Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got Ringwood, pub quizzes and village bars.
First, some news from France, where the government is seeking to “bring back village bars”, as reported by Jaroslav Lukiv for the BBC:
France has seen a sharp fall from about 200,000 bars and cafés serving alcohol in the 1960s to some 36,000 by 2015. Most of the closures were in rural areas… In France, a type-4 alcohol licence is required by law to open a bar selling alcoholic drinks… Currently, no new such permits can be granted, and those planning to open a bar must wait until an existing drinking spot closes to acquire its licence… The new legislation would allow prospective bar managers in communities with fewer than 3,500 people and without a bar to request a brand-new permit without such a wait.
This news, and similar news from Northern Ireland, suggests to us that there might be a post-COVID reaction underway. Perhaps the balance is tipping away from moral panic over alcohol to moral panic over social isolation.
Social isolation is also a theme in Jeff Alworth’s five-years-on reflection of COVID-19 and its impact on the bar and beer industry in the US:
Nearly every measure of human health, physical and mental, goes back to human connection. When we have meaningful social ties to family, friends, and our communities, our minds and bodies are healthy; when they break down, we get sick and depressed. The pandemic isolated us and broke our routine social habits, but more than that, it caused us to regard each other with suspicion. Humans are tribal by nature, and we became more so during Covid. Political polarization, political tribalization, really, has become a universal, transcending cultures as diverse as the U.S., India, France, and Hungary… Blue states, where shutdowns were more common and durable, seem to be in worse shape. In the middle of the pandemic, that seemed like the smart move—those shutdowns resulted in far lower infection and death rates than in red states. But there may have been hidden costs to those policies.
For Pellicle Imran Rahman-Jones has written an excellent and much-needed reflection on what it feels like to lose a brewery you love to the takeover process. In this case, it’s Ringwood, one of the original real ale microbreweries, which hasn’t been beloved for a long time – unless, of course, you grew up and lived near the brewery:
In 1978, veteran brewer Peter Austin was approaching retirement, but he had one last project in him. This was a time when the industry was dominated by the Big Six brewers—Allied Breweries (Tetley, Ansells and Ind Coope), Bass Charrington, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Whitbread and Watney Mann.—producing low-quality froth. In the face of this he decided to set up a new microbrewery… In 1990, Peter Austin sold his share of Ringwood to David Welsh, his long-term business partner. Welsh continued running the brewery in a similar fashion. It only grew more successful, which is why Marston’s was willing to pay £19.2 million for it in 2007.
We wrote about Ringwood and Peter Austin quite a bit in our 2014 book Brew Britannia but very much through the lens of his national and international influence. Taking it back to Hampshire, to one community, to one pub, makes this story feel fresh.
For the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) newspaper What’s Brewing Laura Hadland has written about pub quizzes. She pushes the date of the earliest pub quizzes back a few years from our previous best effort of 1959 and (of course, this seems obvious) points to a working men’s club as ground zero:
[The] York CIU (Club & Institute Union) Quiz League [was] recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest in Britain – formed in 1946. Gordon Falconer was a member of the Fulfordgate Club in York. He was the last surviving player of that first match – making him the world’s oldest quizzer prior to his death in 2008… There is so much quirkiness to admire about pub (and club) quizzes. I feel like team names should really receive their own dedicated book, because they sop up so much popular culture. Each is like a little time capsule, often wrapped up in a delicate packaging of delightfully crude puns. Without Dizzee Rascal, whose hip-hop and grime career took off in the early 2000s, my quiz could not have been won by the Quizzy Rascals. I think it unlikely that last week’s winners, Hot Tub Quiz Machine, would have come up with their moniker without the 2010 film Hot Tub Time Machine.
At St. John’s Wort Jordan St.John continues his series of written lectures on aspects of how the beer industry works. This week he focused on novelty and our collective passion for what is new:
There aren’t a huge number of industries that expanded as quickly as craft beer. If the last fifteen years were about anything, they were probably about novelty. There are new releases on LCBO shelves! There’s a new brewery down the street! There’s a new brewing school in Niagara! There’s a new beer at the new brewery! A new festival!… I’m as guilty as anyone. When I chose where to live in Toronto after moving back from university, I chose Yonge and Davisville mostly on the strength of The Bow and Arrow. Not only did I know some of the bar staff, but they had Ontario Craft Beers on tap. When I moved back the best, most dependable beers in Ontario were King Pilsner and Black Oak Pale Ale and Nut Brown Ale. They were very good, but they were always available and for that reason people took them for granted.
Martin Taylor spent a quite hour in The Kelham Island Tavern in Sheffield as the sun went down and wrote it up. And that’s it. Well, almost, because there’s also some commentary here about how CAMRA members score cask ale quality and how the organisation selects pubs to include in the Good Beer Guide:
Last week on CAMRA Discourse [messageboard] I attempted to inflame a lively debate about reducing the number of Beer Guide entries by declaring that cask beer in GBG pubs was, all things considered, pretty good… “My own experience of visiting over 500 GBG pubs in the last year is that only a tiny number scored below NBSS 3, which to me reflects well on the ability of local CAMRA branches to select quality pubs for inclusion in the Guide.”… Blue Bee Five Hop [was] in pretty much perfect condition…. I scored it 4.5 though, as it’s common knowledge that NBSS 5s are discounted as perfection is impossible (unless it’s Doom Bar) or something.
Finally, from Bluesky, Liam K’s enviable collection of vintage glassware…
I possibly need to revive my Friday night #BeerGlassology posts on this platform for a new audience, with apologies to the old audience. It'd be an excuse to tidy my shelves if nothing else …
— IrishBeerHistory (@beerfoodtravel.bsky.social) March 14, 2025 at 10:04 PM
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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 15 March 2025: Towards Zero”
1946? Hmm. I wonder, then, if the next research on pub quizzed might direct itself to military messes. I recently read a book on the wartime efforts in Halifax NS to maintain order in the face of immediate naval population boom through manic organization of social events for the enlisted. I’ll have to check back to see if they get mention among the non-stop dances, charitable drives and magazine lending libraries.