Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got old mugs, pub crawls, and melancholy reflection.
First, some news from Northern Ireland, where licensing laws are often cited as a blocker on innovation and enterprise in brewing and pubs. An independent review commissioned by the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland found that the ‘surrender principle’ is stifling growth in the pub sector, and recommended changes to the law. As explained by the BBC:
If you want to open a pub or off-licence you have to obtain a licence from an existing business which is giving up or “surrendering” its licence… The review found that most surrendered licences are being bought by supermarkets and convenience stores which can afford to pay more than new pub businesses.
The latest article at Pellicle has an interesting premise: what if we focus on a brewery at the moment of its closure? The brewery in question is Cambridge Brewing Co. in Massachusetts in the US and writer Gene Buonaccorsi spoke to the founder, Phil Bannatyne about the decision to wind it up:
Days before CBC’s last day in business I sat at a table in the back of the restaurant with Phil Bannatyne and [brewmaster] Will Meyers. It was just after lunch and the brewpub was about half full. A reserved sense of contentment mixed with nostalgia hung in the air, thanks to the constant influx of fans and peers that had come through in the month prior. “We just had our second best week in the history of the business,” they tell me. So why shut the doors now? The answer is as simple as it is challenging: it’s time. After 35 years in service, the team was ready to take a step back, feeling that their job is done. The consensus was to hang their hats on what they’d achieved and walk away proud.
Set aside a little time for this one: Carmichael J. A. Wallace and Stephen D. Snobelen have published a paper tracing an antique wooden beer mug back to its original owner, Isaac Newton, in the 17th century. It’s incredibly detailed and careful, with more footnotes than text, with lots of side observations about beer and brewing, and a killer conclusion:
Newton did a lot of writing. Roughly ten million words in his hand on such matters as natural philosophy, theology and Mint administration survive in various repositories around the world, with notable collections at Cambridge, the National Library of Israel and the Huntington Library. At least in his university days, Newton also made his own writing ink, for which beer was a key ingredient. Here we note two extant ink recipes in Newton’s hand… Whether Newton imbibed beer from this surviving flagon while composing his innovative works of science will have to remain in the realm of the imagination. However, chemical analysis might in the future be able to confirm through organic residues what is implied by the ink recipes quoted here: that Isaac Newton’s great work the Principia mathematica was written in beer.
(Via Tim Holt of the Brewery History Society on Bluesky.)
Chris Dyson has been to Cheltenham in Gloucestershire – which is somewhere we can get to fairly easily, and quickly, but don’t visit as often as we should. His review of the town’s pubs certainly makes it seem enticing, and this taproom sounds very impressive, if you’re impressed by that sort of thing:
My final destination was the main reason I had come to Cheltenham. Because of its location a matter of yards away from the railway station, I had decided to call at the DEYA Taproom last, hoping to end my trip on a high. I arrived outside at just before 2, just before the large pink gates with crocodile artwork to a large unit on an industrial estate opened to let myself and a waiting couple in. I wandered into a yard with a large tank with DEYA branding, empty pallets, and tables and benches which would be unlikely to be used on this wet Friday afternoon. The taproom itself was large with a huge mural on one wall with a sign exhorting us to Drink Fresh. There were rows of tables and a large listing on one wall of the beers available on hand pump and from the line of taps below. Down the full length of the room could be seen the impressive brewery with its gleaming stainless vessels with a capacity of 40 hectolitres.
If you fancy a change of scene, why not take a trip to Namur in Belgium with Tim Thomas at Beer Europe, whose detailed, blow-by-blow notes are (a) helpful for anyone visiting themselves and (b) strangely immersive:
Situated immediately south of the cathedral, at Rue du Seminaire 4, Le Chapitre, was the first bar we visited after checking into the new B&B Hotel near the station on Wednesday 29 January… Tables of different sizes are well spaced around the room with the simple bar set in a corner. Decoration includes enamel brewery signs and some hops… Philomene Florale brewed locally by Brasserie du Clocher is available on draught and my first beer was a bottle of Saison Dupont. It was a relief to find such an ideal bar with a relaxed environment to enjoy a favourite beer after a full day of train travel… A large blackboard on the inside wall lists all the beers with prices that make paying for two beers with a €10 note an easy option. We would return here on three subsequent evenings for a beer and never failed to find a table or an interesting beer to try from the blackboard.
As we’re planning some travel this year our attention was grabbed by the latest post by Franz Hofer at Tempest in a Tankard. It’s partly a plug for his business organising personalised beer-focused trips to Europe, but also has lots of advice on how to travel to, and with, beer. Like this, for example:
When it comes to a particular form of beer travel — beer hiking — what I love best about this is how the entire experience brings you up close and personal with the culture of a region. You have to make the effort to be there. You see what kinds of local economies keep regions going, from farming to forestry to small-scale logging and milling operations. You smell the smells of haying season, or the heady aromas of Alpine meadows in bloom. You meet the butchers, bakers, and cheesemakers who have put the food on your table. And you meet the families that have run breweries or taverns for generations… For packing [beer to bring home] I bring a sheet of bubble wrap that I pre-cut into pieces large enough to roll up a bottle, some elastic bands, and padded and leak-proof “wine jackets.” You can find these online. To date, I’ve never had a bottle break (knock on wood).
Finally, from BlueSky, a snippet of George Orwell on the subject of children in pubs…
And I had forgotten quite how well Orwell understood something that seems to elude so many people today (or perhaps it doesn’t elude them & they just don’t care: if you exclude children from the pub, you also – at least to some extent – exclude women.
— Emma Inch (@emmainch.bsky.social) February 28, 2025 at 11:24 AM
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For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.
One reply on “News, nuggets and longreads 1 March 2025: The House on the Borderland”
When I bought a pewter quart pot years ago, I was struck by the experience was softened somehow. I’ve always likewise wondered what drinking from a tankard made of wood like Newton’s would be like, especially as the lid and the scale suggested it was to be taken in over time, like this massive Tudor example: https://abetterbeerblog427.com/2013/04/14/1182/