Categories
20th Century Pub pubs

Courage’s 1960s modernist pub building frenzy

Courage built a lot of new pubs in the period of economic rejuvenation after World War II, as documented in a volume held at Bristol’s central library.

A few weeks ago a special exhibition was laid on at the library on the subject of beer and pubs. Items from the reference collection were put on display in an ornate wood-panelled room and visitors were invited to shuffle round and have a nose about.

We visited and were drawn at once to a hefty hardback volume collecting together editions of The Golden Cockerel, the house magazine of Courage, Barclay & Simonds, formed in 1960 when Courage acquired Simonds of Reading.

These particular issues of the magazine were from 1962 to 1964 and seemed to include a remarkable number of pub openings.

A post war pub with brick or stone walls and a high tiled roof.
The Treble Chance, Southmead, Bristol, in 2023.

The Treble Chance, Southmead, Bristol

The issue for winter 1962 contained news of the opening of The Treble Chance on the Southmead estate.

It was opened by G.H. Boucher, former director of Bristol United Breweries, and father of A.R. Boucher, the chairman of CBS’s West Country division.

“Mr G.H. Boucher remarked that, although he had been to a number of new houses and attended many openings, he had never come across a more attractive new public house than this one. He complimented the architects who had designed the house and Messrs. C.H. Pearce & Sons Limited who had built it, and was very confident that, in the Treble Chance, Courages had a winner.”

There’s something quite quaint in the traditions attached to the opening of new pubs, even very modern ones, on very modern estates. ‘Ale conners’ tasted the beer, an ale-garland was hoisted, the inn sign was unveiled, and a toast was proposed.

For the record, the architects were CBS’s own in-house team under the direction of N.E. Morley, DSC, FRIBA, and the publicans at the time of opening were Patricia Whiteford and her husband Maurice.

The Treble Chance is notable because it’s one of only a handful of post-war pubs that survives in Bristol. We drank there in March 2023 and, though it was quite friendly, it had certainly lost any trace of mid-century modernism.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 8 February 2025: The Brutalist

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time we’ve got brewery revivals, ancient ales, Cleveleys, and more.

First, a couple of bits of news:

  • Jennings Brewery is reopening under new ownership, having been dumped by Carlsberg-Marstons back in November 2022. The new incarnation will be managed by Chris France, formerly of Beer Hawk. Pete Brown has commentary on his blog. (Disclosure: Chris used to support us on Patreon.)
  • North Brewing is yet another brewing brand to be acquired by Keystone (formerly Breal). North Brewing span off from pioneering craft beer outlet North Bar in Leeds. Jessica Mason has commentary at The Drinks Business.

A couple posing in front of the bar of a pub with pints of beer in their hands.
Emma Cole and Al Wall. SOURCE: Matthew Curtis/Pellicle.

We’d lost track of what was going on at Burton Bridge Brewery, and with Emma Cole and Al Wall who we used to know from Twitter. Now, thanks to a comprehensive profile by Pete Brown at Pellicle, we’re completely up to date:

Geoff Mumford and Bruce Wilkinson brewed for Ind Coope in the 1970s, and became firm friends when they met at the brewery’s plant in Romford… In 1982, they spotted a “for sale” sign outside the Fox and Goose pub in Burton. The pub had enough space at the back for a small brewery, so they bought it, renamed it the Bridge Inn, and launched Burton Bridge Brewery… By 2017, Geoff was 75 years old and feeling his age, and he and Bruce declared their intention to retire… In 2024, I received an email from an old friend… she [Emma Cole] and Al [Wall] had been hired as the brewery manager and head brewer respectively at Burton Bridge. And the reason they had jumped at the chance is that Planning Solutions had bought Burton Bridge, using it as the new home for the beers they’d developed at the National Brewery Centre, which were now being brewed under the new badge of the Heritage Brewing Company.

It’s all a bit head-spinning but Pete makes it make sense – honest! And as a chaser, it’s worth reading the latest piece by Ian Webster, who Pete quotes in the article above, about what’s going on with the brewing archives in Burton.


Adnams' Tally Ho c.1977.

At Beer With Tim Tim Hickford has written about the allure (and frequent disappointment) of vintage beers:

The biggest clear out of my beer cupboard I ever had was in the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020. At this time, like many other people, I found myself unemployed, without an income (no furlough for me!), trapped in my house with limited scope to leave and limited funds to spend on anything. The store of vintage beers took a battering over those few months. At the time I attributed this to not being able to afford to drink much else, but with hindsight I can see that a lot of the reasoning was to do with escapism. Snapshots of previous trips and bygone beer festivals went through my mind whilst working my way back into the depths of the cupboard. They were a much needed taste of happier times.



