Categories
20th Century Pub

The English pub on the cusp of war

A book researched in 1939 and published in 1942 offers glimpses of British beer and pubs at a time when national identity became more important than ever.

H.V. Morton, the author of I Saw Two Englands, was an English patriot but also, it emerged many years later, a Nazi sympathiser.

The motivation behind this book was the knowledge that war was coming and a desire to see the country as it was before bombs began to fall.

I’ve been dipping in and out of it for the past couple of weeks, sharing bits and pieces on BlueSky.

But I’ve been saving the bits about beer and pubs for the blog, of course.

One of Morton’s first destinations, in the early summer of 1939, was Kent and its hop gardens in particular:

Kentish hops were beginning to climb the poles to the strings above. They were a beautiful fresh green colour, because they had not yet been covered with the vine-spray, called Bordeaux Mixture, which turns them into an iridescent coppery green… Not far from Maidstone, I found myself in a world of hops. They stretched in straight avenues on each side of the road… I think hops are unquestionably the most picturesque crop we grow in this country… Neither the vine nor the olive is as beautiful as the hop: and I have never seen on the Continent, or in the East, a vineyard or an olive-grove that could for a moment compare with the beauty of our Kentish hop-gardens.

This section of the book is also interesting because it might be the earliest use of the specific phrase ‘real ale’ with something like its modern usage (my emphasis):

The real old drink of England was ale, which was an entirely different brew. We use the words ale and beer interchangeably to-day, and even our most sincere consumers would find it difficult to define the difference between them. Ale was a thickish, sweet drink, rather like barley water in consistency, which was made from malt. Barley malt was said to make better ale than oaten malt or any other corn… Probably the last real ale is brewed to-day at Queen’s College and Merton College, Oxford, and at Trinity, Cambridge.

OK, so it doesn’t quite have the same meaning as in the Campaign for Real Ale… but it sort of does.

As in, proper beer, like they used to make, not this modern, foreign, mechanised muck.

The true Parliament of England

After war had broken out, in autumn 1939, Morton stayed at a small pub-hotel somewhere in Surrey. Its bar, he wrote, “attracted all the local tradesmen and worthies until you could hardly see the buxom barmaid, known to everyone as Violet, behind the smoke-screen”.

Morton’s reports of meetings with ordinary people often seem too good to be true and his work doesn’t always stand up to fact checking. Still, this passage is quite moving, whether it’s fact, fiction, or somewhere in between.

Sitting silently in the corner, Morton observes the conversation, and reflects on the pub as a haven of open, friendly debate:

Sitting in a corner silently, as became a stranger, I thought that of all English institutions the English inn is perhaps the most satisfactory. Parliament may be criticised. Democracy may not be what it is supposed to be. The Freedom of the Press may be suspected, even by the most innocent, to be qualified in some measure by the opinions and interests of a proprietor and his advertisers, but the English inn is really and truly what it claims to be: a common meeting-place for all types and classes, where any man may say exactly what he likes without being clubbed by political opponents and dragged off to jail. Eccentricity and oddity, which have always delighted the English, come into their own when the inn opens its doors in the evening, and the queer characters, the local jesters, the men with the fads and fancies who give English life its salt and flavour, are always present, although their fame is strictly local and the outsider rarely considers them as funny or as witty as their own villagers or townsmen do. Above all, perhaps, humour, the best of humour, has its home in the English inn. It deflates the pretentious, it corrects the erroneous, and it deflects the dangerous. The qualities of laughter are nowhere more noticeable than in the true Parliament of England, which goes by the name of the Green Dragon or the King’s Arms.

It’s become difficult to talk about free speech and the concept of the open forum without it sounding like a contribution to the culture war debate. This does, however, sound rather idyllic – and, dare we say, healthy.

Unlike online debate, these conversations (about Ribbentrop, among other topics) were face to face, eye to eye, and synchronous. And if people wanted to continue drinking together, we suppose they had to be able to compromise and listen.

