Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 17 May 2025: City of Last Chances

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got interviews, reviews, and pub guides.

First, some news about Jennings via Roger Protz on Bluesky:

More good news re #JenningsBrewery: not only escaped the clutches of Carlsberg-Britvic, the new independent owners have recruited Buster Grant as Head Brewer, highly respected from Batemans, planning to restore Cumberland Ale, Jennings Bitter & Snecklifter. #CockermouthBrewingHeritage

— Roger Protz (@rogerprotz.bsky.social) May 16, 2025 at 6:05 PM

There’s more on the story by Bridget Dempsey at the Times & Star:

Jennings Brewery was closed in 2022, but was acquired by Kurt Canfield, CEO of specialist engineering business Delkia, and Rebecca Canfield, proprietor of wine and spirits company Wine and the Wood in February… Since the announcement, Chris France has been appointed managing director, and Head Brewer, Buster Grant has been appointed – he is currently sourcing new brew kit to a more suited size for the relaunch of the brewery… The company hope to be brewing again by the end of May and beers available by early June.


The front of a Victorian brewery building with big gold letters spelling out St Austell Brewery.

There have been a couple of interesting interviews with UK brewing industry figures in the past week, which we’re going to bunch together. First, for The Grocer, James Beeson has spoken to Russell Bisset of that quiet powerhouse Northern Monk:

Bisset credits Northern Monk’s success partly to its ability to resonate across the north of the UK. Its strapline ‘fresh from the north’ – plus work with Leeds charities including Pyramid Arts and Holbeck Together – evokes a sense of community and pride that connects with beer drinkers, he believes… But Bisset insists the brand also has nationwide appeal… That’s why a chunk of the crowdfunding money will be used to open Northern Monk pubs up and down the country, starting in York and Edinburgh this year, and London in 2026.

Then, for The Morning Advertiser, Rebecca Weller has interviewed Georgina Young, Brewing Director at St Austell:

“You want to give the sales teams what they want, and it is harder for them to sell beer in the current climate with the cost of living, so there’s a lot of cost pressures… We’ve had the energy crisis, there was Covid, the prices of raw material last year and then this year it’s national insurance and the people crisis… But we all live in the state of ‘perma crisis’ and we all feel the pressure.”

In both pieces, it’s worth attempting to read between the lines. Being interviewed when you have a corporate line to toe, and a message to get across is tricky. For example, how do you get across that you’ve made improvements in the process without it sounding as if you’re saying the beers were bad before you arrived?


Two people with glasses standing behind the counter of a pub.
Aggy Perreau and Si Perreau. SOURCE: Matthew Curtis/Pellicle.

There’s a lot of talk about community pubs, and pubs and community… but how, in practice, can a pub help people integrate in a new town, and become part of a community? At Pellicle Rebecca Crowe has profiled The Little Taproom in Aigburth, Liverpool, and its owners Aggy Perreau and Si Perreau:

“We’ve always welcomed small local groups to use our space as best as possible,” Si says. “The book club in particular was born from a conversation with one of my best friends Alyssa, something of a book club impresario, that I’d like to host a book club and she happened to be thinking of starting one.” … Especially in cities, there is a loneliness epidemic. Moving to a new city as an adult with no support system makes it extremely difficult to meet people and make new friends outside of work. With this being the case, people are increasingly drawn to community hubs and extracurricular clubs where they can meet people and bond over shared interests, whether that’s crochet, literature, or bonding over unusual cask [ale].


Neon signs advertising Leffe, Jupiler and Stella Artois in a window.
One of the bars near, but not in, Brussels Midi station.