A plaque on a pub that says "Perfect draught Guinness served here".

Hazel Southwell, who runs a pub in Erith, South London, has provided an insider’s view of the Guinness shortage in her excellent newsletter Behind the Bar:

The first thing is: the Guinness shortage is real. How a company as massive as Diageo has fucked up this badly is a story that someone with more time than me could have a lot of fun investigating, since there’s more rumour than truth going round about the whole business but the reality is that you can’t get the amount of Guinness you order and that it particularly affects draught product, has been going on since November and will likely continue up to summertime… The story, as everyone’s telling it, is that an entire 500,000 gallon vat of Guinness was brewed, kegged and then only after the kegging was it realised to be somehow contaminated.

For what it’s worth, we’ve been asking about Guinness in pubs. One noted Irish-owned pub in London told us they had no Guinness at all, and directed us to Murphy’s as an alternative. Meanwhile, in Bristol, we heard that, though supply has been wobbly, it’s now back on track. That barman was convinced it was a PR stunt.


Bottles of beer in a row.

Jordan St. John has been posting increasingly pointed reflections on the business of beer and brewing and this week has something to say about Joe Public’s lack of respect for expertise:

It’s not uncommon for people to complain about the manufacturers of automobiles… Very few of those people would say, “well, I could do better,” and set up shop in their garage… Barley is easier to acquire than Lithium, and so we have homebrewers. Currently we have something like 360 breweries in Ontario. Many of them are owned by people who looked at large multinational corporations that had dominated advertising on television, radio, and in print for their entire lives; corporations that owned the means of distribution for their product through a provincially sanctioned distribution and sales network. These people, singly or multiply, looked at centuries of experience and billions of dollars in revenue and said: “I could do that.”


The Joiners Arms, Bakewell. SOURCE: Scott Spencer/Micropub Adventures.

As we near the end, let’s go on a couple of pub crawls. First, Scott Spencer at Micropub Adventures will take us on a tour of Sheffield and, more interestingly, Bakewell:

A short 15 minute walk [from the Thornbridge brewery] brings me back into the centre of Bakewell. My first visit here is to the Joiners Arms. This used to be the coaching inn for The Rutland Arms Hotel. Back in the early 1800s, Bakewell was growing fast, which led coaching companies to set up shop there, turning places like this into popular stops. If you check out the wall inside, there’s a map of Bakewell from the 1600s that really shows how much the area has changed. Later on, it became a newsagents that was a hit because of its prime location. Martin Crapper owned it, and the locals affectionately called it “Crappers.” Martin wasn’t a fan of the nickname and tried to rename it “Martin’s,” but “Crappers” just stuck. Fun fact: the roundabout outside made an appearance in the Mission Impossible movie, Dead Reckoning, where Tom Cruise zooms around it.

Then we’ll scoot over to the coast to join Jane Stuart on a boozy wander around Cleveleys, near Blackpool:

As I photographed the pump clips for you, dear reader, a man sitting at the bar piped up: “Ooh are you a beer geek like me?”… “Er, I’m a beer BLOGGER, actually…” I’m not sure why I was so quick to deny my geekiness there when it’s strikingly obvious to all of us (and complete strangers, apparently)… Meanwhile the girl behind the bar proceeded to throw my beer all over the bar, before apologising profusely and topping up and mopping up.


Finally, from BlueSky, a pub we’ve admired on the hoof, but never been inside…

The Posada in Wolverhampton with its glorious tiled exterior, tiled front room, bar back with snob screens and smoke room a bit like a Victorian drawing room. 5 cask ales including HPA and Taylors Golden Best.

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— Dermot Kennedy (@dermotkennedy1.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 6:11 PM

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

Categories
beer reviews

Two decades in pursuit of perfect pints of ESB

At a Fuller’s pub in West London on Friday night we drank perfect ESB – one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Despite takeovers (Fuller’s is part of Asahi these days) there’s a definite romance about its beers.

When we first started to take a serious interest in beer, back in the mid noughties, ESB had a reputation as a big, important beer.

It was strong and expensive.

And it was served, most of the time, in a chunky chalice that said: “This is a pint that demands your full attention.”

It was drunk by old boys in big coats – men who knew what was what, and who was who, and could handle the booze.

We drank it in The Jugged Hare on Vauxhall Bridge Road or The Sanctuary in Westminster, both of which were handy for our respective offices.

We drank it at The Plough in Walthamstow, East London – a pub that no longer exists.

And we drank it in beautiful pubs like The Red Lion in Piccadilly, where ornate mirrors echoed the jewel-like details of its elaborate drinking vessel.

