Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer we’ve spotted in the past week. This time, there’s Thai beer, introversion, and Dublin twice.
First, some news: Sheffield is officially rebranding itself with an emphasis on climbing and craft beer. This is interesting because cities often shy away from making beer part of their identity. In this case, the word ‘craft’ is doing a specific job: establishing that it’s not about stag-dos and pub crawls but something more genteel – and more acceptable. Here’s the food and drink page on the Welcome to Sheffield website. And the promo video on the homepage does, eventually, include shots of hazy IPA and a tasting flight of beer.ws.
There’s something a bit different from Pellicle this week – a portrait of Thailand’s emerging indie beer scene by Joey Leskin, with lots of cultural and legal complexity:
In 2019, The Brewing Project ran again and was won by a Thai Muslim brewer who presented their beer at the competition finals in a Darth Vader mask, noting that they had to remain anonymous on account of their religion forbidding them from brewing. Their Raven IPA was subsequently brewed at Anderson Valley brewery in California and again imported back into the country… The Brewing Project had potential, but needed to take the next step: actually brewing in Thailand… The momentum finally told, and in an emphatic way. At the start of 2023, the major shift that Chit and the hundreds of aspiring Thai brewers had been waiting for happened. The Thai government amended the Liquors Act, meaning breweries could finally operate with smaller batch sizes and with less capital requirement.
This next piece is actually from January but only came to our attention this week, so we’re including it anyway. It’s by Derek Thompson for The Atlantic and is called ‘The Anti-Social Century’. While it’s not only about pubs and ‘the third place’ it does open like this:
A short drive from my home in North Carolina is a small Mexican restaurant, with several tables and four stools at a bar facing the kitchen. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, I walked in with my wife and daughter. The place was empty. But looking closer, I realized that business was booming. The bar was covered with to-go food: nine large brown bags… As we ate our meal, I watched half a dozen people enter the restaurant without sitting down to eat. Each one pushed open the door, walked to the counter, picked up a bag from the bar, and left. In the delicate choreography between kitchen and customer, not a word was exchanged. The space once reserved for that most garrulous social encounter, the bar hangout, had been reconfigured into a silent depot for customers to grab food to eat at home.
There’ll be more commentary on this in our footnotes post on Patreon but, in short, there’s lots in the article that makes us think, “Yeah, sure, Mr Extrovert who is annoyed that people won’t hang out with him…” But there’s also plenty to make us think about how much time alone is too much time alone, and whether it’s a systemic problem.
Eoghan Walsh continues a series of posts that, by his own admission, are a little gloomy, with a comparison between Dublin and Brussels – two troubled cities. And one of Dublin’s problems is that you can’t go for a quiet pint:
I am not, nor have I ever been, a great Irish Pint Man, which explains my somewhat foolish notion that we could stroll into a city centre pub in Dublin on an early Saturday evening during Six Nations seasons and secure a couple of chairs and a table, where we could sit and have a quiet pint and read a book… There was no joy at Slattery’s or McNeill’s on Capet St, and across Grattan Bridge we hadn’t any more luck, with McDaid’s, The Banker’s, Grogans, and The Hairy Lemon all jammed… Brussels pubs are lively, for sure, but in a more relaxed, less manic kind of a way. Maybe it’s because the pubs here in Brussels never really close that there isn’t the impulsive rush to get in early and stay as long as you can. Maybe it has to do with the prevalence of table service, meaning you don’t end up with drinkers naturally clumping together at the bar waiting to be served. But on an equivalent early Saturday evening in Brussels, you wouldn’t find people standing three deep in the middle of a pub, and if you did you’d just go around the corner to the next place and probably be able to find a seat and a quiet corner.
Adrian Tierney-Jones has written about pubs and the history they represent, and present to us, if we’re attuned to it:
The White Horse was old, early 19th century, red brick in its structure, farmhouse-like even, but it had always served beer throughout its long life. Inside it was an elemental space of bare brick, wooden beams and settles, stone floor tiling and a wood burner, silent and unlit for the summer season. There was a fair selection of framed photos on the wall, many from between the wars or even earlier, but all of them telling the story of those who once lived in Edwardstone, telling part of the history of the hamlet, for history sometimes is just all about stories… A teacher sat smiling in the middle of a group of schoolchildren, possibly from the early 1930s, while another school photo came from perhaps the start of the 20th century and the teacher here, a woman like the other one, this time stood to the side of her charges.
Back in Dublin, Lisa Grimm at The Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs finally made it into a pub whose opening hours are a mystery:
Although I’ve lived an extremely brief walk from James Gill’s Corner House for over 4 years, I have never managed to be going past when it was open – until now. Its ‘regular’ opening hours are nothing of the sort, but that’s part of this pub’s mythology. Gill’s Pub opens when Gill’s Pub decides to do so… But if the door is open, you’ll find the walls lined with match-day programs and event posters from previous games and concerts (for those of us who live nearby, we can simply hear everything in the garden – a blessing or a curse, depending on the fixture or artist). But inside there is also the mural of Brendan Behan, too, as well as a wall of Behanobelia. And with good reason, for the Behan family once lived on Russell Street, which runs down the side of the pub, before they decamped to the then-far-off suburbs of Crumlin in 1937 (‘Siberia‘) – this was their local.
Finally, from BlueSky, a zine you might want to buy…
My zines arrived today. Don't they look exquisite? www.pelliclemag.com/shop/a-place…
— Katie Mather (@katiematherkm.bsky.social) February 13, 2025 at 5:53 PM
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For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday, Alan McLeod’s from Thursday and (for one week only?) Jeff Alworth’s from Tuesday.