Morton (who, remember, was secretly sympathetic to Nazism) goes on:

I thought of the black-out beyond the door, symbolic of the black-out of freedom and of free speech that seeks to conquer the world, and as I looked at the ordinary common English-men with their tankards and glasses, small tradesmen, farmers, and the like, I thought how surprised they would be if I rose up and told them that, as they stood there arguing in loud, fearless voices about national and local affairs, they represented nearly everything we are fighting to preserve in England.

His final observation from this particular pub is that many of the barroom politicians and debaters are, like him, veterans of the First World War:

Under the influence of a pint or two they talked the kind of talk one heard so often in the early ’twenties of Ypres, Festubert and Neuve Chapelle, of “Jerry,” of rations and of sudden death and horror. It was like putting back the clock twenty years. Those warriors, men of my generation, seemed to have aged considerably, and I wondered whether I looked as old as they did.

Evacuees, news on the radio, and blackouts

In brief descriptions of pubs elsewhere in England, Morton provides small details of pub life almost in the style of Mass Observation.

There are radios in taprooms and public bars turned on for news of the war, read by announcers who, to Morton’s astonishment, suddenly had names: “…and this is Frank Phillips reading it.”

In a village inn somewhere near Bath there was griping about dirty, ragged evacuee children from the cities, and the awful behaviour of town-folk relocated to the country:

[Strange] women from the cities were in the habit of coming into the tap room in the evening and drinking half a pint, or even gin, like a man. Such a thing had never happened before in the village, and no one liked it… I became aware of a strange breach between town and village. A youngish man related with obvious gusto and pleasure the fact that certain townsfolk billeted in a neighbouring parish were worse than beasts in their habits.

In Stratford-on-Avon, he found everyone gathered in the bar of a large inn, saying farewell to a barmaid nicknamed ‘the Captain’ who was leaving to get married:

She was plump, cheerful and tremendously capable. Every glass and bottle obeyed her hasty movements. As she pulled down the beer handles she gave back chaff for chaff, and everybody agreed that her prospective husband was a lucky man.

And at The New Inn in Gloucester, Morton found himself lost in the black-out and the fog, groping his way through heavy curtains to get into the “warmth and good cheer” of the pub.

Decline and fall

The final section of the book looks back on 1930 and early 1940 from the grim perspective of 1942.

After several years of war, Britain has become quieter, poorer, and hungrier – a backwater bankrupting itself for the right reasons.

Pubs don’t get a mention in this section, perhaps because their “warmth and good cheer” had gone, and their ale was less plentiful, and less real than ever.

We picked up our copy of I Saw Two Englands for a fiver. It was a Christmas gift from Betty to Tom at Christmas 1942.

Categories
pubs

All the pubs we didn’t go to

I’ll always think of 2024 as the year Dad died. Four months on, it hurts less – but it’s often in the pub I find myself dwelling on the loss.

In the immediate, horrible aftermath of Dad’s death, I wrote something like a formal obituary. Then, a little later, I wrote about how we bonded over pubs and beer.

But of course I’m never going to stop thinking about Dad, or run out of things to say about him.

Last month, the day after what would have been his 76th birthday, what remains of the family gathered in Bristol for lunch. Afterwards, we drifted to The Strawberry Thief, a Belgian-style cafe-bar.

It felt like the right place to go for a couple of reasons.

First, they served Brugse Zot – a fairly unremarkable Belgian blonde beer that was Dad’s favourite. He discovered it on a trip to Bruges more than a decade ago and got a case from my brother for Christmas every year since.

Mum and I toasted him, raised our glasses, and enjoyed every drop of what Dad always called ‘That Zot’.

Secondly, The Strawberry Thief is a reminder that you can’t make assumptions about what people will or won’t like based on their social class. Dad was working class and never became, or aspired to be, anything else. That didn’t stop him deciding he liked citrusy, piney craft beers, or taprooms, or vaguely pretentious bars like The Strawberry Thief.

Equally, he might decide he hated them. That was half the fun of a session with Dad.

This weekend, I braved Storm Darragh to visit Mum in Somerset. “Maybe we can pop round to the pub?” I said and, somewhat to my surprise, she said yes. I was even more surprised when she ordered a pint of Bath Ales (St Austell) Gem, having not seen her drink a pint in years.