With practice, we learned to know what good ESB tastes like – and bad.

At its worst, ESB can be like chewy, vegetal pond water. In pubs where nobody drinks it, neglected and unloved, it loses its sparkle.

And unfortunately, because it’s strong, and old fashioned, it is often neglected.

It’s neither session beer nor the kind of ‘craft beer’ that people expect at that ABV these days.

Frankly, we’re surprised it’s still being brewed, 50-odd years being a good run for any particular British ale.

As it is, the chalice has gone, as has the handled mug that replaced it for a decade or so. Now, pints come in standard straight glasses – nice enough, but a sign of ESB’s loss of dignity.

Our perfect pints on Friday were served this way, as towers of autumnal mahogany topped with loose but steady foam.The aroma was of marzipan and fresh woodland sap.

And it tasted like the inevitability of one pint too many, like the Holy Grail, like the White Whale, like a miracle in progress, like being 25 again learning for the first time what beer could really be.

It was so good that it made Jess switch from Titanic Plum Porter. It was so good that she didn’t even resent the inevitable day after headache. It was so good that, even with the headache, she co-wrote a blog post about it.

The pub was nothing special. Fuller’s pubs are run by a an entirely separate company these days and, even in the West London heartlands, can feel a bit plastic. We’re not naming it because, frankly, there’s no guarantee the ESB will be this good on your visit.

Other breweries are making ESB these days.

We had a good one from Tiley’s recently, for example, and a really interesting version at the West London micropub/microbrewery The Owl and the Pussycat. The latter felt like a tribute to, and text about, the real thing.

Because, of course, Fuller’s remains the temperamental reference model.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 1 February 2025: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil

Every Saturday we round-up the most interesting writing about beer from the past week. This time we’ve got French ale, perfect pubs and yodelling.

First, another bit of data that suggests largish regional brewers are kind of doing OK despite the general air of doom around hospitality and brewing. Butcombe, one of our local breweries, has posted stats for the year to 25 January 2025 (via Beer Today):

“Total Managed like for likes grew by 7.8%, with a standout performance in food at 12% growth. Both accommodation and drink grew by 4% and 5% respectively.”

And a second piece of news, broken by Melissa Cole for The Drinks Business: Keystone Brewing Group (formerly Breal) has bought the Magic Rock and Fourpure brands out of administration. Note ‘brands’, though – not breweries.


A glass of brown ale with a logo that reads Coreff.
SOURCE: Anaïs Lecoq.

For Pellicle Anaïs Lecoq has written what feels rather like the definitive history of France’s first cask ale, Coreff, from Brittany:

The story goes like this: One beautiful day in May 1985, the first Coreff was served by Roger Le Jan to Fañch le Marrec. Pictures of that first drinker regularly come up on the brewery’s social media, where the Breton musician proudly stands in front of Ty Coz toilet door, painted with the first Coreff logo… Called Brasserie des Deux Rivières when Jean-François Malgorn and Christian Blanchard opened it in 1985, Coreff is considered France’s first microbrewery… Brewing nothing but real ale at the time, Coreff came to life with the help of a person that will mean nothing to the vast majority of French people, even the beer drinking type. Yet he’s considered a legend on the other side of the English Channel: Peter Austin, founder of Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire.


A glass of golden beer in a Czech bar.
SOURCE: Fuggled/Al Reece.

It’s always exciting when something you’ve posted prompts someone else to write a few hundred words of their own. This week, our pondering on ‘pubs to visit before you die’ inspired ‘Velky’ Al Reece at Fuggled to post a list of 10 pubs he loves, or wants to get to know:

If you know me in the slightest, this one takes no explaining whatsoever. For the final couple of years that Mrs V and I spent in Prague, U Slovanské lípy was high on our list of regular haunts. It was less than 20 minutes from our apartment, it was the only pub in Prague, at the time, to have Kout na Šumavě’s entire range of beers on tap, and after several pints the walk home was all down hill. I loved that place, nay, I love that place. Sure, it now has a rotating set of taps, and Kout na Šumavě are no more, but it still has the same, local, non-touristy, vibe that I always loved. Every time I have been back to the city in the last few years I organise a meet up with friends there largely because it is one of the models of perfection in my beery universe.

(We’d love to read your list, if you feel inspired.)


A sign on the side of a pub advertising scrumpy, fruit wines, and bottle cider.
Ye Olde Cider Bar in 2014.

