News, nuggets and longreads 13 July 2024: Hey Jude

Every Saturday we round up the most interesting writing about beer and pubs from the past week. This time: lots of lager.

First, some big news: Marston’s is breaking away from the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company (CMBC) partnership and pulling out of brewing, to become a pub company only. We read the story first in this piece by Sophie Witts at The Caterer but check out Darren Norbury for emotional content and Roger Protz for pointed commentary:

“Marston’s has pulled down the shutters on 190 years of beer making… CMBC said the closure of the regional breweries was due to a fall in demand for cask beer – a fall not seen by independent producers who say the category is recovering well from Covid and lockdowns…”

This follows a more general pattern in the industry of breweries turning into pub company’s (e.g. Young’s, Fuller’s) masked for most people by the fact that the pubs continue to sell the same beers as ever. Down here in the West Country, though, we’ve noticed Young’s pubs starting to sell more St Austell beer. So who can say how long those partnerships, formal or otherwise, will ever last.

---

Via Substack we stumbled across Lisa Dotzauer’s piece entitled ‘W is for What’s on cask please? – the slow public death of my local’, which paints a depressingly recognisable picture of pub life away from big urban centres:

My local pub occupies a lovely spot in the village, it has a large fenced outdoor area with trees providing shade, as well as additional outdoor seating on the patio. The building itself is a Grade II listed building, which makes my historian-heart beat just that tiny bit faster, and as the only remaining pub in the village[vii], should thrive… Given that the village was once home to five pubs and a brewery, should, is the word indeed… Yet, how my heart aches… I don’t know how you like your Premium Czech Lagers, but I like mine with some good amount of carbonation. The one in front of me was certainly lacking the freshness CO₂ provides. And when it comes to Pale Ales? I prefer refreshing bitter notes and an orange kick, over the stale wet cardboard notes the ale was giving me…

(Yes, we know, but that’s not the point of the piece.)

---

Dermot Kennedy’s photographic project documenting Art Deco pubs in the UK continues with a second post about city centre pubs:

Architects designing in city centres in the 1930s didn’t usually have the space for the detached, low slung streamlined style of art deco pub that became popular in the suburbs. Instead they were often forced to build on the end of or even in the middle of an existing terrace. Even new developments, especially in the bigger cities required that a pub be part of a larger mixed-use block. The exteriors though were still recognisably art deco with one or more of curved corners, Crittall metal windows and horizontal banding. Some though were added to an existing older block and relied on a frontage with art deco tiling or a frieze with art deco letting. The interiors of city art deco pubs have generally survived better than their suburban counterparts, and a few are essentially unaltered inside.

---

For Good Beer Hunting Adrian Tierney-Jones has written about a Brussels craft brewery focused on producing lager – a bold move in a country where locally-produced pils is popular but hardly critically feted:

Apart from Brasserie de la Senne, which uses the method for Zenne Pils, Brasserie de la Mule is the sole Belgian brewery practicing decoction mashing. Its lagering times are also generous, with eight weeks at 0.5˚C (33˚F) being standard. All the beers are organic. For [founder and head brewer Joel] Galy, this approach is not an act of resistance to the monolithic nature of Belgian lager brewing. Neither is it one of blind faith, in that he saw a gap in the market and rushed pell-mell toward it. The story of the brewery is more of a deliberate and planned vision as well as one of a goal—or, perhaps, more precisely, an aim in bringing into this rumbustious part of Brussels a beer-drinking experience that has its roots in the cheery, communal pub culture of Bavaria.

This also feels like another item of evidence to file alongside Utopian’s acquisition of a pub and Bohem opening its second London outlet. Lager is where it’s at in the 2020s, right?

---

Actually, still on that theme, it’s interesting that Andreas Krennmair could travel to Chicago, get a train 50 minutes out of the city, walk to an industrial estate, and find Vienna beer that totally impressed him:

Goldfinger’s Vienna Lager is very much Czech in the best way possible… The beer was so good, I tried not to down it too quickly… I tried [every beer] on the menu. I don’t remember all the details of all of them, but a lasting impression for me was that every single one of them was absolutely flawless, full of flavour, and so enticing that you would have wanted a second one of every single one of them. Goldfinger Original, Vienna Lager, German Pils, Mexican Lager, Heller Bock (it was the end of Maibock season, after all) and Hefeweizen were on tap, and all of them excellent examples of their respective styles. Not just excellent, but formulated and brewed to absolute precision… [When] you have an Austrian go to a small brewery in Chicagoan suburbia, drink their beer and suddenly reminisce about all the great Bavarian beers it reminds him of, you know the brewery is doing something very right…

---

At The Drinks Business Jessica Mason reports on a talk by Inka Kosonen about the practical ways in which women are locked out of brewing:

One area Kosonen insisted was still being overlooked in terms of gender equality is the availability of basic sanitary bins in workplace toilets. For breweries and beer businesses, she shed light on how the consideration that these are basic female needs that are oft overlooked… Kosonen explained: “In the workplace or at your brewery, where there are toilets, are there also sanitary bins? If not, that is illegal. It is not just about meeting the minimum.”

On a related note, several of our local taprooms and pubs have excellent selections of free sanitary products in the toilets… Except when you need them, of course, in an emergency. Then it’s just empty boxes.

---

Finally, from social media, a remarkable piece of film from 1964 about the Salford pubs left behind after ‘slum clearance’:

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