Categories
Beer history Germany

Baedeker on Beer #1

Extracts from Baedeker’s Handbook for Travellers — Northern Germany (1893 edn.)

Berlin

The somewhat insipid ‘Weissbier, once the favourite beverage of the Berliners, is sold by Clausing, Zimmer-Str 80; Kortwich, Friedrich-Str. 94; Stüdemann, Schützen-Str. 5; Haase, Französische-Str. 10; Hahn, Behren-Str. 21.

Brunswick

Mumme‘, a sweet and unrefreshing kind of beer made from wheat, is sold by Kniep, Bäckerlint 4; Nettelbeck, Beckenwerper-Str, 26.

Leipzig

Further to the E. is Eutritzsch, where ‘Gose‘, a favourite kind of beer, may be tasted at the Gosenschenke or the Helm.

Categories
Beer history Somerset

The Golden Lion, 1946

This photo was in the local paper in Bridgwater recently. It shows a queue for hot cross buns outside a bakery in 1946. Of course we were more interested to see the livery on the Starkey, Knight and Ford pub in the background.

The pub’s not there anymore, but my parents remember going there the day after they were married to keep warm during a power cut.

Bailey

Categories
Beer history london pubs

A Victorian moans about pubs

From Old London Taverns by Edward Callow (1899):

Some fifty to sixty years ago a roughness – but it was a cosy roughness – pervaded, with a few exceptions, the taverns and chop-houses both in the City and West End. This has since given place to a highly decorative style, that does not invariably include comfort, to say nothing of cosiness. Mirrors, coloured glass, massive brasswork, flashy furniture and encaustic tiles tend more to please the eye than the satisfy either the palate or the stomach: the hungry and thirsty individual looks round in vain for a comfortable seat – indeed a seat of any kind – and is compelled to adopt, nolens volens, that modern habit of standing up at a bar to eat his lunch or dinner, that the hurry-skurry of the present day has introduced.

Categories
Beer history

Usher's Brewery now in North Korea!?

When Usher’s closed their brewery in Trowbridge, the North Korean state-owned Taedongang beer company bought it, lock stock and, er, barrel.

The BBC have aerial photos here.

And apparently the lager doesn’t taste too bad, either.

Categories
Beer history

Serve short measures, face eternal damnation

alewife

As well as a lot of great pubs and a couple of breweries, Salisbury in Wiltshire also boasts one of the finest medieval church Doom paintings in the country. The huge mural at St Thomas’s Church depicts a sort of Biblical apocalypse — a world overrun by devils, dragging people down into Hell.

Of course, there’s something of interest to beer geeks here, too: the ale wife (pub landlady) who faces eternal damnation for her habit of serving short measures.

Why don’t CAMRA make more of this threat in their ‘Take it to the Top’ campaign?