Here’s our pick of writing about beer and pubs from the past week, including NIMBY neighbours, Czech lambic, and Keighley.
First, a couple of related pieces about a common problem facing pubs: neighbours who don’t like the noise. The famous Sekforde in Clerkenwell, London, is struggling with complaints from neighbours, and its operator says further restrictions will make the pub impossible to run.
Meanwhile, the landlord of a pub in Berkshire has spoken to Louis Thomas at The Drinks Business about the threat to his pub caused by ‘NIMBYism’:
The Rising Sun in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire was built alongside the Grand Union Canal in the latter half of the 19th century. But, despite being a fixture of the area for well over a century, its future has been potentially jeopardised by a new arrival to the neighbourhood… According to Granger, the new neighbours, who have not been named, have lodged numerous complaints over the last three years to Dacorum Borough Council, the authority covering Berkhamsted, Tring, Hemel Hempstead, and nearby villages.
Chaser: ‘Homebuyers want a pub nearby – preferably within a mile’.
For Pellicle Claire Bullen has written about an unusual brewery in the Czech wine country run by Jitka Ilčíková:
There is a joke told repeatedly here, that even while South Moravia is the heart of the Czech Republic’s winemaking industry, lager is still its most popular drink. And yet, Mikulov did not have its own contemporary lager brewery until 2011, when Jitka and her husband, Libor Ilčík, founded Pivovar Mamut, or Mammoth Brewery. Its name is a tribute to the region, whose soils continue to yield whole mammoth skeletons today… Since its inception, Pivovar Mamut has brewed what it calls “honest, unfiltered, and unpasteurised lager”—ordinary beer made with care and quality ingredients. That ethos would resonate with many in the beer world, but Jitka was interested in a different kind of brewing. She had made repeat visits to Belgium for work, and while there, encountered lambic: a tradition and set of practices that she instinctively understood from her winemaking upbringing.
At Real Ale, Real Music Chris Dyson has an interesting companion piece to the recent Pellicle article about Timothy Taylor – that is, a pub crawl of Keighley. Where, of course, Taylor’s rules:
It had been years since I’d last had a beer in Keighley. Back in the 1970s and 1980s.. Keighley town centre back in those days had plenty of Taylors pubs to go at, with the brewery having a virtual monopoly. However, over the years, places such as the Cricketers, the Burlington, Globe, Vine, Eastwood Tavern, and Burlington have all gone. Others such as the Friendly, Brown Cow, and Volunteers still operate, but are no longer run by Taylors. Of the original town centre pubs, only the Boltmakers, Royal, and Albert continue to be operated by the brewery, along with another pub they acquired a few years ago, the Lord Rodney, which now operates as Taylors On The Green… I broke my journey at the Albert. A large pub situated beside a busy roundabout, it is one of the longest-standing of Taylor’s current portfolio of 19 pubs.
Will Hawkes’s newsletter London Beer City is always essential reading. If you’re not a subscriber you can now read last month’s edition online. The format’s not ideal (a PDF in a window) but the content is good enough that we’re happy to put up with it. The most interesting bit in November’s edition is about a brewpub in London we’ve never heard of, created at the height of the craft beer boom, then neglected, until the recent arrival of a brewer from America:
Founded at the Ealing Park Tavern in 2015, Long Arm moved into The City two years’ later and was, to all intents and purposes, then largely forgotten… Until recently the bar was bedecked with various bits of naff American sports paraphernalia, but a new broom at the company – Danish COO Michael Farquhar, once of Ottolenghi and D&D – has done away with that. The intention now is to focus on beer… Which brings us, finally, to the important bit. Head brewer Jason Leeman arrived in London from the USA about five years ago when his wife got a job here; by then, crucially, he had acquired 15 years of experience at small breweries in Colorado… Perhaps because he’s been away from the US for a while, perhaps because he clearly knows his own mind, Leeman’s beer evokes an earlier era in American craft-brewing, before a shrinking market and hopmania combined to make everything less balanced.
Award-winning beer writer David Jesudason has taken a bar job, doing one shift a month at The Shirker’s Rest, New Cross, South London. His first shift was prompted by a desire to help sell a beer he brewed with St Austell but he found the experience eye-opening:
[Working] in a pub gives you a rare gift of seeing the space for what it truly is even if that is amorphous – at first it went from being a slew of self-contained tables and then a communal mass with multiple conversations tied together with the love of beer. And, at times when I wasn’t part of the fun or the work, I had a vision of it being a high-street shop – the marvel of the micropub unwrapped… The most shameful confession is that for a few seconds when facing random customers I felt like I over-explained to somehow overcompensate that I was more than a bartender – maybe James’s intervention was warranted. That I had somehow failed in my career as a writer and become perma-frosted since 1999, which reveals how I may subconsciously view service industry jobs as somehow inferior to other pursuits.
As we wind up, let’s visit a couple more pubs. First, Martin Taylor has notes on one of his absolute favourite top ten pubs, The Sutton Arms in London:
Not many
loo stopspubs at all, full of Santas or not, on the walk up from St Pauls through the Barbican to Angel… But I’d found my target, a pub which 3 years ago I immediately warmed to, as much as for the wonderful Old School landlord as the crafty keg, which in all fairness should have invalidated my completion of the GBG… Then the Sutton Arms was almost empty. Now it is heaving on a Thursday evening, almost entirely youthful post-work trade, and my photos are restricted to wall art,
Meanwhile, in Dublin, Lisa Grimm has been to a totally new pub, Molly’s Bar, which sounds as if it might make an interesting case study in years to come:
While much of The Liberties is blessed with Georgian and Victorian architecture, the building housing Molly’s Bar is relatively new, and not as characterful as many of its neighbours. The exterior is giving ‘breezeblock TARDIS’ in its current deep blue – quite a change from the bright pink everywhere when this was drag bar Doll Society, now decamped (well, ‘relocated’ is more apt here) to a spot inside Hyde, nearer Grafton Street.
Finally, one of the things we missed most after leaving Twitter was Martin’s posts about his pub crawls…
Stop 3 in Gent. Trappistenhuis (Orval ambassadeur) Draught beers include Three Rules Trappist collaboration and Chimay Grand Réserve.
— 6TownsMart (@6townsmart.bsky.social) December 12, 2024 at 7:04 PM
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For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.
