.

It also seems to us that it creates opportunities for newer, smaller breweries to fill a growing gap in the market. That so many have, in recent years, been honing their skill at brewing trad styles like mild and bitter puts them in a strong position.

Of course they need to overcome the difficulty of getting into pubs owned by pub companies which restrict which beers publicans can order and sell. But here in Bristol we know pubs do find a way around this so they can stock beers like Butcombe Original and Bristol Beer Factory Fortitude.

So, brands and breweries come and go. If they didn’t, what would we have to be nostalgic about?

For now, though, don’t take the beers you like, or feel fond towards, for granted.

Order ‘boring’ standards every now and then and take a moment to appreciate them – because you never know what news tomorrow might bring.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 30 November 2024: Birding

Here’s our weekly round up of the best writing about beer. This week, we’ve got cask ale, Belgian beer, and lots of different boozers.

First, some news: Carlsberg-Marstons has decided to stop brewing a bunch of the cask ale brands it has acquired over the years. Some have shrugged – these aren’t beloved beers, on the whole, and why brew them if nobody wants to drink them? Others, like Tandleman and Pete Brown, are concerned about the message it sends: “Are CMBC honestly trying to deliberately destroy the UK’s cask ale market? Of course they’d say no, if they could ever be arsed to comment on the situation. But if they really were trying to murder cask ale, what would they be doing differently to what they’ve done so far this year?”


The cap of a bottle of Westvleteren 12.

For Belgian Smaak Jonny Garrett has written about one of the great puzzles of beer geekery: why did we all decide Westvleteren 12 was “the best beer in the world”?

Local news stations reported chaos in that late summer of 2005. Drivers in the Flemish village parked wherever they could, churning up grass and leaving debris. The police were summoned. Helicopters scrambled. People queued for hours outside the village’s monastery, bringing traffic to a standstill… Then the world saw what was going on and the press started calling. They asked how a handful of monks had achieved such a thing, and why they would even want to… The monastic inhabitants of St Sixtus Abbey, a few kilometres south of Westvleteren, had brewed beer for centuries, using the profits to support their peaceful way of life. Like any conscientious brewery, they wanted their beers to be as good as they could be, but it was far from their focus. They certainly didn’t list Westvleteren 12, their Belgian Dark Strong Ale—or “Quadrupel”—on any beer rating sites. So they were probably more surprised than anyone when, in 2005, an American website crowned Westvleteren 12 the “best beer in the world”.

(Public service announcement: to close the ‘Sign up to our newsletter’ popup you want the little cross hidden in the top right corner of the screen, nowhere near the popup itself.)


A typical Alpine inn with ornate text on its frontage and flags of various nations.
A Wirtshaus. SOURCE: Tempest in a Tankard/Franz D. Hofer.

At Tempest in a Tankard Franz D. Hofer has been exploring an important Austro-Bavarian institution – the Wirtshaus, or village inn. It starts with a typically delightful anecdote from his travels:

A small group of burly men with broad grins joined us at our table, curious to hear about these two wanderers who clearly weren’t from this Bavarian village snug up against the border with Bohemia. So it goes at the Wirtshaus, where tables for two are rare. Some had worked in construction. Another was a local farmer who supplied pork to the butcher around the corner. The conversation grew more animated as the empty glasses lined up and the talk turned to the state of the world today. Our food arrived and we tucked in. After a few minutes the farmer proudly proclaimed that the Schweinsbraten and Schnitzel on our plates had come from his farm.


A red brick pub on a street corner.
The Lamb & Flag, Leeds. SOURCE: Chris Dyson.

Closer to home Chris Dyson at Real Ale, Real Music has been exploring Leeds and provides a useful update on the state of the city’s beer scene:

I carried on down past the Duck & Drake under the railway bridge towards the Minster where on one side was the Lamb & Flag… This lovely brick-built pub dates from the 19th century and was formerly run by Leeds Brewery until their demise, when the small pub estate was acquired by Camerons and the beers were taken on by Kirkstall. With its mullioned windows, interior featuring exposed brickwork and timbers, wooden floors and fittings it is one of the most attractive pubs in the city… I ordered a pint of Kirkstall Three Swords, missing out on the few Leeds beers that were amongst the 8 hand pumps on the bar, and took it to a corner table at the side of the door facing the bar… 


The sign of the Moon Under Water on Deansgate in Manchester.