The Beer Nut has been in Brussels on beer consumer union business and has used the time productively, turning out tasting notes for a wide selection of beers you might encounter in the Belgian capital this summer. Excuse the rather chunky quote from this one, which defied our attempts to edit:

I had lunch in Billie, the bar which has taken the space of beloved Brussels institution Monk. Mercifully, it has been left almost exactly as it was before, down to the menu and beer selection. After my spaghetti, I had the house beer, Billie. This is brewed by Belgoo, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s simply a rebadge of something else. It’s a straight up blonde ale of 5.8% ABV with lots of very typical Belgian flavours: both pithy and earthy; grapefruits and farmyards, with a sprinkling of white pepper spice for a savoury, saison-like, finish. It’s not an especially distinctive beer, but is classically constructed and made well… I had another from Belgoo at the Wolf food market, where they run the brewery. Belgoo Hoppy Pils is beautifully clear and golden. There’s a slightly worrying hint of perfume about the aroma but the flavour goes full-on citrus, with zesty lemon up front, followed by a gentler satsuma or kumquat effect. That’s set on a very simple malt base, properly lager-clean and nicely full-bodied, as one would expect at 5% ABV. To me, it comes across as something in the Italian pilsner style, but regardless of nomenclature it’s very tasty and easy-drinking. Before this trip I didn’t think I liked Belgoo’s beers. These two gave me pause, and indicated why breweries’ beers are often worth revisiting.

There’s also a second post focusing on sour beers, to complete the overview.


A shopping trolley or grocery cart.
SOURCE: Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash.

How’s the beer selection at your local supermarket? ‘Velky’ Al Reece isn’t very impressed by what he finds at his on his ritual, habitual ‘bimbles’ around the beer section:

I noted a single brown ale, the excellent Tavern Brown from Alewerks Brewing in Williamsburg, just the one amber ale, Satan’s Pony from Charlottesville’s South Street Brewery, and precisely zero milds, hefeweizens, Scottish ales, Czech style dark lagers, and even an utter dearth of Extra Special Bitter… At last year’s Great American Beer Festival there were 102 categories, and yet an alien visiting a supermarket in central Virginia would be forgiven for believing beer was called IPA, and that was pretty much all that was available.


A brewpub in a modern glass box building with trees outside.
SOURCE: Lisa Grimm/Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs.

Lisa Grimm’s exploration of Dublin pubs continues with notes on the beer garden at the Urban Brewing brewpub:

Although the branding is different, Urban Brewing is an outpost of Carlow Brewing, of O’Hara’s fame, which means that the core O’Hara’s beers are always available, the gorgeous Leann Folláin included… But there is a rotating lineup of exclusive and one-off beers brewed here on site as well – there’s often a mild that’s a delight in warmer weather, and a variety of interesting things to try… And the site is one of the main reasons to visit Urban Brewing: built into a Grade 1-listed former warehouse at Custom House Quay that has been here since at least 1820, it’s an excellent example of thoughtful and creative reuse of a heritage building – something we could really use more of in Dublin…

As we head into summer, it’s worth adding that Lisa has categorised her posts so you can easily find Dublin pubs with gardens or pubs that are good for ‘pavement pints’. She’s also pulled some of this together into a post about the best Dublin pubs for sunny days.


Finally, from Bluesky, evidence that CAMRA’s ‘month of mild’ is well underway, despite some rather warm weather in the UK…

The pub has 3 dark milds on out of 9 cask. Both impressive and ill advised.

— Mark Johnson  (@marknjohnson.bsky.social) May 16, 2025 at 8:04 PM

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

Categories
design

Why are skulls a craft beer thing?

What imagery do you associate with craft beer? Hop cones? Beards? Skulls? The first two make sense but the third is, on reflection, a puzzle.

In a craft beer bar in Burgas, Bulgaria, the other week, we realised that there were no fewer than 17 images of skulls surrounding us.

They were on the walls, in the form of chalk art and graffiti murals, and on beer packaging – including the can on our table.

A collage of images of stickers, t-shirts, and beer can labels.
Skulls spotted in craft beer bars over the course of 24 hours in Sofia, Bulgaria.

This reminded us that a few years ago a lot of new entrants into the craft beer market also leaned heavily on skull imagery.

One particularly notable example was Pistonhead, which launched as a faux-craft sub-brand in 2011 by old skool Swedish brewery Spendrups.

A can of Pistonhead lager with a flaming biker gang style skull.

As we drank our skull-adorned Bulgarian craft beer, two questions formed in our minds:

  1. Where did this association between skulls and craft beer start?
  2. What does it mean?

We love digging back through the archives to pin down how certain trends developed and who has the strongest claims to be first.