The village isn’t cute – it’s one of those collections of former council houses, farm buildings and industrial units along a main road. The pub isn’t cute either, with a public bar dominated by working men in hi-viz jackets and muddy boots who spend most of their time smoking outside the front door.

I’d always got the impression Dad didn’t like the pub much but Mum told me that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, after their first visit, he said he was worried that, in retirement, it might be a bit too easy to end up there every lunchtime spending money they didn’t have on booze that wouldn’t do them any good. So he avoided it altogether.

Mum and I had been there a while, one round in, before we noticed that both of us were bopping along to the jukebox. It was non-stop blues music – not exactly the kind of songs Dad would have chosen himself, but not far off. We shivered. It felt spooky.

The landlord popped in to ask Mum how she was, glancing around to look for Dad. He obviously hadn’t heard the news. Mum told him and, in his gruff, unpretentious way, he expressed his sympathy. He seemed quite moved.

After a couple of pints, Mum began to reminisce about the drinking she and Dad did in their twenties, crawling through Bridgwater, playing euchre in The Cobblestones, Dad being presented with his own glass by the landlord and landlady…

The booze eventually made us maudlin, especially when we returned to a house where Dad wasn’t, but where his bass guitar still leans against the wall.

Another small problem is that every pub I go to in Bristol has either some memory of Dad, or is somewhere we hoped to take him “when he gets a bit better”.

For the past couple of years we’d talked about a taproom tour, even if we had to get cabs between them.

That now puts me in the ridiculous position of feeling faintly melancholy every time I go to Lost & Grounded, surrounded by plastic tubing, stainless steel, and people with beanie hats very high on their heads.

We never took him to The Star in Fishponds, which I’m sure he’d have loved, or to the Board Mill Social Club, with which he was fascinated.

My brother has spoken about feeling ambushed by things that make him think about Dad.

Personally, I’m constantly being emotionally tripwired by posters advertising upcoming gigs by pub blues bands: “Ooh, blues night at The Stillage, I really must tell Dad about tha– oh, fuck.”

Christmas is going to be weird because there won’t be a Christmas Day pint with Dad. There hasn’t been the past few years, to be honest, because he wasn’t well enough to make the short walk.

There was always the promise of it happening, though, even if we ended up drinking bottled beer on the sofa.

Maybe I’ll take Mum to the pub instead, while my brother cooks. Or perhaps I won’t. It might just be another way of pricking my heart and I don’t know if that’s helpful.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 23 November 2024: The Enchanted

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer and pubs from the past week. This time we’ve got festivals, malt, Kölsch and more.

First, some news: AB-InBev is closing the Elysian brewing facility in Seattle. Now, we don’t generally jump on every item of news from the US (it’s not our beat) but, as Jeff Alworth explains, this is significant as a sign of a wider shift in the market: ‘Big beer is done with craft.’ We’ve all spent so much of the past decade talking and thinking about small breweries being taken over by multinationals that it hasn’t dawned on everyone that we’re in a new phase:

With ABI sales of eight breweries  last year and Molson Coors dumping four of their breweries a few months ago, we can call 2024 the final chapter in ‘corporate craft’ era of American brewing. ABI will no doubt radically scale back Elysian’s offerings going forward to streamline production, distribution, and sales. In 2020, ABI purchased Craft Brew Alliance for a single beer, Kona Big Wave, which is now a standalone brand in their portfolio. I would expect them to strip Elysian of everything but Space Dust going forward… This was never a great union. National breweries and small, regional breweries have not just different business models, but nearly opposing reasons for being. since this is the end of the line for these relationships, it’s worth doing a bit of forensic work to understand why they didn’t work.


Grains of malt.
SOURCE: Lutz Wernitz/Unsplash.

