News, nuggets and longreads 4 January 2025: New Year’s Evil

Every Saturday we round up good writing about beer from the past week. Here’s the first for 2025, with landladies, pork pies and Golden Pints.

First, a set of stats, released annually, that we find helpful in gauging what’s up with the state of beer in the UK: how many London breweries are there? And how many pubs and bars are there worth including in a guide to drinking in London? These are now compiled by Stephen Jackson, who took over stewardship of Beer Guide London when founder Jezza moved to Belgium. The headlines are:

• “2024 started with 108 London breweries on our list and the year ends with 103, a decrease of 5 over the year. This is the smallest net decrease for a number of years…”
• “2024 started with 315 Guide entries… and we end the year with 291 entries, a reduction of 24…. Of the deletions the bulk (25) came about following an editorial decision to remove all BrewDog bars and all Laine Brew Co bars…”

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Just before Christmas The Standard published a piece by Millie Milliken profiling six female publicans from across London:

A black eye, an armed robbery, a run-in with British acting royalty: Natasha Purdom’s 25-year career working behind pub bars has been colourful to say the least. Her first pub job was at The Flower Pot in her hometown in Bedford. She remembers being in awe of landlady Kathy: “She was a strong woman, the driver of the business… Whenever she worked a Saturday night, she was always dressed up: she put on her makeup and clothes and her job was to engage with the customers – I liked the glamour of it.”

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Katie Mather has been in Cologne and her write up is a joy both in terms of the writing (she’s cut loose a bit here) and the pleasure at experiencing new things and places she conveys:

It’s illegal, or at least impossible as far as we could work out, to park a van in the centre of Cologne, so I booked a very cheap hotel for two nights. This was actually an amazing idea and a stroke of genius too, because Mühlen Kölsch ended up being right around the corner… This being our first Kölsch in Cologne, we were excited to be ushered to a tall drinking table in the heart of the building. The building itself is an historic brewery hall, dating from 1858. To get in you must navigate a heavy revolving wooden door and then push yourself through an equally heavy velvet curtain, adding a definite feeling of pizzazz to the dining room you enter into. As most people in there have been seated and enjoying a peaceful meal until you arrived, they probably won’t enjoy your squeals of delight at being shoved through into what is essentially German Narnia.

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When Ferment went behind a paywall we lost access to some good writing, and good writers, so we were pleased to see that Charlotte Cook has shared something she wrote for them about Zoigl on her own personal Substack:

In the Upper Palatinate of Bavaria, nestled in a hilly landscape of broadleaf forests and gently peregrinating rivers – very close to the Czech border – there are a handful of small towns that have a unique brewing culture. After brewing rights were bestowed on these towns in the 15th century they established communal brewhouses, and a tradition of serving beer from the homes of the brewers, which has remained largely unchanged ever since… This style of brewing used to be fairly common across Europe, in England women would serve beer from their homes, but this gradually died out, with permanent inns and taverns replacing the temporary domestic openings. In these Zoigl towns, however, you can still turn up to a strangers house, sit in his living room, and for the very reasonable price of €2,40 per beer, have as many pints as you care to imbibe, often with the whole family chipping in to serve beer and small snacks.

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Jane Stuart has kicked off 2025 as she means to go on: with a pub crawl and a beer festival, this time in Derby. This description made us want to get on a train:

Now I visited the Furnace almost ten years ago and it has stuck in my mind because, on that visit, I enjoyed the Best Pork Pie Ever. I don’t actually like pies, least of all pork pies. But this one was outstanding… I was dismayed to learn that they had sold out and were awaiting their next delivery from Barry Fitch Butchers in Little Eaton… Pie famine notwithstanding, this was an epic pub – not least because of our incredibly knowledgeable hostess. I smiled to myself as the three women enthused about various beers and I trotted off to take some pics of the interior.

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We were pleased to see quite a few ‘golden pints’ posts around – as well as some ‘definitely not golden pints’ which do the same job. Here are those we’ve spotted:

• Paul Bailey (no relation) – Thornbridge Jaipur Union
• John ‘The Beer Nut’ Duffy – ‘end of year content filling’
• ‘Lilliput’ at What’ll You Have – best pub experiences in 2024
• Benjamin ‘Ben Viveur’ Nunn – Ilkley Dad Jokes, among others
• Robbie Pickering at Refreshing Beer – with a top ten best beers
• Roy at Quare Swally – with a focus on Northern Ireland
• Simon at Simon Says – Lineman Underline
• Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer – with offbeat categories

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Finally, from BlueSky, a reminder…

Not all good pints are about the beer. Pint of Madri in a plastic cup 1.34 miles out to sea on Southend Pier last year. The donuts were bangin’, and we sipped our pints watching locals fish off the end of the pier.

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— Bramling Ross (@rossisdead.bsky.social) January 2, 2025 at 8:55 AM

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