News, nuggets and longreads 29 March 2025: Orbital

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got Irish pubs, pub sofas, and barroom fiction.

First, an interesting nugget of news: Leeds-based craft brewery Northern Monk has signed a UK distribution deal with Spanish brewery Damm. The latter will now distribute a couple of Northern Monk’s beers across the UK.

Russell Bisset, founder of Northern Monk, is quoted as saying: “2025 will see Northern Monk’s brewing capacity increase by 20%, allowing us to produce an additional 2 million pints, compared to 2024… we’re excited to join forces with Damm, a best-in-class partner, to accelerate our on-trade growth, too, using this increased capacity to raise awareness of Northern Monk across the UK.”

This is interesting to us because, first, it consolidates Northern Monk’s place in the market – no longer small or local, very much sitting alongside BrewDog as the kind of brewery whose beer you see everywhere.

And, secondly, because it’s a reminder that being taken over isn’t the only way for indie breweries to hook up with multinational businesses. We’re always a bit surprised that this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often.

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After a well-earned break David Jesudason is back at his weekly newsletter with a new series of posts about gay pubs, and the struggle by gay people to be included in British pub life. The first post is based on an interview with queer historian Alf Le Flohic who came of age in the 1980s, and focuses on one particular gay pub in Chichester:

For someone like me who was born in the 1970s, it seems a bit OTT to describe what a gay pub is but these days single-identity spaces have become rarer and younger people – even if they are gay or queer – may never have experienced one… The Bush, as described by Alf, is… a typical gay pub complete with big glass windows that were difficult to see into. This afforded a lot more privacy than a regular pub – “people inside the bar didn’t feel on show,” Alf tells me… The entrance was down the side with the pub door sealed up. Instead you knocked on a side door, which had a little window in it where you were sized up before being allowed entrance… “Once you were in, you were in,” says Alf. “Once your face was seen a couple of times you were let in automatically – so it was like being a regular in a private bar.”

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“My own most totalitarian, right-wing opinion is… that no pub should have sofas,” writes neuroscientist and author Dean Burnett. “Or armchairs. Or futons. Or beanbags.” In a post entitled ‘Why sofas in pubs need to be banned’ at The Neuroscience of Everyday Life he explores this personal hatred of soft furnishings in pub in some detail:

I like a sofa, they fulfil an important role. People having somewhere they can sit back and relax is a boon to any living space… That’s the key, though; sit back and relax. That’s all well and good in your own home. But at the pub, you’re there to engage, to socialise… And as any introvert will tell you, socialising is work. It requires neurologically-taxing effort. If you don’t want to invest that, fair enough. Going to the pub isn’t mandatory, and there’s nothing wrong with pursuing other socialising options… But if you do go to a pub, then you’ve entered into an implicit contract to engage in the norms of the context… You’re there to sit forward and engage, not sit back and relax. Reclining in softness means you’re more likely to be relaxed, drowsy, disengaged.

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For Smithsonian Magazine Liza Weisstuch achieves something that defeated us: gets the people from the company that designs and exports pre-packed Irish pubs to tell their story. Honestly, we wrote so many letters and emails trying to get an interview, or just anything out of them for our book 20th Century Pub. And we know they got the messages because, though they never replied, they did add us to their sodding email marketing list. Oh, well, enough of our moaning. This article, which has the faint whiff of PR about it, nonetheless does a good job of setting out the history of The Irish Pub Company, explaining its business model, and unpacking the aesthetics of the global Irish pub:

Mel McNally is not in the business of just shipping pub-in-a-box packages around the world. Each one is custom-designed to fit a specific space in collaboration with the local owner, who has creative control over the many, many, many details involved. The company’s stock-in-trade is not the Irish pub as a commodity; it’s the Irish pub as a vibe. You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy… The Irish Pub Company evolved out of a project McNally did about pub design for a competition when he was an architecture school student in Dublin in the 1970s. What the professors believed to be a cheeky excuse to spend time drinking pints turned into a two-year expedition through Ireland in which McNally and some architect friends visited more than 200 pubs in cities and remote country villages… “We recorded the essence of what makes a pub a pub—in the scale, the architecture, the mix of details, the craftsmanship,” McNally says. “No two are the same, but they have an essence that we carry into projects we do now.”

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For Belgian Smaak Eoghan Walsh has written about Brussels brewery Brasserie de la Mule and its founder, Swedish-born Joël Galy:

Fitzcarraldo’s dream of introducing European high culture to a remote Amazonian trading post involves, among other things, hauling a 320-ton steamboat over a steep hill separating two rivers. Belgian brewer Joël Galy may not share Kinski’s mania, and his dream—introducing German beer styles to Brussels in a neighbourhood brewery and taproom—was less outlandish. But the pair do share a persuasive glint in the eye, the same near-quixotic, evangelical passion. A tête de mule, Galy calls it, a mulish determination… You need to be stubborn, pig-headed, if you have—like Kinski’s Fitzcarraldo—a grandiose dream. As Galy was to find out too, a tête de mule comes in handy when you’re trying to get anything done in the complicated chaos that is Belgium’s capital city.

We always feel the need to justify “How we founded our brewery” stories here, because they can feel rather generic. In this case, the points of interest are (a) the brewery’s “no geeks” policy and stated intention to produce good but ‘normal’ beers; and (b) the seeming difficulty of getting anything off the ground in Brussels, let alone when there’s a pandemic in the way.

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We don’t often feature fiction here but every now and then a story pops up with a pub at its heart and we can’t resist. Lucie McKnight Hardy’s latest, ‘Wild Horses’, is about a woman returning from America, and a disastrous marriage, to the Welsh pub where she worked as a young woman:

Sandra is behind the bar and she doesn’t look up. She’s pouring a pint for an old guy who’s perched on one of the bar stools, the usual sort: flat cap, tweed jacket that will be pungently reminiscent of sheep dip and creosote. Sandra’s hair is still bleached and scraggy, and pulled up in a tight ponytail on the top of her head—what they’d have called a council facelift, back in the day. She’s scrawny-thin, but the tops of her arms where they peer from the sleeves of her blouse are glutinous, like cheap ice cream melting in the tub. She’s still wearing the low-cut tops, and Alison can see the curve of her breasts, hoisted artificially high, wrinkled and parched. When Sandra does look up, Alison is absurdly shocked that she is still wearing her trademark plum lipstick. At her age.

The story contains depictions of sexual assault, by the way, so proceed with caution.

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Finally, from Bluesky, behold this excellent T-shirt…

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— David Bailey (@bathedailey.bsky.social) March 27, 2025 at 1:29 PM

There will be even more links, and further commentary on the links above, in a ‘footnotes’ post for Patreon subscribers. Sign up now (£2 a month) if you want to access that, and other bonus features.

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