For Pellicle Pete Brown has written about Baird’s Malt in Essex, with a particular view on the future of the malting industry in the face of climate change:

It’s January 2024 and I’m on the train back to my new home in Norwich. It’s a cold, blue day, and winter light fills the carriage. I look up from my laptop and see that we’re speeding past a beautiful lake, the sun shimmering on its surface. I knew about the Norfolk Broads, but I never knew about lakes like this!… Quickly, I stab at my phone and bring up Google Maps. I want to see exactly where we are so I can bring Liz back here for a lakeside picnic in the summer. When the app responds, I’m momentarily disorientated. The blue dot informs me that my immediate location is surrounded not by blue, but green and gold. This is not a lake. It is—or was—farmland. Somewhere under all that water is what was supposed to be the 2024 winter barley crop.


The crowd at a beer festival in a tent, with a long bar.
SOURCE: Quare Swally.

Roy at Quare Swally has an impassioned piece about the importance of the Belfast Beer and Cider Festival to a place whose indie beer scene has struggled to establish itself in the past half century:

It was a time pre-Covid, pre-Ukraine war, pre-Liverpool winning the Premier League. It was also a time when you could get a decent beer in Belfast for well under £7. That time was 2018 and that’s when the last Belfast Beer and Cider festival took place – until now. For reasons we won’t go into here, there’s been no such CAMRA NI-organised festival since 2018 and it was great to see it returning, now at Banana Block, opposite Boundary Brewing on the Newtownards Road… If there was no appetite for a Belfast Beer Festival, it simply would not exist. The reason such an event happens is because people want it to happen. The drinkers of Belfast and Northern Ireland made the festival a success… There’s also something special occurring across the wider beer scene in Northern Ireland. The festival proved, as if we needed reminding, that more people are embracing independent beer and seeking a better range of styles. The festival didn’t sell Guinness, Carlsberg, Harp, Madri or Tennent’s. It didn’t have what NI hospitality chiefs are telling others is our “taste profile”, yet the place was rammed.


An improvised sign that reads "Sorry for the condition of the toilets, refurb on the way, thanks, Team L.A.H."
SOURCE: Jane Stuart.

Jane Stuart has been exploring again. This time, she’s been checking out the pubs of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, and it’s more about the photos than the words, really, although there’s poetry in those snippets, too:

We were intrigued by the front door – had this previously been a prison door? I enquired of the barman, who confirmed that the door had been custom-made for the pub. This was in fitting with the general quirkiness of Harrogate that was endearing me to this wonderful spa town… I must point out that there was absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with the condition of the toilets… The friendly barman remembered us from earlier and I told him that we were back after visiting seven pubs because his beer was the best (I had that lush liquorice porter again)… 


Koelsch barrels on a serving counter in a Cologne beer hall.

We’re bothered by the lack of a definitive, detailed history of Kölsch, the unique top-fermented lager-like beer of Cologne. We may have dropped hints to this effect at various times, hoping that someone like Andreas Krennmair, who has ability to read sources in the original German, might take on the job. Now, on his blog, he’s shared notes on how to brew a pre-World-War-II version of Kölsch, with historical notes on the side:

Johannes Olberg’s book Moderne Braumethoden from 1927 contains a multitude of recipes for more than 50 different beer styles. One of them is Kölsch, briefly discussed as the “national drink” of Cologne, and characterised as golden, thirst-quenching, “not too heavy but digestible” beer. The recipe is particularly interesting because it’s the only well-documented Kölsch recipe I’m aware of from before the end of World War 2… A lot has changed since then, and the Kölsch of 2024 is of course very different from Kölsch about 100 years earlier. Even the modern standards of what Kölsch is supposed to be, the “Kölsch-Konvention”, was only developed from 1981 onwards, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office signed off on in it 1985, and it was finally signed by 24 Kölsch breweries in 1986.


The interior of a pub with shiny wood panelling and a framed portrait of an older man on the wall.