Alex at Pub Vignettes gives us a trio of closely observed pubs, all in Devon, including Ye Olde Cider Bar in Newton Abbot:

The Swiss think they’ve got the monopoly on yodelling, but they’re wrong. Couple of old boys slurp half pots of opaque scrumpy as an aide-mémoire. Both fondly recall hearing their grandads yodel right over there by the bar in the late 1930s. When men were men. When men, well, yodelled. Storied is the tradition of Devonian yodelling, I’m told. Education happens in the unlikeliest of locations. Mid-afternoon crowd, weekly pension payments being well invested in more than a dozen ciders. No beer, but some perry if you’re going to be operating heavy machinery later. Fruit wine if you’re not.


An improvised keg lens for Dupont Avec Les Bons Voeux.

Here’s a great observation from Eoghan Walsh at Brussels Beer City: how come there are loads of Belgian Christmas beers, but only one for New Year when, arguably, we need it most?

The Christmas beer might exist to satisfy an atavistic instinct towards oblivion as the days darken and the temperature drops, carrying as it does the weight of a year’s exertions on its back, and tasked with obliterating your troubles before the arrival of the new year. The task of the New Year’s beer is different. The beer is no less a reward – for good behaviour over the holidays and for as-yet unbroken resolutions. The Christmas beer brings the year to a close; it is a full stop and has the declarative power of one. The New Year’s beer is different, the capital letter at the beginning of a sentence that you’ve yet to write, a clean slate, a new start, a bright and breezy rallying cry not to waste the coming year’s unspoiled promise.


A pack of promotional playing cards from the 1950s with poker chips. Each card has a cartoon character on it, such as a pair of spivs.

Liam K at IrishBeerHistory has posted another entry in his history of Irish brewing in 100 objects. This time, it’s a pack of promotional playing cards from Smithwick’s which, as he explains, holds a lot of story:

Gaming and drinking are hardly new bedfellows, and it would be fair to say that the practice goes back many centuries if not millennia, so it was hardly a surprise that sometime in the late 1950s someone within the greater Smithwick’s brewery fold of marketing gurus had the brainwave to produce a poker game that could be used to advertise their drinks. It was at a time when many drink companies were exploring ways to brand their output and advertise their beers more in newspapers, and promote them with items such as branded glassware, beermats and other bits of ephemera. Colour printing was becoming more affordable and the use of graphics and images in newspaper advertisements was starting to become more the norm than the exception, and marketing brains were becoming more inventive in their pitching of concepts and ideas in that alleged golden age of advertising.


Finally, from BlueSky, more evidence of the oddness of pubgoers…

Well this is a new one on me….someone actually nicked two lightbulbs out of the bar 💡  WTAF 🤣

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— Ellie Leiper (@thebathlandlady.bsky.social) January 27, 2025 at 11:48 AM

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

Categories
Beer styles The Session

The Session January 2025: the best thing in beer since 2018

What’s the best thing to happen in beer since 2018? asks Alan McLeod, attempting to relaunch The Session. For us, it’s the genuine, meaningful resurrection of traditional beer styles.

For years, the predicted revival of mild, stout and porter felt like wishful thinking.

Sure, you could find those styles if you knew where to look, but you might equally go months between sightings.

The big multinational breweries weren’t interested in them at all.

And the large family and regional breweries saw them as part of their past – or perhaps a novelty to wheel out from time to time.

Fuller’s London Porter, for example, was a marvel, but finding a pint of it was always much harder than it ought to have been.

At some point, though, the new generation of craft brewers began to embrace these styles for real.

Perhaps because their founders and brewers started to get grey hairs and to mellow into small C conservatism.

What’s more, many of those brand new upstart breweries are now a decade or more old.

If they’ve survived successive rounds of closures and takeovers, they’re mature operations – and they’ve learned to brew good beer with more subtlety than big chuck-hops-at-it IPAs.

Think about Five Points, for example, whose most lauded beers these days (certainly by us, and we believe by others) are a best bitter and a porter.

Both are great examples of the style now, having had time to bed in.

Bristol is a city dominated by hazy pale ales. That’s what we’d call the defining local style.

Even so, when we go out on our weekend crawls, we often find mild or porter at The Kings Head, The Barley Mow, or The Llandoger Trow.

These beers aren’t everywhere – but they’re not nowhere, either.

Slowly, steadily, they’ve come back into being.

That they’re precisely the types of beer people assumed craft beer (pale, hazy, aggressively hoppy) would finally kill makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating.

As does the fact that, in the case of dark mild, it’s often the cheapest thing on the bar – just as it should be.

The Session was an important ritual in the old days of beer blogging. Everyone posted something on a topic nominated by a host and we took turns to host. But as beer blogs became Twitter accounts, and fresh topics dwindled, fewer and fewer people participated. Then it died. We’re glad to see it back. If nothing else, it’s a good writing exercise.