For news outlet CNN Will Noble has done his best to explain the UK’s Wetherspoon pub chain to Americans. We suspect British readers will enjoy it, if only for the strange sensation of seeing our own culture presented as alien and exotic:

Utter the single word “Wetherspoon,” or even the colloquial “Spoons” to a Brit, and they’ll know what you mean. Some will grimace. Some will groan. Others will excitedly rub their hands together like you’d just cooked their favorite meal… Wetherspoon pubs are an institution in the UK. They enjoy cult-like status both among admirers, lured in by real ale and “pub grub” sold at astoundingly low prices, and detractors, who see them as emblematic of everything that’s wrong with modern Britain… More than 800 Wetherspoon chain pubs freckle the country — from The Muckle Cross in Scotland to The Tremenheere in Cornwall. In just a few decades, “Spoons” have become so ingrained into British daily life that they probably now deserve to be up there with Stonehenge on the list of UK cultural institutions.


The cluttered and cosy interior of a Dublin pub.
The Glimmer Man, Dublin. SOURCE: Lisa Grimm.

As we near the finish, let’s pop into a few pubs around and about.

First, in Dublin, Lisa Grimm takes us to a pub with the brilliant name The Glimmer Man: “The name comes from the Emergency/WWII-era job title – think a sort of proto-TV license inspector role – tasked with seeking out people using too much gas. It’s been applied to the pub here since at least the 1980s, though a previous proprietor, T. Lyster, is still commemorated in the tiled entrance.”

Then we’ll bob over to Ramsgate in Kent with Alex at Pub Vignettes for a snapshot of life at The Hovelling Boat Inn, among others: “You here for the Meat Raffle, son? Wasn’t aiming for a whole side of lamb kind of afternoon, but carpe diem. Strip of five tickets. Sonny and Cher. Simon and Garfunkel. Micropub and Butcher. Get the collab while it’s happening, nothing’s eternal.”

Finally, with Adrian Tierney-Jones, let’s visit Whitelocks in Leeds: “I engage in the tradition of vertical drinking at the long bar, its polished copper top gleaming like a much-loved child on Christmas morning, while the well-polished glasses standing on shelves at the mirrored back bar add to the impression that this is very much a glittering palace of beer…”


Finally, from BlueSky…

The AEB – GEB yeast packet designs go so hard. Would have each of these on a t-shirt. (Pic from geterbrewed.com)

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— Katie Mather (@katiematherkm.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 11:26 AM

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

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 23 November 2024: The Enchanted

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer and pubs from the past week. This time we’ve got festivals, malt, Kölsch and more.

First, some news: AB-InBev is closing the Elysian brewing facility in Seattle. Now, we don’t generally jump on every item of news from the US (it’s not our beat) but, as Jeff Alworth explains, this is significant as a sign of a wider shift in the market: ‘Big beer is done with craft.’ We’ve all spent so much of the past decade talking and thinking about small breweries being taken over by multinationals that it hasn’t dawned on everyone that we’re in a new phase:

With ABI sales of eight breweries  last year and Molson Coors dumping four of their breweries a few months ago, we can call 2024 the final chapter in ‘corporate craft’ era of American brewing. ABI will no doubt radically scale back Elysian’s offerings going forward to streamline production, distribution, and sales. In 2020, ABI purchased Craft Brew Alliance for a single beer, Kona Big Wave, which is now a standalone brand in their portfolio. I would expect them to strip Elysian of everything but Space Dust going forward… This was never a great union. National breweries and small, regional breweries have not just different business models, but nearly opposing reasons for being. since this is the end of the line for these relationships, it’s worth doing a bit of forensic work to understand why they didn’t work.


Grains of malt.
SOURCE: Lutz Wernitz/Unsplash.

For Pellicle Pete Brown has written about Baird’s Malt in Essex, with a particular view on the future of the malting industry in the face of climate change:

It’s January 2024 and I’m on the train back to my new home in Norwich. It’s a cold, blue day, and winter light fills the carriage. I look up from my laptop and see that we’re speeding past a beautiful lake, the sun shimmering on its surface. I knew about the Norfolk Broads, but I never knew about lakes like this!… Quickly, I stab at my phone and bring up Google Maps. I want to see exactly where we are so I can bring Liz back here for a lakeside picnic in the summer. When the app responds, I’m momentarily disorientated. The blue dot informs me that my immediate location is surrounded not by blue, but green and gold. This is not a lake. It is—or was—farmland. Somewhere under all that water is what was supposed to be the 2024 winter barley crop.


