News, nuggets and longreads 4 May 2024: Project Hail Mary

Every week, we round-up the most interesting writing about beer and pubs from the past week. This time, we’ve got flyovers, pub grub and hard data.

First, a few bits of brewery news, including one that’s close to home for us:

• Buxton, founded in Derbyshire in 2009, has announced that it intends to appoint administrators, as reported at The Business Desk. This feels like a big one in the context of the craft beer boom of the 2010s. (We now have a standing search for brewery + administration, by the way.)
  
• Bristol Beer Factory, founded in 2004, is moving its brewery… slightly. And expanding. Our observation on the ground would be that they’ve been pretty rampant in the past year or two, hoovering up accounts across the city, advertising on billboards, and achieving what seems like remarkable success with their non-alcoholic brand, Clear Head.
  
• Greene King, founded in Suffolk in 1799, is also moving its brewing operation a similar distance, physically, but a long way in emotional, historic terms. As Jessica Mason reports at The Drinks Business: “The British brewer, known for beers such as Old Speckled Hen and Abbot Ale, has been brewing cask ales at its Westgate Brewery in Bury St Edmunds for over 200 years… However, despite its provenance attached to the historic brewery, it has made the decision to move and build a new brewery at Suffolk Park, next to Moreton Hall.”
  
• And finally, the latest UK brewery tracker numbers are out from SIBA: “[The] UK total number of active brewers now stands at 1777, a -38 drop since the end of Q4 2023.”

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Sticking with numbers, briefly, the author of the wonderful A London Inheritance blog has shared details of the London Data Store created created by the Greater London Assembly:

[It] has made available a very extensive range of raw data, and information, freely available, to view and download, and to use to understand different aspects of London today, how the city has, and continues to evolve… There is data in the London Data Store on things you would expect (such as population growth) as well as unexpected data, such as a spreadsheet of every recording studio in the city… There is also a spreadsheet of London’s pubs and bars in 2023, however with over 4,000 entries I did not want to overload the site on which the blog is hosted by importing and creating a map, so I will use a graph on the number of London pubs between 2001 and 2022… What is interesting about the graph is that whilst there has been a general decline in the overall number of pubs, this has mainly been a result of the closing of small pubs, those employing fewer than ten staff, whilst larger pubs employing more that ten have increased in number.

The spreadsheet and data obsessive in our house (Jess) will certainly be playing with these numbers.

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At Real Ale, Real Music Chris Dyson reports on the reinvention of The Olde Shears Inn, a pub in Halifax, West Yorkshire, as The Hop Monkey Music Bar. His post touches on the history of the town, its industry, and the coming of a mighty flyover which looms over the pub. This leads to an interesting final act to the post in which Chris recalls other pubs beneath bridges:

Aside from the micro pubs, taprooms, and breweries which are to be found in railway arches up and down the country from London to Newcastle via Manchester that are within the structure of the bridge, there are a number of free-standing pubs in different parts of the country that have a bridge or viaduct above them. One that stands out is the Crown in Stockport, which lies beneath the one of the 27 arches that make up the huge viaduct which dominates the town. In fact the viaduct is the largest brick-built structure in the country with an incredible 11 million bricks used in its construction. The Crown, one of many fine pubs located in the town, is a former Boddingtons pub as indicated by the vintage pub signage.

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For Good Beer Hunting Ruvani de Silva has profiled an American brewery called Arizona Wilderness based in Phoenix – or, rather, the latest incarnation of that brewery, in terms of its culture. It’s interesting because it acknowledges that rapid growth and sudden fame can make it easy for brewery owners to make bad decisions:

Within eight months [of opening], RateBeer awarded them Brewery of the Year, they were interviewed by Esquire Magazine, and they started collaborating with pretty much every craft beer superstar brewer around the world… Following the rush of attention and demand, there was a period where, while they didn’t lose sight of their goals pertaining to either brewing quality or sustainability, they struggled to balance the pressures of leadership and creativity. As they took on first the taproom adjacent to the Gilbert brewpub and then their downtown location, along with an ambitious wild ale program in the Woodnotes Cellar, the pair found themselves overstretched and at a greater distance from the heart of the business than they wanted to be. “It felt like I was sprinting up a mountain with Pat behind, then I would veer off course and Pat would have to decide whether to follow me or stick to the original route – with a group of people behind him, which was stressful for staff members,” says [brewery co-founder Jonathan] Buford.

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You might be interested to know that we also produce footnotes for these posts for Patreon subscribers. Here’s last week’s as a freebie taster. Please do consider signing up.

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Paul Bailey (no relation) has written about the disappearance of the affordable pub lunch from the south of England. This is something we sometimes feel wistful about, too – whatever became of the sub-£5 pub lasagna? As Paul writes:

Pre-filled rolls remain the best option, and whilst these are really readily available in both the Midlands and the North, the opposite applies in London and the south east… In these parts of the country, the simple sandwich has ceased to exist, and if it is available, the description simple, no longer applies. Instead, the hungry trencherman is served a filling, between thick-cut slices of artisan bread – nothing wrong with that so far, but when its embellished with some type of greenery, ranging from few springs of rocket to a full-blown, and largely unwanted salad, complete with a fancy dressing that’s going to affect the taste of the beer, that’s a different matter… All these unwanted “extras” bump up the price, so much so that it’s not uncommon to be looking at £7 to £10 for a simple sandwich, especially in some of the posh “dining pubs” in the southeast.

This post is also where we learned the worrying news that the historically significant pubs The Barton Arms in Aston, Birmingham, has closed.

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At Beer Insider Glynn Davis has an observation from an East London pub that highlights an important customer service issue: really busy pubs aren’t fun places to be. As he reports:

You can catch the rather unique characteristics of the Chesham Arms in E9 on a Friday and Saturday evening when there is invariably a queue at its door and a one-in-one-out policy being implemented by its friendly manager Joe Garcia… Joe has a maximum capacity of a modest 180. Interestingly he had on occasions previously had as many as 250 people in the place but he found this delivered no more money into the tills. In fact it had actually worked against him because it annoyed customers because many had to stand when drinking as well as navigating long queues at the bar – that can only house seven servers standing shoulder-to-shoulder – and deal with seriously long waits at the toilets. No doubt the lack of queues outside the women’s toilets is a factor in the Chesham Arms having such a high percentage of female customers.

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Finally, from social media, some Brussels boozing food…

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A post shared by thirstypilgrim (@joestange)

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