You might take note of Orkney Skull Splitter, an award-winning beer with ‘skull’ in its name – but no skull on its label, because it’s actually a dual reference to (a) viking axes and (b) hangovers. It was first brewed, we believe, in 1989.

There’s also Laughing Skull, a pilsner first brewed in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, in the late 1990s until 2005, and then revived as an amber ale after 2009. This one did and does have a skull on the label.

But it seems fairly clear that the skull obsession in craft beer began in earnest with Beavertown in around 2011, via its in-house designer Nick Dwyer.

In various interviews, like this one from 2012, Dwyer talks about his designs as “psychedelic” and mentions Mars Attacks! as a specific influence.

The article linked above also says “They have their roots in old drawings of robots with rib cages”.

In other words, these particular designs arose from Nick Dwyer’s own interests and obsessions – from the kind of things he liked to draw and doodle.

Before they were dragged into beer, however, skulls were already popular in other areas of hipsterish culture.

In tattoo art, for example, skulls have been among the most popular icons for decades.

A recent book called Skull Session collects examples of skull tattoo designs from the collection of Lyle Tuttle, with some dating back to the 1950s, and many examples which wouldn’t look at all out of place on a beer can.

A selection of designs for tattoos on a page from a book with the caption "Unknown artists 1950s to 1960s".
SOURCE: Skull Session/lyletuttlecollection.com

There’s also a tradition of skull iconography in biker culture, in American punk music, and skateboarding. In his 2011 book Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation David A. Ensminger writes:

Images of skulls and skeletons are omnipresent in [1980s American] punk flyers, which might reveal the influence of skate-core bands like Suicidal Tendencies and their zealous homemade fans who made countless skull shirts… but also the art of Mad Marc Rude (Mis-fits, Battalion of Saints, Christ on Parade), Push-ead (Septic Death, Corrosion of Conformity), or Shawn Kerri (Germs). Most likely, the roots relate to the 1978 skull-and-dagger graphic designed for the (Powell-Peralta) Ray “Bones” Rodriguez [skateboard] deck by V. Courtland Johnson. Similar skull designs were omnipresent on Powell-Peralta [skateboards] throughout the mid-1980s…

He tracks this back further to Los Angeles gang art which, in turn, might have been influenced by Mexican folk art.

There’s a whole strain of alternative street culture here that British breweries were tapping into, consciously or otherwise, in the 2000s and 2010s, as an antidote to the folksy conservativeness represented by CAMRA and real ale.

For BrewDog that meant simply writing PUNK on their products, and shouting it a lot.

For Beavertown and others, the approach was slightly more subtle. They created label designs that wouldn’t look out of place on a skateboard, on stickers, on T-shirts, or in ink on skin.

What skull imagery means in the context of beer

David Ensmiger, quoted above, suggests that in the context of punk music and skateboarding, skulls and skeletons represent a certain ‘apartness’ from mainstream culture.

To paraphrase his argument, skaters, punks and bikers are monsters created by society, who delight in horrifying and repulsing ‘normies’.

There’s also a more obvious sense in which skull imagery is about confronting death, and embracing life. People who fly skull flags see themselves as fearless risk takers, in both physical terms (skateboarding accidents hurt) and in terms of their cultural status.

Again, this is exactly the kind of attitude craft beer producers either wanted to tap into (appropriate) or which actually reflected their lifestyles.

The Weird Beard Brew Co logo with a skull whose eye sockets are filled with hops. The skull also has a long knotted beard.
SOURCE: Weird Beard Brew Co.

In the latter case, Weird Beard Brew Co., launched in 2013, springs to mind.

Its logo incorporated a bearded skull which rather resembled Bryan Spooner, one of the founders and head brewer until 2024. Both he and his co-founder, Gregg Irwin, were fans of metal music – another hotbed of skull imagery.

But skulls didn’t become potent images in the 1970s, of course. Consider the ‘memento mori’, for example, as explained in this article from the Science Museum website:

A memento mori is an object that serves to remind the viewer of the inevitability of their death and the brevity of life. ‘Memento mori’ is a Latin phrase that translates to ‘remember you must die.’ … Ancient Romans would reflect on their own mortality at banquets and feasts. At some feasts, every guest would be presented with a small memento mori.

