It’s been 10 years since our book Brew Britannia was published, and 7 since the follow-up 20th Century Pub. What did we get right? What did we get wrong? And where is British beer today?
As one review of Brew Britannia suggested, it was a story half told, because we hadn’t reached the end. We were obliged to reflect the contemporary scene as best we could, and take some guesses about where it might go next. This is what we wrote:
Though ‘big beer’ seems to be struggling, there is plenty of energy and excitement on the latter side of the fence, and new breweries continue to open while better-established ones keep growing. Now that ‘alternative’ category is in the process of subdividing yet again, this time into two broad camps: ‘real ale’ and ‘craft beer’… For all its increasing diversity and apparent health, there are anxieties in the world of ‘alternative beer’. Several people we spoke to in the industry say they are braced for a shake-out: there are too many breweries, they say, and many are brewing downright bad beer, which they are selling too cheaply… Another concern is that, in a market where the buzz is around the latest and weirdest beer, there might be nothing new left to discover…
This long post is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps and hold ourselves to account: what did we get right, what did we get wrong, and what took us totally by surprise?
More importantly, it’s about gaining some perspective. It’s easy to mistake the fact that we personally have become older and more jaded to mean that there has been a decline in the quality and vibrancy of the beer scene.
Maybe there has, maybe there hasn’t – but there must be some objective facts we can use to test our gut feelings.
We know other people have different perspectives, though, so we’ve also asked as many people as possible for their thoughts.
Our criteria for a healthy beer culture from 2013
A decade or so ago, beer felt exciting. It was at the centre of the conversation with a significant buzz about it. The very existence of Brew Britannia is proof of that. We wouldn’t have got an offer from a publisher for that book in 2004 but in 2012 Aurum (Quarto) thought there might be a market.
There were new breweries and bars opening all the time, along with constant ‘product innovations’ – for better or for worse.
I visited St Davids in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, after 15 years away, and noticed some changes, and some things that had stayed the same.
The first place I checked in was The Farmers Arms, pictured above, which I wrote about back in 2008, not long after starting this blog:
If I had to choose my favourite pub in the world, it would probably be the Farmers Arms in St Davids, Pembrokeshire. This isn’t because of its beer offerings or even because of the great atmosphere, but because all my early pub memories were formed here. When I was growing up, we went to the Pembrokeshire coast every year for our annual holiday, sometimes as a family, sometimes with a large group of my parents’ friends as well.
It’s strange to go back somewhere you used to know well, which is tangled up with memories of loved ones and happy times, after such a long gap.
In the 2008 post I mentioned going to St Davids every few years. This stopped when we moved to Cornwall, partly because of distance and partly because we found that when you live where other people go on holiday, you like to go on holiday where other people live.
I was delighted to discover that The Farmers still feels like The Farmers. That is, a cosy pub with plenty of locals and lots of interesting chat about who’s doing what, who’s been where, who’s been in lately, and what’s going on in the rugby.
The menu has changed just enough to avoid feeling outdated but yes, you can still get fish and chips and one of my favourite things in the world, pub-grub lasagne.
Having lived in a tourist area for six years we have a better idea of how pubs like this can feel at different times of the year, and also how hard it is to pull off appealing to locals out of season, while still bringing in the tourist money in summer. Locals, especially those working seasonal jobs, aren’t generally loaded with money, and want good value. Whereas tourists on their annual binge can be squeezed a little harder.
Whether it’s the pictures of the lifeboat crew on the wall or the easy conversations at the bar, The Farmers manages to feel like a place that is utterly at the heart of the community.
It’s always interesting to see which brewery’s beers will be on offer. I have a theory that the Farmers Arms is a good bellwether for trends, particularly in real ale. As I wrote in 2009…
Back in the eighties and early nineties, the beers on offer were from one of the ‘big six’ – I think Whitbread, but wouldn’t swear to it. In the nineties, Flowers from Whitbread was still available, but beers from the regional heavyweight, Brains (Cardiff) became more and more popular.. This year’s selection was Felinfoel (Llanelli), Crwr Haf from Tomos Watkins/Hurns Brewing Company, (Swansea) and Rhymney bitter (Rhymney). Smaller local breweries have taken over from the regional giant, just as more local produce has started to appear in the cafes and restaurants.
