Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got faux-Victorian pubs, mountain retreats, and indie beer.
First, some bits of news, as we approach the end of the tax year and Quarter 2 of 2025, and various press releases get dropped (both via Beer Today):
- Shepherd Neame reports a decrease in sales of ‘premium bottled ales’ – perhaps the least fashionable product in the market today?
- Stats from a consulting firm suggest that hospitality is finally beginning to feel the bite with an increase in insolvencies.
At A Tempest in a Tankard this week Franz D. Hofer took us to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, an Alpine town near Germany’s highest peak, with plenty of beer:
With all the Alpine charm you could ask for, the Bräustüberl skirts the boundary of kitsch without crossing it. As you enter, you have your pick of a cozy Stube to one side and a rustic beer hall to the other… Locals gather in the snug Stube wrapped around with roughly hewn plank paneling. The beer hall welcomes larger groups out for a hike, or winding down the day for dinner. Pot-bellied beer pitchers line the mantel above the paneling, vaulted ceilings shelter lively conversations, and Alpine motifs depict idealized scenes from the town’s rural past. A striking indigo blue Kachelofen rounds out the ensemble. Beer issues forth from the König Ludwig Schlossbraureri Kaltenberg, and the menu offers up hearty Bavarian fare fit to fill you up after a hike.
(Wankberg. Hurhurhur.)
David Jesudason’s latest piece for Pellicle is right up our alley: it’s about The Persevere, a handsome Victorian pub in Leith, that is not actually Victorian, and is run by Poles. We’re not surprised that people were surprised to learn that it’s not as old as it looks because it only takes a decade or so for pubs to feel worn-in, and for the collective memory to distort:
That old time, Victorian feel I mentioned, was in fact created in 1992. While other pubs were becoming identikit by stripping out the carpets and the old wood, the Persevere charted a different course with then owner, Kevin Doyle, and righthand man Graeme Arnott deciding to go back to a previous century when designing the interior… They also commissioned the five paintings to foster a retro aesthetic and these were the work of New Town resident Kenny Skeel—it’s odd to think that ‘Mary Queen of Scots Landing at Leith Pier 1561’ was probably painted when MasterChef or Countdown was on the TV… In fact, the building became a pub in 1974, converted from a former Co-Op and butcher’s…
We appreciate Chris Dyson’s write-ups of his travels around Britain because he often goes to the kind of places we think of visiting – and his detailed notes are generally evocative enough to move those towns to the ‘to do’ list. This time, he’s been exploring ‘The Marches’, that bit where England butts up against Wales, and specifically Leominster and Ludlow:
The [Blood Bay in Ludlow,] sandwiched between a butcher and a kebab shop, is an absolute gem, a real step back in time. Back to Victorian times, in fact, as the pub incorporates many traditional features from that period. However it is essentially a re-imagining of how a Victorian parlour pub would look, as this former newsagents only became a pub in 2017. It was opened by Jon Saxon who has The Dog Hang’s Well I referred to earlier. He spent 9 months refurbishing the place during which time many traditional features were uncovered and incorporated into the pub. The curving bar and beer engines were salvaged from a pub in London that was facing demolition, whilst a public bar and a snug were created in the front of the building, with a tiny room added at the back of the bar, complete with its own serving hatch. Wood panelling, traditional seating, and period lighting add to the authentic look of the Blood Bay.
We love it when a theme emerges between links!
This next piece is from Phil Mellows at Beer Breaks Britain on Substack and is actually from last week but (we’re human) we missed it. It’s about the distinction between mainstream craft beer (your Beavertown Neck Oils) and indie craft beer, which has a different “aura”, as Phil puts it:
[It] seems to me that pubs, bars and taprooms that have grasped this difference, and chosen to focus on the more adventurous end of craft beer, are doing okay. At least that was my experience researching our book, Beer Breaks in Britain… So, intrepid beer tourist that I am, I took a stroll across the road to one of my Brighton locals, the Independent Taproom and Beer Shop for some in-depth investigation… “If I were to start selling the kind of beers you find in most pubs, I’d lose half my customers,” says Matt. He believes that by getting involved in craft, big brewers have, “devalued the product”, and that explains the decline… After all, you don’t want to be travelling to distant destinations to drink beers you can find at any old pub at home.
Next, another old article from Ferment, the promo mag for a beer subscription service, that’s made its way onto the open internet via its author, Charlotte Cook. This one reveals an interesting detail about attitudes to beer in India, where there are “restrictions on producing, selling and transporting alcohol” during election periods:
This means that a craft brewery in Mumbai will find it increasingly difficult to send beer south to Goa or Karnataka during the election period, and even multinational producers have to adjust their supply chain projections during the election to attempt to keep a semblance of normal distribution going. Couple this with additional checks at state borders, and your chances of getting that delicious mango beer are increasingly diminished… For tourists the thought of not getting to drink a crisp lager whenever you fancy it can feel like a draconian restriction, but the locals I have spoken to are used to alcohol bans during times of national importance, and feel that the continuity helps to maintain peace and order during a time when many Indians are keen to see change in their country and tensions can flare.
Finally, from TikTok via Bluesky, an update on the present value of the BrewDog brand…
This is class
— Ruth Husko (@dankackroyd.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 8:54 AM
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For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.
2 replies on “News, nuggets and longreads 22 March 2025: The Furnished Room”
Thought-provoking stuff, and here are the thoughts it provoked!
The Sheps’ press release is surprisingly hard to interpret. If you look at it, they’re saying off-sales are down after (because???) they decided to focus on the on trade – and obviously if they’re supplying fewer bottles to the retail trade they’re going to sell fewer! Finding out what’s going on there would be a good project for someone, although it should probably be someone who actually likes Sheps’ beer.
The ‘invented tradition’ stuff is interesting. We know from experience that anything that was around when we were kids is ‘old’, and anything that came in when our parents were young is ‘really old’ – and anything that was already around when our parents were kids may as well have been there forever. But when we start writing about long-established traditions and institutions, all that goes out of the window – we tend to assume that if everyone’s calling something ‘old’ it’s probably been there a century or more. Perhaps it’s because so much of the culture of (say) 40 years ago is still meaningful to us now – but if you think in terms of doing something continuously for such-and-such a period, 40 years is actually a hell of a long time.
Lastly ,I thought BrewDog always were naff. Confused now. As you know Bob, I was slagging off BrewDog (and BrewDog bars specifically) a long time ago, but I’m actually quite fond of them now – the silly-ABV options do tend to deliver, and the bars have dropped most of the stuff I moaned about in that review. (And by gum, that TikTok takes a long time to make its point – or rather, it makes it quite quickly & then makes it again and again and… I stopped it playing after what felt like half an hour.)
Have to say, got a chuckle writing Wankberg.