A few weeks ago Time Out published a guide to London’s best pubs that made everyone angry. In response, we said: “Remember, if you see a list in a newspaper you don’t like, that’s nature’s way of telling you to make your own list. (We would like to read your list.)” To our delight Tommy Palmer, a Belfast man in London, has done exactly that. Some of these pubs wouldn’t make our list, and some pubs we like aren’t included. But there are also lots here that we’d now like to visit thanks to Tommy’s short, evocative descriptions:

The Auld Shillelagh serves all the standard drinks that you might expect from an Irish pub, and although I’m not really a Guinness drinker, I have been reliably informed that they pour it well… Once when I was in there on a Friday night a proper seafood seller was coming round, so I helped myself to a little pot of prawn cocktail. My only experience of the classic pub fish man, but it made me wish it was still common… It also serves Nordie Tayto, which as you’ll see is a recurring theme when it comes to pubs that I enjoy.


Finally, from BlueSky, a proper thread from one of our favourite beer historians…

Michael Jackson did great work, but he also left the beer community permanently confused about stone beer. The problem is the Beer Hunter episode where he visits Rauchenfels in Franconia to see their stone beer. What's truly weird is that everything he said was true, and yet it's deceived everyone.

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— Lars Marius Garshol (@larsga.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 8:23 PM

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

Categories
Beer history

The relatability of beer and pubs in the Roman Empire

I’ve spent much of the past month hiding down a rabbit hole, learning about the Roman Empire and Ancient Rome. And of course I took notes when beer and pubs were mentioned.

I’m not a historian and, unlike Jess, didn’t even study history at university. So, I find I quite easily get lost when trying to understand ancient history.

After visiting Roman ruins in Colchester and the City of London in early August I found myself frustrated at my lack of solid knowledge about Rome. So, I decided to do my homework.

Fortunately, Mary Beard’s 2015 book SPQR offers a relatively concise, extremely clearly-expressed history of Ancient Rome that even I could follow. The Kingdom, the Republic and the Empire made sense, and I understood for the first time which emperor followed which.

With my beer blogging hat on, though, the section that really grabbed me was about the decor of a bar in the port of Ostia in the 2nd century CE (formerly AD):

The main theme of the painting is the standard ancient line-up of Greek philosophers and gurus traditionally grouped under the title of ‘The Seven Sages’: they include Thales of Miletus, the sixth-century BCE thinker famous for claiming that water was the origin of the universe, and his rough contemporaries Solon of Athens, an almost legendary lawgiver, and Chilon of Sparta… But there was a surprise. For each of them was accompanied by a slogan not on their specialist subjects of politics, science, law or ethics – but on defecation… There are many ways to imagine the life in this bar: the rowdy guffawing at the lavatorial humour, the occasional discussion about what exactly Chilon’s claim to fame was, the bantering with the landlord, the flirtation with the waiting staff. The customers would have come for all kinds of reasons: to get a good, hot meal, to enjoy an evening in jollier and warmer surroundings than they had at home or simply to get drunk.

This made me think of those modern pubs where the publican’s personal taste and sense of humour manifests in the pictures on the walls, silly brass signs, and joke books on the shelves.

She also describes the many bars of Pompeii which, at her conservative estimate, numbered at least a hundred:

They were built to a fairly standard plan: a counter facing the pavement, for the ‘takeaway’ service; an inner room with tables and chairs for the eat-in, waiter service; and usually a display stand for food and drink, as well as a brazier or oven for preparing hot dishes and drinks. In a couple of cases at Pompeii… their decoration includes a series of paintings depicting scenes – part fantasy, part real – of life in the bar itself… One image shows the wine supplies being delivered in a large vat, another some snacks being consumed underneath sausages and other delicacies strung from the ceiling. The ‘worst’ signs are one full-on image of sex (hard to make out now because some modern moralist has defaced it), a number of graffiti along the lines of ‘I fucked the landlady’…

Elsewhere, in a discussion of the Romanisation of northern Europe, Beard writes about changing drinking habits:

[As] early as the beginning of the first century BCE, the same Greek visitor to Gaul who had been shocked to find enemy heads pinned up outside huts also spotted that – despite what Caesar had to say about local distaste for the grape – the richer locals had started to quaff imported wine, leaving traditional Gallic beer to the less well off. By the beginning of the second century CE, there were rather fewer beer gardens and rather more wine bars in Roman Colchester; or that, at least, is what the surviving fragments of the jars used to transport the wine suggest.