More than a decade on, Double Dragon by Felinfoel is still a regular, and as we get older and more conservative in our tastes, we tend to appreciate beers like this all the more.
The hip newcomer was Evan Evans whose beers were on in most pubs we visited on this trip. We really enjoyed their WPA (4.1%) which was like a softer version of Hop Back Summer Lightning. It was golden but not intensely hoppy, and was deeply satisfying. A proper same-again beer.
Inside The Bishops.
I knew St Davids as essentially a one-pub town for most of my childhood. My dad has reminded me that there were a couple of hotels with licensed bars but, to my mind, they weren’t pubs. We visited one on this trip and it was utterly dire.
Now, though, there is also The Bishops, occupying a prominent position in the central square and sending out Ye Olde Pub vibes. And we liked it well enough.
The staff were friendly and the beer was decent, too. There was more ale from Evan Evans along with the light-bodied and zingy Whitesands Pale Ale from St Davids Brewery.
The crowd, such as it was, seemed lighter on locals than The Farmers. Here, it was all geeky tourists like us sitting quietly in pairs recovering from their day’s cliff walking.
The exterior of The Smorgasboard on a rainy day.
There is also a craft beer and pizza joint whose opening hours never quite worked for us and intriguingly, The Smorgasboard which was fitted out before our eyes over the course of a few days and opened just before we had to leave.
We’ve spotted this trend but hadn’t expected it to reach places like St Davids just yet.
When he spotted us peering through the window the owner beckoned us in and told us about their plans, including their intention to serve craft beer on draught.
When it did open, with only coffee on offer, we paid £3 per person for a two-hour session.
Even with work still being done, and the tourists still to come, it seemed to attract a lot of attention, and did decent business.
When I was eight, I’d have loved a board game cafe, and would have been constantly pestering my parents to take me – even though my dad insists on calling them “bored family games”.
I suspect it’s going to do well this summer. Even if – or perhaps especially if – it’s as wet as last year.
I will try to get back to St Davids again before another 15 years have passed, if only because it’s a useful indicator of what people are drinking, and where they’re drinking it.
A fun question to ask of any apparently irrational human behaviour is “What’s the evolutionary advantage?” Consider drunkenness, for example.
Ray recently read William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors. It’s about a band of Neanderthals struggling for survival in the forests of prehistoric Europe as a new threat emerges – Homo sapiens, AKA modern man, AKA us.
It’s an extremely thought-provoking book in many ways as Golding attempts to demonstrate that the seeds of modern human behaviour, from war to capitalism, have long roots. But of course the thing that stood out for Ray, and that got us talking, is its treatment of drinking.
The Neanderthals (who think of themselves as “the people”) don’t drink alcohol because they don’t have the technology to make it, sophisticated as they are in many ways.
When “the new people” turn up, however, two Neanderthals, Lok and Fa, observe them as they gather round their campfire at night after a day’s trekking. We see what’s going on through Lok’s eyes:
His nose caught the scent of what they drank. It was sweeter and fiercer than the other water, it was like the fire and the fall. It was a bee-water, smelling of honey and wax and decay, it drew toward and repelled, it frightened and excited like the people themselves… The girl Tanakil was lying in front of one of the caves, flat on her back as if she were dead. A man and a woman were fighting and kissing and screeching and another man was crawling round and round the fire like a moth with a burnt wing. Round and round he went, crawling, and the other people took no notice of him but went on with their noise.
They’re drinking some form of mead from beakers – which the Neandarthals, who don’t even have the simple technology of cups, conceive of as round stones. This orgy of drunkenness continues for several pages until the humans drift off to their caves, or sneak off to shag in the woods.
It’s easy to imagine Golding making observations, and taking notes, in the pubs of Salisbury on Saturday night. He was also an alcoholic and had plenty of personal experience of how it felt to binge yourself silly.
Later in the book, Lok and Fa find a jar of mead abandoned in a human camp and get drunk themselves. Golding reiterates the point that the liquid is repellent and attractive at the same time. It burns, but in a way that is strangely addictive.
Having previously been peaceful, rather gentle creatures, the mead also immediately makes them aggressive, competitive, bold, and – this seems important – visionary. Lok finds himself having big ideas, and envisioning great success, the limits of his mind having expanded.