As regular consumers of beer, a substance that is bad for us, we often find ourselves pondering on the balance between enjoying life and prolonging it. If we gave up beer altogether, we might live longer. But as we’re only here for a short while, why should we deny ourselves pleasure?

Perhaps we might see the skulls we encounter on craft beer packaging as an everyday mass market memento mori. Life is fleeting – treat yourself.

And the memento mori is also a symbol of defiance: we look death in the eye sockets as we knock a few hours off the span of our lives with every session.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 10 May 2025: Hell House

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week – even when we’re on holiday. This time, we’ve got low-alcohol beer, fancy taps, and cheese.

First, some news we’d missed: Ilkley Brewery went into administration at the end of April. And some more recent news we did catch: a local investor has stepped into prevent the brewery’s closure. “The past 12 months have been extremely challenging,” Ilkley’s Luke Raven says in the official statement, which is a phrase we seem to be hearing a lot lately. We haven’t seen Ilkley beers around lately which is a shame as we generally liked them a lot. Let’s hope this new investment will lead to a revival in their availability.


Illustration of the word 'Zero'.

Sticking with the BBC, Jude Winter from BBC Derby has written a piece explaining in some detail why non-alcoholic and low-alcohol beers might cost as much as ‘proper’ ones – which is a question we see pop up fairly frequently on social media. The piece includes quotes from various brewers, publicans, and drinkers:

[Dominic Driscoll of Thornbridge] said they use less malted barley to get a lower alcohol percentage but use more hops to make the alcohol-free beer taste better… “We use the same equipment but we use it in a different way,” explained Mr Driscoll… “Over the last few years we have developed our own method to create our low alcohol beer, everybody does it in a different way.” … Steve Kirk, owner of the Neptune pub in Derby, said buying alcohol-free products costs the “exact same price” as higher percentage products… “The fact we have to sell it at the same price as regular alcohol is not a great incentive for people to choose an alcohol-free alternative,” he added… Amit Gill, 24, from Derby, said: “The price would put me off if I’m being honest. If it was cheaper I think it would be more attractive to people.”


Sonja Mitchell. SOURCE: Jonny Hamilton/Pellicle.

And while we’re sticking with things, let’s stick with the subject of alcohol-free beer. At Pellicle Emmie Harrison-West has written about a Scottish brewery that’s new to us, Jump Ship, which specialises in booze free beer, under the leadership of Sonja Mitchell. There’s lots of interesting stuff in the article, from legal battles with BrewDog to the process of recipe development, but this was the line that really stood out for us:

“Consumer confidence in this space is still fragile,” Sonja tells me. “And I want their first alcohol-free pint to be perfect.”

In other words, people assume alcohol free beer will be crap, or nasty, and you might only get one chance to change their minds. You could probably extend that philosophy to craft beer more generally.


Beer being poured, from an old advertisement.

Evan Rail has noticed something interesting: global beer culture seems to be going through a phase where how a beer is poured is as important, if not more important, than the beer itself. As he writes in an article at VinePair:

Across North America, the appeal of draft beer is increasingly becoming not just that it is on tap, but how it is being tapped. Want a tube of 100 percent foam? You can get that. Want a Czech-style šnyt, with about half foam and half liquid? No problem. Want a beer poured in the style of a small taproom in Tokyo during the late 1930s? We got you… So what does it mean that the discussion around beer is shifting from aspects of its production — formerly important marketing elements like celebrity brewers, innovative recipes, heritage malts, unusual yeasts, or new kinds of hops — and focusing instead on simply how that beer is being served to the customer?


Kilner jars full of Camembert type cheese marinating in oil.
Nakládaný hermelín. SOURCE: Andreas Krennmair/Daft Eejit Brewing.

At a slight tangent to beer Andreas Krennmair has shared notes on, and recipes for, three cheese-based snacks that go perfectly with beer:

I do love my Obazda, but even though it seems like a very straightforward dish to make, there can be a massive difference in how intense it tastes. I’ve had fairly bland ones, but a beer garden known for its good beer (at least in my experience) usually also serves a very good Obazda… If you want to make it yourself, there are some pretty good recipes available out there. According to legend, Obazda was invented in the 1920s by Katharina Eisenreich at the Weihenstephaner brewpub in Freising. Weihenstephaner brewery has a recipe for Obazda on their website which they claim is the original recipe.