Keen to learn more, I followed the thread of the Vindolanda tablets – a trove of documents written on thin sheets of wood recovered from a site near Hadrian’s Wall in 1973. That led me to this episode of a BBC radio documentary from about 20 years ago where, yes, beer was mentioned again, at 25 minutes.

If you’d rather read about it, though, an article by Patricia Gillespie on the website of the Vindolanda Charitable Trust sets out the story nicely:

Early garrisons at Vindolanda, the Tungrians and Batavians, were from the northern provinces of the Roman Empire and clearly had a taste for beer. There are several references in the writing tablets to Celtic beer and in writing tablet 628 the Decurion Masclus, from the 9th cohort of Batavians, out-stationed with a vexillation, group, of soldiers is asking for orders on what to do next and ends his letter with ‘my men have no beer – please order some to be sent’.

On two occasions shortly before the New Year and again in February, a metretes of cervesa (beer) is listed in writing tablets. This was a measure containing 100 sextarii, about 50 pints, and the cost was only eight asses. (An as is a very low value bronze coin). The Batavians and the Tungrians clearly consumed beer in large quantities and had their own regimental brewer.

Also, in August, the BBC ran a story about brewing as a “mega industry” in Roman Britain.

Archaeologist Edward Biddulph is quoted as saying that “actually a lot of the population in Roman Britain were drinking beer and we see that in the pottery they were using, large beakers in the same sort of sizes as modern pint glasses”.

So much of Roman life and history seems impossible to know. But other aspects seem to telescope history and put us on the bench, in the boozer, next to some lairy lads, wondering what to have for the next round.

Main image: wall decoration at a bar in Pompeii via Nick Fewings at Unsplash.com

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 27 July 2024: The Heat is On

Here’s our regular round-up of good writing about beer and pubs, with notes on Guinness, beer ticking, and the word ‘floral’.

First, a general observation on trade news: the individual stories don’t often grab our attention, but it is interesting to look at the front pages as a whole and see who is doing well, and where the problems are. At The Drinks Business and The Morning Advertiser this week we’ve had growth stories from Thornbridge, Mitchells and Butlers, Young’s (pubs) and, more tentatively, Fuller’s (pubs). Meanwhile, there are also stories about the surging price of a pint, the rapid loss of hospitality venues, and the ongoing battle between property developers and councils over pubs. We’d observe from Bristol, too, that things feel quite ‘frothy’, with venues changing hands, some breweries apparently thriving, and the fight to save The Rhubarb entering a new phase.


The logo for non-alcoholic Guinness.

Brewer Ed Wray went on a tour of the Guinness brewery and applied his technical and scientific eye to this famously secretive operation:

After its initial hiccup Guinness Zero has been way more successful than anticipated. They are however extremely cagey about how they make it and we had one of the strangest experiences I’ve seen on a brewery tour talking to the guy in charge of it. We only got as far as the outside of the building in which it’s made and most of our questions were nervously answered with “I can’t tell you that.” The smart money was on it being dealcoholised by reverse osmosis. The lack of alcohol means it gets 80 PUs. In Ireland you can get Guinness Zero on draught, an opportunity I did not take up as you can also get Guinness draught on draught.


Illustration: a pint glass.

For The Guardian beer ticker Andy Morton has written about his hobby and how it’s enabled him to try 50,000 beers over the years:

I got a taste for real ale in the late 1970s while at university in Cardiff. The only alcohol available in the students’ union was bland, fizzy beer. I sought out a better quality drink in local pubs and quickly grew to love the depth of flavour of all the different styles of cask ales… Back home in Sheffield after university, I started attending beer festivals. By 1985, I was recording the beers I drank by ticking them off in the festival programmes. In those early years, I was going to three or four festivals a year. Then someone I knew got me into this hobby properly, which is called beer ticking or scratching – marking off beers you drink from a list… The most festivals I’ve done in a single year is 109 – that was in 2004… The social side of ticking is great. You get to travel the country, and I’ve met some great friends and characters over the years: many with nicknames, like the Alefinder General, Mick the Tick, Trolley Gary and Jingling Geordie.