The crowd at a beer festival in a tent, with a long bar.
SOURCE: Quare Swally.

Roy at Quare Swally has an impassioned piece about the importance of the Belfast Beer and Cider Festival to a place whose indie beer scene has struggled to establish itself in the past half century:

It was a time pre-Covid, pre-Ukraine war, pre-Liverpool winning the Premier League. It was also a time when you could get a decent beer in Belfast for well under £7. That time was 2018 and that’s when the last Belfast Beer and Cider festival took place – until now. For reasons we won’t go into here, there’s been no such CAMRA NI-organised festival since 2018 and it was great to see it returning, now at Banana Block, opposite Boundary Brewing on the Newtownards Road… If there was no appetite for a Belfast Beer Festival, it simply would not exist. The reason such an event happens is because people want it to happen. The drinkers of Belfast and Northern Ireland made the festival a success… There’s also something special occurring across the wider beer scene in Northern Ireland. The festival proved, as if we needed reminding, that more people are embracing independent beer and seeking a better range of styles. The festival didn’t sell Guinness, Carlsberg, Harp, Madri or Tennent’s. It didn’t have what NI hospitality chiefs are telling others is our “taste profile”, yet the place was rammed.


An improvised sign that reads "Sorry for the condition of the toilets, refurb on the way, thanks, Team L.A.H."
SOURCE: Jane Stuart.

Jane Stuart has been exploring again. This time, she’s been checking out the pubs of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, and it’s more about the photos than the words, really, although there’s poetry in those snippets, too:

We were intrigued by the front door – had this previously been a prison door? I enquired of the barman, who confirmed that the door had been custom-made for the pub. This was in fitting with the general quirkiness of Harrogate that was endearing me to this wonderful spa town… I must point out that there was absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with the condition of the toilets… The friendly barman remembered us from earlier and I told him that we were back after visiting seven pubs because his beer was the best (I had that lush liquorice porter again)… 


Koelsch barrels on a serving counter in a Cologne beer hall.

We’re bothered by the lack of a definitive, detailed history of Kölsch, the unique top-fermented lager-like beer of Cologne. We may have dropped hints to this effect at various times, hoping that someone like Andreas Krennmair, who has ability to read sources in the original German, might take on the job. Now, on his blog, he’s shared notes on how to brew a pre-World-War-II version of Kölsch, with historical notes on the side:

Johannes Olberg’s book Moderne Braumethoden from 1927 contains a multitude of recipes for more than 50 different beer styles. One of them is Kölsch, briefly discussed as the “national drink” of Cologne, and characterised as golden, thirst-quenching, “not too heavy but digestible” beer. The recipe is particularly interesting because it’s the only well-documented Kölsch recipe I’m aware of from before the end of World War 2… A lot has changed since then, and the Kölsch of 2024 is of course very different from Kölsch about 100 years earlier. Even the modern standards of what Kölsch is supposed to be, the “Kölsch-Konvention”, was only developed from 1981 onwards, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office signed off on in it 1985, and it was finally signed by 24 Kölsch breweries in 1986.


The interior of a pub with shiny wood panelling and a framed portrait of an older man on the wall.

A few weeks ago Time Out published a guide to London’s best pubs that made everyone angry. In response, we said: “Remember, if you see a list in a newspaper you don’t like, that’s nature’s way of telling you to make your own list. (We would like to read your list.)” To our delight Tommy Palmer, a Belfast man in London, has done exactly that. Some of these pubs wouldn’t make our list, and some pubs we like aren’t included. But there are also lots here that we’d now like to visit thanks to Tommy’s short, evocative descriptions:

The Auld Shillelagh serves all the standard drinks that you might expect from an Irish pub, and although I’m not really a Guinness drinker, I have been reliably informed that they pour it well… Once when I was in there on a Friday night a proper seafood seller was coming round, so I helped myself to a little pot of prawn cocktail. My only experience of the classic pub fish man, but it made me wish it was still common… It also serves Nordie Tayto, which as you’ll see is a recurring theme when it comes to pubs that I enjoy.


Finally, from BlueSky, a proper thread from one of our favourite beer historians…

Michael Jackson did great work, but he also left the beer community permanently confused about stone beer. The problem is the Beer Hunter episode where he visits Rauchenfels in Franconia to see their stone beer. What's truly weird is that everything he said was true, and yet it's deceived everyone.

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— Lars Marius Garshol (@larsga.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 8:23 PM

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