Even non-cooks ought to find these simple recipes quite inspiring – especially as we enter the season of back garden beer gardens.


A sign advertising Duvel.

Adrian Tierney-Jones has stared long and hard at Duvel and reflected on it in four dimensions:

‘Horror, horror, horror.’ … The first words in a diary entry, Tuesday, October 20, 1987… ‘Had a disgusting hangover. Never again that poison Duvel.’ … What did the beer taste like then? I can write on what it tastes like now, but then it was — if my memory serves me right — a taste of difference, not easy perhaps, but difference. This was a totally different beer to what I was used to drinking. This was a new flavour experience, on a par with my first dish in what we used to call a Chinese restaurant at the age of 12 with my father on Saturdays when we used to see him. Or the time in Bologna when an interview with a chef and the subsequent meal I was served made me realise how good a beef ragù could be.


Finally, from Bluesky, a call for submissions for the next round of The Session…

New post up on Beer Diary — a call for submissions to the next round of The Session. During May, have a think about your favourite (for whatever reasons) depictions of beer and pubs in art and fiction (broadly defined). Post them wherever you post things, and I'll round them up.

[image or embed]

— Phil Cook (@beerdiary.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 8:05 PM

For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round-up from Thursday.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 3 May 2025: Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got trains, indie beer, and wallpaper.

First, some news, via John ‘The Beer Nut’ Duffy and the European Beer Consumers’ Union (EBCU). We’ve just spent several weeks travelling across Europe by train and bus, finally reaching Istanbul, only to learn that the best railway station pint anywhere on the continent can be found in Sheffield:

The European Beer Consumers Union (EBCU) has revealed the results of its European Travel Beer Survey, listing the best places to enjoy a quality beer while on the move… And the steel city has come out on top, with the beloved Sheffield Tap securing the best rail station title… EBCU chairman André Brunnsberg said: “We launched this survey to shine a light on how beer culture can thrive even in places of transit… Copenhagen and Sheffield show what’s possible when quality and locality are put first… These aren’t just places to wait for your flight or train – they’re places worth arriving early for.”


The pump clip for Exmoor Gold with a mighty stag.
SOURCE: Exmoor Ales.

And here’s another bit of news, via Darren Norbury at Beer Today: the Exmoor Ales brewery has closed with production of the brands moving to Hog’s Back. Exmoor is a particularly significant first-wave UK microbrewery, founded in 1979, and with a claim to having produced the first ‘golden ale’, as early as 1986. Darren’s personal commentary is worth a read:

Hogs Back is an excellent business partner for Exmoor Ales and will be a good custodian of the brewery’s recipes. The alternative was never to see the Exmoor brands again, so we can be thankful. But other brewers struggling with costs may not be so lucky… Rupert Thompson, owner and chairman of Hogs Back Brewery, added: “In a very challenging market, one of the ways to survive and eventually prosper is to enter into close commercial collaborations with like-minded businesses. This allows for the sharing of resources, expertise and staff, and at the same time, saves a very popular local beer brand.”


A pub wall with nicotine stained wallpaper and wooden panels.

One of the great strengths of Jeff Alworth’s writing is his ability to come up with a snappy phrase to summarise a trend or phenomenon. This week he suggested that craft beer has entered it’s “wallpaper phase”:

For the first couple decades, small breweries commanded a very committed, niche audience. These were the early-adopters who were excited to discover a new craft they could help birth. Beginning in the late aughts, craft beer started to break through and had enough of a profile to reach a broader audience. It wasn’t completely niche anymore; it was a new arena for the cool kids to enter… Today, most people have heard of craft beer; IPAs are about as exotic as as lattes. You can get it anywhere, and anywhere you go where beer is served, “craft” will be available, from dive bars to stadiums to the best restaurants. Nothing stays cool long, and so trends in alcohol have moved along. This is the way of things: once a product category reaches a certain threshold, it is too common to be cool. 


