News, nuggets and longreads 8 February 2025: The Brutalist

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time we’ve got brewery revivals, ancient ales, Cleveleys, and more.

First, a couple of bits of news:

• Jennings Brewery is reopening under new ownership, having been dumped by Carlsberg-Marstons back in November 2022. The new incarnation will be managed by Chris France, formerly of Beer Hawk. Pete Brown has commentary on his blog. (Disclosure: Chris used to support us on Patreon.)
• North Brewing is yet another brewing brand to be acquired by Keystone (formerly Breal). North Brewing span off from pioneering craft beer outlet North Bar in Leeds. Jessica Mason has commentary at The Drinks Business.

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We’d lost track of what was going on at Burton Bridge Brewery, and with Emma Cole and Al Wall who we used to know from Twitter. Now, thanks to a comprehensive profile by Pete Brown at Pellicle, we’re completely up to date:

Geoff Mumford and Bruce Wilkinson brewed for Ind Coope in the 1970s, and became firm friends when they met at the brewery’s plant in Romford… In 1982, they spotted a “for sale” sign outside the Fox and Goose pub in Burton. The pub had enough space at the back for a small brewery, so they bought it, renamed it the Bridge Inn, and launched Burton Bridge Brewery… By 2017, Geoff was 75 years old and feeling his age, and he and Bruce declared their intention to retire… In 2024, I received an email from an old friend… she [Emma Cole] and Al [Wall] had been hired as the brewery manager and head brewer respectively at Burton Bridge. And the reason they had jumped at the chance is that Planning Solutions had bought Burton Bridge, using it as the new home for the beers they’d developed at the National Brewery Centre, which were now being brewed under the new badge of the Heritage Brewing Company.

It’s all a bit head-spinning but Pete makes it make sense – honest! And as a chaser, it’s worth reading the latest piece by Ian Webster, who Pete quotes in the article above, about what’s going on with the brewing archives in Burton.

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At Beer With Tim Tim Hickford has written about the allure (and frequent disappointment) of vintage beers:

The biggest clear out of my beer cupboard I ever had was in the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020. At this time, like many other people, I found myself unemployed, without an income (no furlough for me!), trapped in my house with limited scope to leave and limited funds to spend on anything. The store of vintage beers took a battering over those few months. At the time I attributed this to not being able to afford to drink much else, but with hindsight I can see that a lot of the reasoning was to do with escapism. Snapshots of previous trips and bygone beer festivals went through my mind whilst working my way back into the depths of the cupboard. They were a much needed taste of happier times.

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There’s plenty to read here but Patreon subscribers get even more, in a weekly ‘footnotes’ post that includes additional commentary and a bunch of bonus links. Do consider signing up. 👣

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Hazel Southwell, who runs a pub in Erith, South London, has provided an insider’s view of the Guinness shortage in her excellent newsletter Behind the Bar:

The first thing is: the Guinness shortage is real. How a company as massive as Diageo has fucked up this badly is a story that someone with more time than me could have a lot of fun investigating, since there’s more rumour than truth going round about the whole business but the reality is that you can’t get the amount of Guinness you order and that it particularly affects draught product, has been going on since November and will likely continue up to summertime… The story, as everyone’s telling it, is that an entire 500,000 gallon vat of Guinness was brewed, kegged and then only after the kegging was it realised to be somehow contaminated.

For what it’s worth, we’ve been asking about Guinness in pubs. One noted Irish-owned pub in London told us they had no Guinness at all, and directed us to Murphy’s as an alternative. Meanwhile, in Bristol, we heard that, though supply has been wobbly, it’s now back on track. That barman was convinced it was a PR stunt.

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Jordan St. John has been posting increasingly pointed reflections on the business of beer and brewing and this week has something to say about Joe Public’s lack of respect for expertise:

It’s not uncommon for people to complain about the manufacturers of automobiles… Very few of those people would say, “well, I could do better,” and set up shop in their garage… Barley is easier to acquire than Lithium, and so we have homebrewers. Currently we have something like 360 breweries in Ontario. Many of them are owned by people who looked at large multinational corporations that had dominated advertising on television, radio, and in print for their entire lives; corporations that owned the means of distribution for their product through a provincially sanctioned distribution and sales network. These people, singly or multiply, looked at centuries of experience and billions of dollars in revenue and said: “I could do that.”

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As we near the end, let’s go on a couple of pub crawls. First, Scott Spencer at Micropub Adventures will take us on a tour of Sheffield and, more interestingly, Bakewell:

A short 15 minute walk [from the Thornbridge brewery] brings me back into the centre of Bakewell. My first visit here is to the Joiners Arms. This used to be the coaching inn for The Rutland Arms Hotel. Back in the early 1800s, Bakewell was growing fast, which led coaching companies to set up shop there, turning places like this into popular stops. If you check out the wall inside, there’s a map of Bakewell from the 1600s that really shows how much the area has changed. Later on, it became a newsagents that was a hit because of its prime location. Martin Crapper owned it, and the locals affectionately called it “Crappers.” Martin wasn’t a fan of the nickname and tried to rename it “Martin’s,” but “Crappers” just stuck. Fun fact: the roundabout outside made an appearance in the Mission Impossible movie, Dead Reckoning, where Tom Cruise zooms around it.

Then we’ll scoot over to the coast to join Jane Stuart on a boozy wander around Cleveleys, near Blackpool:

As I photographed the pump clips for you, dear reader, a man sitting at the bar piped up: “Ooh are you a beer geek like me?”… “Er, I’m a beer BLOGGER, actually…” I’m not sure why I was so quick to deny my geekiness there when it’s strikingly obvious to all of us (and complete strangers, apparently)… Meanwhile the girl behind the bar proceeded to throw my beer all over the bar, before apologising profusely and topping up and mopping up.

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Finally, from BlueSky, a pub we’ve admired on the hoof, but never been inside…

The Posada in Wolverhampton with its glorious tiled exterior, tiled front room, bar back with snob screens and smoke room a bit like a Victorian drawing room. 5 cask ales including HPA and Taylors Golden Best.

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— Dermot Kennedy (@dermotkennedy1.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 6:11 PM

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