Every week we round up the best writing about beer from the preceding week. This time we’ve got pool tables, massive pubs, and thin places.
First, a BrewDog update: the Scottish brewery has told shareholders that it is no longer going to claim to be ‘carbon negative’ from November. As reported by Eloise Feilden at The Drinks Business: “In an email to shareholders, new BrewDog CEO James Arrow said that the ‘market for carbon credits has changed’ since BrewDog became carbon negative in 2020.”
At Pellicle Fred Garratt-Stanley offers an insight to an aspect of pubs that we’d never thought about – pool tables, the business model behind them, and why they’re disappearing:
“We’ve lost a lot of pubs that do food because food makes more profit than pool tables,” says Nicky Lines, General Manager at Ivor Thomas Amusements, a Kent-based company supplying pool tables and other pub equipment to establishments across the southeast of England. “We had a lot of machines and pool tables taken out because of Covid… then, they don’t have them back because they think, ‘look at how much my pool table took compared to how much I can get from three tables, and say, ten covers, over the same period.’”
Will Hawkes’s newsletter London Beer City continues to be one of the best and richest reads around with the equivalent of a month’s worth of blog posts in every edition. The May edition is now (belatedly) online for everyone to read and has, among other things, notes on The Downham Tavern:
On Tuesday this week, the first warm afternoon of the year, you could have walked past without a second glance were it not for the boisterous gaggle of drinkers, complete with muzzled XL Bully, sitting at the picnic tables in front. It’s a nondescript nineties building, a beefed-up Barrett Home of a boozer next to a large Co-op. Perhaps the only notable thing about it is it’s a resolutely working-class pub in a city where they’ve become a relative rarity… But this South-East London pub is remarkable – or at least its predecessor, which existed for over 60 years until its mid-90s demolition, was. It was, at different times and for different people, ‘the most up-to-date tavern in Britain’, ‘the only tavern where you needn’t drink’, ‘England’s biggest pub’, home to ‘the longest bar in England’, and ‘Britain’s toughest pub’. It hosted table service, music hall, acid house, cowboys, David Bowie, gangsters, multiple punch-ups and misdemeanours, and much more besides. It was a dream and a nightmare and now it’s a memory – and a fading one at that.
In another ‘beer city’, Brussels, Eoghan Walsh is doing that psychogeographical thing again, reflecting on the view from a bar which seems to collapse time and space:
I wouldn’t normally subscribe to some of the spiritual otherworldliness behind the notion of the thin place, but I wasn’t ready to dismiss the theory that there are places in the world that can, if you are in the right frame of mind, give you a feeling of being close to another dimension, an alternate branch of the multiverse to the one in which we inhabit. Maybe it was the heat and the beer. Maybe I watched too many episodes of Sliders when I was younger. Or maybe it was because sitting and drinking in Bij/Chez Jansens & Jansens and places like it – less thin places than portals to other possible worlds – always get me thinking whether this is what more of the city might have looked and felt like if the Spanish had never left 300 years ago, and Brussels had remained a Mediterranean outpost in Northern Europe.
We’re loving Franz Hofer’s snapshots of drinking in Bavaria at the moment, perhaps because we haven’t (yet) made it to Germany this year. This week he provided a portrait of a brewery in a village outside Bamberg:
Mönchsambacher Lagerbier’s reputation precedes it. Aficionados of Franconian beer speak about it in reverential tones… But I had never quite understood the hype… Then came May 2024. Not only is the entire family running the show some of the friendliest folks you’ll meet (Oma Zehender even pulled me my mug of beer, then recommended what food I should order to go with it), but the Lagerbier was divine. Rich, round, and creamy, with white nougat, milk caramel, honey, freshly mowed meadows drying in the sun. And a whole lot of hops that added a fruity Sylvaner grape note, something that I find to be a hallmark of Perle hops, depending on how they’re used during the process, and with which malts. And, of course, that snappy bitterness that’s also a calling card of Mönchsambacher’s beers, balanced here by the malt heft. I asked Stefan Zehender, owner/brewer, about the bitterness. He told me that their water is extremely hard: 28 degrees on the German hardness scale. So there’s one for all you terroir buffs out there.
Katie Mather has written about customer reviews and the instinct to criticise or, rather, to be a critic:
Reviews were so important to me when I had a bar, they showed me what people liked about us, and what we could improve. It was always interesting to see, however, that positive reviews were always about the things people enjoyed, and negative reviews were about how a person felt. Negative reviews are charged with emotion, positive reviews tend to be more factual: I had a lovely drink, the cheese toastie was nice…I also noticed how negative reviews often showed an attempt to showcase a person’s elite sense of taste or superior knowledge—something I’ve learned is called the “Cynical Genius Illusion.” Picking holes makes you seem like you know what you’re talking about, so you keep finding ways to appraise the world around you, never satisfied with what you’re given, always looking for what could be improved, never appreciating what actually exists.
This happened to land the same week as a story on the BBC about restaurant owners being blackmailed over reviews. It’s a murky old business.
Finally, from Instagram, a handsome pint in a handsome pub…
For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.
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One reply on “News, nuggets and longreads 20 July 2024: The Magician”
I’ve never been a fan of pool in pubs. I was glad when they got rid of the pool table in my local.