A perfect pint of Bass in Plymouth.

We spotted a run of blog posts that struck us as related this week. First, in the wake of the Campaign for Real Ale’s collective decision to prioritise support for independent breweries, Ed Wray asked: “Why should I care if a brewery is independent?”

I’ve drunk good and bad cask beer from both independent and multinational breweries. I’ve also worked at small and large breweries. The multinationals are undoubtedly evil but then again some of the… most awful people I’ve ever met have been running small breweries.

And Martin Taylor has been observing some signs of a buzz around Bass which got him thinking about its awkward status in relation to the new CAMRA policy:

I watched as a succession of unapologetic young folk arrived at the bar, went “ooh” and pointed at the red triangle… Should I have told them that CAMRA doesn’t consider it a “good” beer?

Finally, Phil Cook at Beer Diary has put down in writing thoughts we know have been bubbling away for a while around the constant pleading for governments to do more to support beer and brewing:

Your favourite thing might not be quite so beloved by others, and almost certainly isn’t objectively more important than theirs. I think this is important to keep in mind when advocating for something, so you don’t veer into expecting special treatment for your business or your hobby — if someone didn’t care as much as I do about this, would they still agree to what I’m proposing?

Actually, you can probably rope in Darren’s post about Exmoor and Jeff’s piece about “wallpaper”, too.

It’s one big conversation about where beer finds support, which beers get supported, and who should do the supporting.


If you want more links, and commentary on the links in this round up, check out our Patreon, where paid subscribers get a bit extra every week.


A neon sign reading BAR.
SOURCE: Alex Knight on Unsplash.

In his latest post Kevin Kain at Casket Beer gets to the root of something that’s often bugged us in articles about American ‘dive bars’: aren’t they often just describing… bars? The word ‘dive’ suggests, to us, that these are low-down places, or at very least notably down to earth. Perhaps Kevin’s criteria for dive bar status will irritate some people, sounding, as they do, rather close to the controversial conversation around ‘rough pubs’ in the UK. Still, we found it refreshing, and illuminating:

On the outside, a dive bar shouldn’t seem too inviting. In fact, its appearance should make you question whether the place is even open. Windows should be small or obstructed in some way to shield potentially nefarious behavior from the outside. Graffiti, stickers, and other items likely adorn the facade with little concern from the owners about how the place appears… There may be a neon sign in the window for a brewery. It may even be a smaller, local-ish brewery, leading you to think there might be some fancy beer inside. Don’t be fooled by this.


Cantillon, Brussels.

Neil Reid, AKA The Beer Professor, has written a proper broadsheet review of Bottle Conditioned, a new documentary about Lambic producers, which not only endorses the film but also serves as a summary of the history of Lambic, and of the film’s key themes and ideas:

On the one hand, there are producers like Cantillon’s Jean-Pierre Van Roy for whom tradition and protecting the heritage of lambic are important. Van Roy bemoans the emphasis that the younger generation of brewers’ place on “production, turnover, and profits”. According to him, “the beauty and aesthetics” of producing authentic lambic “doesn’t interest them”… Van Roy is also dismissive of the modern beer drinker – “When I see people drink beer nowadays, I’m horrified”, he says. He dislikes the way many of them analyze beer as they drink it, taking notes, lining up bottles and taking photographs. This, Van Roy says, is “atrocious”. At one point in the film, Van Roy laments that “I am simply from a different time”… 


Finally, on BlueSky, a statement from a hard-to-impress critic that Thornbridge ought to be putting on billboards…

Is Thornbridge Jaipur the best beer in the UK? Quite possibly. Definitely a contender. I wish I could find the  Burton Union version.

— Tandleman (@tandleman.bsky.social) May 2, 2025 at 10:42 PM

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

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture

Appreciating the machine in hospitality

Sometimes you go for a beer and a bite to eat and find yourself in the jaws of a machine – and it’s not always an unpleasant experience.

These are hospitality operations run with total efficiency.

At first, you might think, ugh, this is all a bit charmless. Not very organic. Not very artisanal or indie.

But after a while, if you submit to it, you might start to appreciate its sheer effectiveness, which does actually translate into a form of good service.

