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News, nuggets and longreads 1 June 2024: Your Community Hub

It’s Saturday which means it’s time for a round-up of the best writing about beer from the past seven days. This time: Anchor, faux-Irish pubs, heritage brewing, and more.

First, some news: San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing has a new owner who intends to “restart brewery operations and restore its traditional branding and its position as a national player in the beer industry”. We generally keep our noses out of US beer news these days but Anchor is so important in the story of craft beer globally, and especially in the UK, that we can’t ignore it.

The new owner, Hamdi Ulukaya, is the owner of a yoghurt brand and Jeff Alworth has commentary on his motives for buying Anchor: “[In his TED talk] he discusses reorienting a business around the workers and their communities rather than quarterly profits and shareholder profit… I am all for billionaires buying historically important breweries as an act of cultural preservation.”


A cobbled city street lined with pubs and restaurants.
Temple Bar, Dublin, by Vitaly Mazur at Unsplash.

The last place you’d expect to have a problem with faux-Irish pubs is Ireland but the demands of tourism can make strange things happen. For Lovin Dublin Emily Mullen has written about this phenomenon:

Faux Irish bars are a familiar sight in the US, the UK, and mainland Europe, but now their neon-lit shamrocks have begun to illuminate the fair corners of our capital. For some visitors it can be hard to distinguish between the authentic and the inauthentic, for locals the difference is as clear as a trip to the opticians. Firstly, location is generally a giveaway. While typically clustered around the Temple Bar area, faux Irish bars have now started popping up across the city, generally beside a new hotel (that was probably built on the site of a since-cleared Dublin cultural institution). The name festooned above their door is another good signifier, inevitably invoking some mythical proprietor  (think Jimmy-Joe O’Reilly’s or Biddy McGinnty’s) or an Irish phrase uttered during the Leaving Cert orals. Their signs are generally made of a cheap plastic material that looks to be temporarily fixed to the front of the place, ready to be whipped down the moment some new passing fad becomes more profitable.

(Via an email from The Beer Nut.)


A man in traditional costume tends a market stall and discusses his wares (mead and beer) with an older couple also in medieval style costumes.
SOURCE: Lana Svitankova/Good Beer Hunting.

Good Beer Hunting is best known for its magazine-style ‘longreads’ but also has a section called ‘b-Roll’ where it sneaks in smaller, shorter stories that are more like traditional blog posts. This week Lana Svitankova shared a note on a mediaeval market in Bremgarten, Switzerland, where there was a lot of mead but only a little beer:

Due to a legislation quirk, Switzerland can boast the highest number of breweries per capita in the world (about 1,200 for 8 million people). If you are a homebrewer producing more than 400 liters of beer per year, you are obliged to register and pay taxes. From there it’s relatively easy to obtain permission to sell beer, so the overwhelming majority of the breweries are tiny, with brewing capacity of 50-100 liters. For many of them, brewing is a self-sustaining hobby, not a business. The venerable ‘monks’ offering us their Lindenbier operate on the same principle.


A pub window with frosted glass.

Adrian Tierney-Jones continues to deliver observations from the corner of the pub with a Moleskine notebook next to his pint. This week’s note is about laughter, a sometimes overlooked sound of the pub:

Meanwhile elsewhere in the pub more hyena laughs in the middle of the night split through the air along with the slap of a palm on the table as the anecdote was too funny. Then on the table with the musical friends, a well-judged comic remark and yet another aspect of laughter in the pub was the spitting out of beer as the other was caught out in the middle of taking a deep draught from his glass. A ripple of laughter as a man at the bar said to his server that he had been coming to this pub for years and that whoever selects the music (a very twiddly jazz track was being plays at that moment) should be shot.


The front of a micropub called Malt Disley in a former retail unit in a row of high street shops.
Malt Disley (groan) in Disley. SOURCE: Scott Spencer/Micropub Adventures.

At Micropub Adventures Scott Spencer has extensive notes, and lots of photos, from the Three Counties Rail Ale Trail. This particular train-and-cask crawl runs from Derbyshire to Manchester although Scott started at Disley in Cheshire:

My first call of the day is to Disley in Cheshire (County Number 1). It is located on the edge of the Peak District in the Goyt Valley… My call here is to ‘The Malt Disley’, this Micropub opened in 2017 having formerly being a shop. A really nicely done out Micropub with cosy seating on two levels (the lower level converts into a games room). A couple of tables outside at the front of the pub also… A line up of 4 cask beers on the bar today, alongside a wide range of keg beers ranging in styles. I went with ‘Five Card Draw’ from Malton, North Yorkshire based Brass Castle Brewery. A great tasting American style classic IPA showcasing 5 different hops.


Detail from an old brewing log.

We’re popping this at the end because it’s more of a reference to bookmark than something to sit down and read from end to end. Steve ‘Beer Nouveau’ Dunkley has written several thousand words of guidance on how to brew heritage beer, which he defines as follows:

To look at the comparisons between modern and heritage brewing we need to look at the full life cycle of the beer until it reaches the drinker. In general I use the terms Historic, Heritage, Traditional and Modern when it comes to the eras of brewing. They’re a bit loose but Historic is before we started writing things down, around the late 1700s (which is also when we first started properly using hops), Heritage is from then until the start of the First World War. Traditional goes until the late 1990’s/early 2000’s and then modern takes over. It all really depends on the country, the brewery and the drinker. But it’s a good rough guide.

It’s practical and detailed with an easily-navigated structure. And there’s also a PDF for those who prefer something formatted more like a book.


Finally, from one of our favourite accounts on Instagram…

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