There was way too much good stuff this week, by the way, which is good news for the ‘footnotes’ post we also now post on Patreon every week. That has further thoughts on all the posts here, plus extra links, and some easter eggs. Subscribe if you want to read it.


The St James of Bermondsey, a Victorian pub on a street corner with benches outside.
St James of Bermondsey. SOURCE: Will Hawkes/London Beer City.

Because he had a backlog, we get two Will Hawkes newsletters in a row. It was May’s last week, and now he’s put June’s online, too. This one is another cracker with lots to enjoy but especially the more-honest-than-usual account of one London craft brewery’s attempt to run a proper pub:

4 July is Independence Day across the Atlantic… This year, though, our American cousins are not going to have the fun to themselves: there’ll be a degree of joy in Bermondsey, too… On that day, Anspach and Hobday’s six-month lease of the St James of Bermondsey pub runs out, and – as co-owner Jack Hobday puts it, albeit in not so many words – not a moment too soon… The St James is owned by Stonegate, Britain’s biggest pub group, and if A&H wanted to keep the pub going, they’d have had to accept a five-year deal at 90 percent of the advertised £49,972 a year, with no break, although they’d only be paying 60 per cent for the first two years (they’re currently paying a third)… Stonegate (which reportedly has debt of £2.2bn) uses The Beer Company for its procurement, but the range of keg beer A&H have been able to get has been limited to big-brewery brands… A&H was able to sell its own beer to the pub only on cask, but even then it was a painful experience. They sell their own beer into Stonegate at around £70 a firkin (72 pints, in theory), but the pub buys it at £130 or £140 a go. “We even have to deliver the beer direct as part of that sale!” says Jack.


Some yellow flowers in the park in soft focus.

Jordan St. John has a piece unpicking the meaning of the flavour descriptor ‘floral’. It’s a good one, he says, because it draws on universal experience: “Isn’t this aroma of grass, clover, and dandelion familiar to anyone who grew up in the city’s parks?… Relevant to everyone isn’t a bad place to start.” He then goes on to get more specific and ask, well, which aspect of florality do you mean?

When… grass is cut or chewed on, it releases aromatic volatiles. These are chemically similar enough that they’re referred to generically as Green Leaf Volatiles or GLV’s. These are aldehydes, alcohols, and esters that are emitted, potentially as signals to other plants and to attract or repel insects… In specific, what we’re interested in are Hexenal and Hexenol. In various configurations these are leaf aldehyde and leaf alcohol. Their defining characteristic is that they are generically grassy; they are what you’re smelling when you smell fresh cut grass… Which means, if you’re going to be drinking beer, a beverage made from the seed of a grass and a heavily bracted flower, it’s probably going to put in an appearance. An undecocted pilsner made with undermodified malt is likely to contain Hexanal. It will be grassy. You might find it in beers made with malt from small, local maltsters with batch to batch variance. Even well pelletized hops will contain bract matter; green leaves.


A painted sign on a pub advertising J.W. Lees brewery.

Looping back to the trade press, we enjoyed this interview with William Lees-Jones, who runs Manchester brewery J.W. Lees by Gary Lloyd. It’s the kind of frank, honest, rambling conversation that we suspect might have had his PR people twitching a bit, here and there. It’s also a reminder of the complex class dynamics in traditional brewing dynasties:

Lees-Jones states he was “shamelessly born with a silver spoon in his mouth” and entered the ‘dynasty’ of brewing back in 1994… All the family members who came to work in the business were able to bring complementary skills – his brother was a chartered surveyor, his sister was a fund manager in the City, his cousin Christina who set up the catering in the managed houses was working in the catering sector while cousin Michael became a qualified brewer… If he were to start from again from scratch would he have done things differently? “This probably sounds a bit arrogant but I probably wouldn’t have done,” Lees-Jones says. “I probably would have worked a bit harder at school and university but it probably wouldn’t have made much difference.”


Finally, from Instagram, a particularly beautiful beer…

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