It can also be incredibly entertaining to observe, like a magic show, or a demonstration of athletic prowess.

Not very artisanal? It’s the epitome of skilled labour, requiring the best of the best. at the peak of their game.

In these hospitality machines, processes have been honed and iterated so that no time or effort is wasted in getting you seated, getting you served, getting the cash out of your pocket, and spitting you out into the street so another party can slot into your space.

Everyone on the team has a role to play and knows what is expected of them.

That includes people whose job it is to smile and convey an atmosphere of carefree fun, at least while you’re looking at them.

The margins have been calculated to the penny and no chance to upsell is ever missed. And if that upselling can be made to feel as if they’re doing you a favour, all the better:

“My personal favourite? I’d have to say the pasta. (On which we make 30% more markup than everything else on the menu.)”

In the past week, we found ourselves in two such machines in Bucharest, the capital of Romania.

Both drew us in with beautiful, historic buildings and the promise of decent mainstream beer.

Caru’ cu Bere is a German-style beer hall established in 1879 and housed in a grand Gothic building designed by an Austrian architect in 1888. It has its own house beer and serves hearty traditional food in large portions.

It’s recommended in all the guidebooks and smells, frankly, a bit like a tourist trap, rather than a tourist attraction, which is an important distinction in our view.

We really wanted to see inside the building, though, and also really wanted to drink a decent lager in vaguely trad surroundings, so we made our booking and braced ourselves.

On arrival, we were intercepted by a member of staff whose only job was to assign people to free tables and escort them to their seats. She wasn’t exactly cheerful, but she was certainly efficient.

She handed us off to a waitress controlling a section of about 10 or 15 tables who was just as friendly as she needed to be to avoid making us feel totally unwelcome. When we took a little too long to decide what to drink she got, perhaps, a touch impatient.

But, like in the beer halls of Cologne, or The Dog & Bell in Deptford, once you accept that you’re not there to make friends with the staff, this brusqueness becomes part of the offer.

It’s what allows establishments like this to serve the constantly flowing crowds of customers quickly. We didn’t have long frustrating waits to order, or to receive our beers, or with empty glasses in front of us, or for our food, or for the bill at the end of the session.

We thought we’d been conned into buying bread we didn’t need but, actually, we did need it. And she even talked us out of ordering too much dessert.

Meanwhile, she was negotiating with customers who didn’t like their tables or had questions about their bills. She was chucking children under the chin and chatting to old ladies. And she was bollocking supporting waiters who brought food to the wrong tables, or were too leisurely on their way back to the kitchen.

At one point, she was taking a food order from one table, taking our beer order with a nod and a couple of gestures, and telling people on a third table that she’d be with them shortly.

Awesome, if intimidating.

We had a similar experience at another tourist-focused venue, Hanu’ lui Manuc. We hadn’t intended to visit but, on a hot day, the sight of its beer garden in the courtyard of an historic inn built in around 1808.

The building was breathtaking – a medieval fantasy of galleries, balconies and flagstones – only slightly undercut by the sense of passing into the mouth of a great predator.

Again, we were intercepted at the gate and seated within seconds, at which point another crack waitress took control of the situation.

She started by trying to sell us a lamb dish for sharing – colossal, expensive, and more suitable for a medieval banqueting table than lunch on a warm day. She did successfully upsell mayonnaise at 8 Lei (about £1.50) and attempted a little emotional manipulation when we said “No” to ketchup.

But, on the whole, service was again super efficient, with barely a gap between rounds of beer.

When she did neglect us for a moment, during a crisis at another table, a colleague slipped in seamlessly, passing our order to her as they rushed past each other, swooping together ages apart like ballet dancers.

Our food arrived very quickly. Too quickly, almost, as if it came from an all-you-can-eat buffet counter hidden from view.

Perhaps we also detected a hint of misery and desperation in the way our waitress pleaded with us to review the experience online, and to mention her by name, as she slipped a QR code onto the table.

Watching the waiting staff buzzing around the bar collecting drinks we saw plenty of grim, exhausted faces.

The problem with machines is that they tend to drag people in and chew them up, on both sides of the service counter.