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Beer history pubs quotes

The Trouble With Mild Drinkers, 1938

“If you don’t want to drift you must conceive a strategy and stick to it. My policy here seems indicated by the Inn’s position on the map and in the Town — viz. a useful place for casual eaters and for nighters… and as the best Smoke Room in the Town. But what seems to obstruct this policy is the little knot of very loud-voiced mild-beer drinkers who stand in the dark at the bottom of the stairs, very pleasant people, very respectful, but yet their voices penetrate into every room up and down the house and the effect upon people who have to edge their way through them must be beery enough… [Now] that in an Inn can no longer live on drink… How and when to stop it?”

John Fothergill on the struggle to drag a pub ‘up market’ in his 1938 memoir Confession of an Innkeeper.