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News, nuggets and longreads 12 October 2024: The Outcasts

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed us in the past week, from Manchester to Acid House.

First, a few bits of news:

  1. Thornbridge & Co (a partnership between Thornbridge and Pivovar) is planning to open a pub in London in 2025. It seems a long way from home but there’s no denying that our immediate reaction is pleasure at the thought of knowing there’ll be somewhere we’ll always know we can find Thornbridge beer when we’re in the capital.
  2. Abbeydale, another brewery from the same part of the world, founded in 1996, is now employee owned. This is an interesting answer to the succession problem which has caused so many other breweries to pop out of existence in recent years.
  3. Carlsberg Marston’s announced plans to close the historic Banks’s Park Brewery in Wolverhampton. Death by a thousand cuts and all that.

The interior of a bar with Chinese characters in neon.
The Harcourt. SOURCE: Matthew Curtis/Pellicle.

For Pellicle David Jesudason has written about The Harcourt, a pub in Altrincham, Manchester, with a distinct and fascinating proposition:

“When we opened, local people thought we were a restaurant because they never expect Asian people to run a pub,” Priscilla So tells me… We’re sat in her pub chatting about why the Hong Kong-inspired venue, Harcourt, which she runs with husband Brian Hung in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, is so special. For once it’s best described by a word used wrongly 99% of the time—authentic. In fact, it’s authentic in so many ways: in its food, in its beer, and especially in its modern welcome… “Because we’ve got the traditional Chinese character outside [on the sign] the locals didn’t expect us to be a pub,” Priscilla says. “They thought we were a Chinese restaurant.”


A pub cluttered with flags, junk, and ornate decorations.
The Crafty Baa. SOURCE: Scott Spencer/Micropub Adventures.

For some vicarious pub crawling, this week’s recommendations are Scott Spencer’s visit to the Lake District at Micropub Adventures, starting with the excellently named Craft Baa:

After a journey by train from Blackpool, I started my day yesterday in Windermere. My first call here was to The Crafty Baa, which opened in August 2016. This location is truly remarkable! Upon entering, one is immediately captivated by the walls, floors, and ceilings adorned with a myriad of items, including flags, lampshades, signs, and much more. There are boxes that are not meant to be opened, a room said to be haunted, a lost and found area, a potting shed, and additional intriguing features… My preferred beer was one of their signature brews, “The Snaily Pale.” It is a flavorful, refreshing, and easily drinkable pale ale.

And Martin Taylor’s exploration of Lincoln over the course of several posts, including The Strugglers:

This is what we call a “cultural melting pot”, a place where someone perches on your table and you don’t know whether they’re going to start discussing Kerouac or Kilmarnock FC.


Dr Gabriela Montandon. SOURCE: The Crafty Pint.

For The Crafty Pint Mick Wust has written a detailed account of the work of Dr Gabriela Montandon at Fermentis, an industrial brewing yeast producer, in France. It’s feels a bit like an advertorial (maybe we’re wrong) but there’s just so much fascinating detail about how tasting panels actually work:

For beer sensory analysis, Gabriela has access to around 60 tasters who come in to taste on a weekly basis to stay sharp. They make up three tasting panels. The two larger groups are sourced from around LeSaffre, with one trained especially in fermentative flavours, while the other is trained more generally with other raw materials (including malt and hops). The third and smallest group is an expert panel made up of 13 people in Fermentis to work with confidential R&D projects… Before this part of the experiment, it’s been easy to control variables and keep things objective. Now that we’ve reached our human element – and multiple humans, at that – Gabriela has her work cut out. Even with trained tasters, there are always differences in what people taste and describe, and Gabriela isn’t here to gather a range of opinions; she’s looking for consistent patterns in the data.

It occurs to us that this is how some people think tasting panels, like the one that decides the CAMRA Champion Beer of Britain, ought to be run.


A can of FourPure pils.

Will Hawkes’s newsletter for October has just gone out (check your inboxes) which means the September edition is now online for everyone to read. The phrase ‘jam packed’ is overused but, really, there’s a lot of stuff in this one, from notes on how FourPure came and went to memories of the acid house era at The Downham Tavern:

Music was a central part of the Downham Tavern’s story, from tea dances in the 1930s to visits from David Bowie and Arthur Brown in the late 1960s. With the arguable exception of boxing, it was what happened in the pub’s huge hall, called Bal Tabarin for much of its existence. It was in the late 1980s that it really flowered, partly because the owners – Courage – finally realised its potential, and partly because it hosted Fascination, one of the UK’s first Balearic dance events… The story of how dance music took off in the UK tends to focus either on the London DJs who returned from Ibiza in 1987… or the Hacienda in Manchester, or the outdoor raves that took place across the country in the late 1980s. An event like Fascination, in a 1930s pub in a dowdy south London suburb, doesn’t quite fit into any of these categories…

Be aware, though, that it’s now a PDF rather than in blog post format.


The Left Handed Giant Brewpub at Finzel's Reach, Bristol, in an old industrial brewery building overlooking the river.

As we near the end of the round up here’s some people watching in the pub from Liliput at What’ll You Have? that feels worthy of Mass Observation:

Though it was noisy, I found the hubbub quite relaxing. What was less so, was the icy draught that swept through the building everytime the door was left open… We ended up watching to see how people behaved when going through the door… parties with more than 2 people tended to hold the door open for the person behind, and each subsequent person pushed the door a little more open until the point that it stopped trying to close. Most of the time, the door was then left open… If there were many people both coming in and coming this was more likely to happen… Every now and again someone close to the offending door would get up, and close the door and sit down again – only to have to do it all over again.


Finally, from Instagram, a pint and a packet of crisps – what more could you ask for?

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

3 replies on “News, nuggets and longreads 12 October 2024: The Outcasts”

The chi chi residents of Altrincham, which is culturally if not now administratively part of affluent north Cheshire, wouldn’t thank you for placing their town in Manchester!

If we’ve learned one thing in the past decade and a half it’s that if we say somewhere that’s historically in Cheshire, we’ll get corrected and told it’s in Manchester. But if we say it’s in Manchester, we’ll get corrected the other way. Gives people a brief moment of pleasure, I suppose.

Ah – you are confusing Manchester, the city, with Greater Manchester, the county. Altrincham is in the latter but very much not in the former.

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