We’re off to London for the next week or so where we’ll be undertaking some more research and, for the first time in a while, attending the Great British Beer Festival.
The research is final phase stuff for The Big Project and will take us to pubs in such glamorous locations as Lewisham and Bishop’s Stortford, as well as back for another bout at the London Metropolitan Archives and the RIBA library, among others.
We’ve got some meetings to attend and duties to dispense at GBBF but will be knocking about having a few beers on Tuesday afternoon if anyone wants to come and say hello, or just point and laugh from a safe distance. We’ll broadcast where we’re cowering sitting standing on Twitter when we’ve found a spot. We haven’t worked out our game plan yet — nothing but milds, maybe? Or all beers from The North? We’re such lightweights we have to find a way of thinning out the field.
In the meantime, if you want something to read…
- We have a big feature article in the latest edition of CAMRA’s BEER magazine on the subject of the history and meaning of theme pubs. Members will have a copy but non-members might consider popping along to their local CAMRA-friendly real ale pub and seeing if they have a copy knocking about.
2. Last year we wrote another big feature for BEER marking the 40th anniversary of the first modern beer festival, the 1975 Covent Garden Beer Exhibition. We’ve now made that available here on the blog — enjoy!
3. And don’t miss our most recent piece for All About Beer which argues that beer geeks are nothing new.
4. We won’t be doing our usual Saturday morning news round-up this week and possibly not the next either but Stan’s Hieronymus’s Monday link-fests are great, and Jordan has started doing history-focused ‘posts of the week’ on (we gather) Fridays.