Every Saturday we round-up the most interesting writing about beer from the past week. This time we’ve got French ale, perfect pubs and yodelling.
First, another bit of data that suggests largish regional brewers are kind of doing OK despite the general air of doom around hospitality and brewing. Butcombe, one of our local breweries, has posted stats for the year to 25 January 2025 (via Beer Today):
“Total Managed like for likes grew by 7.8%, with a standout performance in food at 12% growth. Both accommodation and drink grew by 4% and 5% respectively.”
And a second piece of news, broken by Melissa Cole for The Drinks Business: Keystone Brewing Group (formerly Breal) has bought the Magic Rock and Fourpure brands out of administration. Note ‘brands’, though – not breweries.
For Pellicle Anaïs Lecoq has written what feels rather like the definitive history of France’s first cask ale, Coreff, from Brittany:
The story goes like this: One beautiful day in May 1985, the first Coreff was served by Roger Le Jan to Fañch le Marrec. Pictures of that first drinker regularly come up on the brewery’s social media, where the Breton musician proudly stands in front of Ty Coz toilet door, painted with the first Coreff logo… Called Brasserie des Deux Rivières when Jean-François Malgorn and Christian Blanchard opened it in 1985, Coreff is considered France’s first microbrewery… Brewing nothing but real ale at the time, Coreff came to life with the help of a person that will mean nothing to the vast majority of French people, even the beer drinking type. Yet he’s considered a legend on the other side of the English Channel: Peter Austin, founder of Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire.
It’s always exciting when something you’ve posted prompts someone else to write a few hundred words of their own. This week, our pondering on ‘pubs to visit before you die’ inspired ‘Velky’ Al Reece at Fuggled to post a list of 10 pubs he loves, or wants to get to know:
If you know me in the slightest, this one takes no explaining whatsoever. For the final couple of years that Mrs V and I spent in Prague, U Slovanské lípy was high on our list of regular haunts. It was less than 20 minutes from our apartment, it was the only pub in Prague, at the time, to have Kout na Šumavě’s entire range of beers on tap, and after several pints the walk home was all down hill. I loved that place, nay, I love that place. Sure, it now has a rotating set of taps, and Kout na Šumavě are no more, but it still has the same, local, non-touristy, vibe that I always loved. Every time I have been back to the city in the last few years I organise a meet up with friends there largely because it is one of the models of perfection in my beery universe.
(We’d love to read your list, if you feel inspired.)
Alex at Pub Vignettes gives us a trio of closely observed pubs, all in Devon, including Ye Olde Cider Bar in Newton Abbot:
The Swiss think they’ve got the monopoly on yodelling, but they’re wrong. Couple of old boys slurp half pots of opaque scrumpy as an aide-mémoire. Both fondly recall hearing their grandads yodel right over there by the bar in the late 1930s. When men were men. When men, well, yodelled. Storied is the tradition of Devonian yodelling, I’m told. Education happens in the unlikeliest of locations. Mid-afternoon crowd, weekly pension payments being well invested in more than a dozen ciders. No beer, but some perry if you’re going to be operating heavy machinery later. Fruit wine if you’re not.
Here’s a great observation from Eoghan Walsh at Brussels Beer City: how come there are loads of Belgian Christmas beers, but only one for New Year when, arguably, we need it most?
The Christmas beer might exist to satisfy an atavistic instinct towards oblivion as the days darken and the temperature drops, carrying as it does the weight of a year’s exertions on its back, and tasked with obliterating your troubles before the arrival of the new year. The task of the New Year’s beer is different. The beer is no less a reward – for good behaviour over the holidays and for as-yet unbroken resolutions. The Christmas beer brings the year to a close; it is a full stop and has the declarative power of one. The New Year’s beer is different, the capital letter at the beginning of a sentence that you’ve yet to write, a clean slate, a new start, a bright and breezy rallying cry not to waste the coming year’s unspoiled promise.
Liam K at IrishBeerHistory has posted another entry in his history of Irish brewing in 100 objects. This time, it’s a pack of promotional playing cards from Smithwick’s which, as he explains, holds a lot of story:
Gaming and drinking are hardly new bedfellows, and it would be fair to say that the practice goes back many centuries if not millennia, so it was hardly a surprise that sometime in the late 1950s someone within the greater Smithwick’s brewery fold of marketing gurus had the brainwave to produce a poker game that could be used to advertise their drinks. It was at a time when many drink companies were exploring ways to brand their output and advertise their beers more in newspapers, and promote them with items such as branded glassware, beermats and other bits of ephemera. Colour printing was becoming more affordable and the use of graphics and images in newspaper advertisements was starting to become more the norm than the exception, and marketing brains were becoming more inventive in their pitching of concepts and ideas in that alleged golden age of advertising.
Finally, from BlueSky, more evidence of the oddness of pubgoers…
Well this is a new one on me….someone actually nicked two lightbulbs out of the bar 💡 WTAF 🤣
— Ellie Leiper (@thebathlandlady.bsky.social) January 27, 2025 at 11:48 AM
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For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.