Unfortunately, he also finds that he cannot walk in a straight line and that the trees themselves have become unstable. And the next morning, he has his first hangover: “Lok opened his eyes and yelped with pain for he seemed to be looking straight into the sun.”
Why did we evolve to get drunk?
Golding’s book is fiction, and it’s old. To answer this question we sought some more recent, more academic texts.
Unsurprisingly, it’s been much discussed, often with a focus on understanding why people today (like Golding) might be driven to drink so much, and so often, that it becomes harmful.
This paper from 2023 describes it as an ‘evolutionary’ mismatch: something that was useful in the early days of the species, when resources were scarce, is less helpful in an age of abundance.
This is also the argument for why we crave sugar and fat, both of which are bad for us. In the deep past, we evolved to consume as much as sugar and fat as possible, when it was available, to see us through winter, or periods of famine.
In the case of booze, the suggestion is that perhaps we evolved to be attracted to the smell of ethanol because it might help us find rotting fruit, and so find the trees from which it had fallen. Or, related to the point above, eating rotten, alcoholic fruit might have given us the munchies, stimulating our appetites, so we would consume even more fat and sugar.
Another suggestion is that the ability to process ethanol was itself an evolutionary advantage, meaning that some of our ancestors could eat the ‘bad’ fruit that had fallen on the ground.
Individuals who could “metabolise ethanol” could eat more, and continue to function while pissed. So, at a very fundamental level, we learned to associate drunkenness with pleasure and satisfaction.
But what about getting drunk together, as a social activity?
But why did we evolve to go to the pub together?
One paper from 2017 suggests that there are multiple benefits attached to getting drunk deliberately, together:
[There] is an implicit assumption that its hedonic (physiological reward) and anxiolytic (reduction of anxiety or stress) properties are the main reasons for its universal use. However, alcohol also plays an important role in social contexts by reducing our social inhibitions, as well as being a potent trigger of the endorphin system… In other words, it functions much like the many other behavioural mechanisms (including laughter, singing, dancing and storytelling…) that are used to trigger the endorphin system so as to facilitate large-scale (i.e. communal as opposed to dyadic) social bonding. The other possibility is that alcohol in some way affects our social or cognitive skills in ways that allow us to function more effectively in social situations.
We think this can be interpreted to mean that societies which drink together become stronger overall, as a unit, and so gain a competitive advantage over other ‘tribes’.
From our own perspective, as generally well-behaved, rather uptight 20th century specimens, there’s something in this.
When we’re tipsy with friends and relatives, we express our feelings more freely. It helps us resolve conflicts and strengthen connections.
And, of course, we know many couples who got together after, in effect, drinking mead together around the campfire before sneaking off into the woods.
Main image adapted from the profile of the restoration of the head of a Neanderthal man via the Wellcome Collection.
It’s normal in Berlin to drink a bottle of beer as you wander between pubs… or wander anywhere, for that matter.
We hadn’t been in the city long before we noticed just how many off-licences there are.
Or, rather, convenience stores that just happen to be piled high with crates of beer.
In Berlin, they’re usually labelled as ‘Spätis’, from Spätverkaufsstellen, meaning ‘late shopping outlet’. It’s a culture that originated in the former Communist East.
Our favourite, glimpsed from a tram, had stolen Spotify’s branding and was called, of course, Spätify.
Alongside dirt cheap mass-produced or local beers there are also exotic imports from Bavaria. Tegernsee Helles from Bavaria, for example, at €2 a pop.
But there’s nothing remotely pretentious about these shops. They also sell Monster energy drinks, chocolate bars, ice cream, vapes, and bog roll.
That the beers are being sold to drink on the go is underlined by the presence on the counter of a bottle opener.
Hand over your cash, knock off the cap, and you’re away.
And that’s exactly what people do. Visiting some Kneipen with Berlin-based friends we lost sight of one on the subway. He reappeared 30 seconds later with an open bottle of Sternburg Export which, he told us, cost €1.
“Back home, people look askance if you‘’’re carrying an open bottle of beer in the street,” he said. “In Berlin, on Saturday night, they look askance if you’re not.”
“Someone said that the police stopped a person to check his papers on the Oranienburger Strasse… It turns out he was a Canadian tourist. And the police stopped him because he was the only one who didn’t have a Wegbier, so he looked suspicious.”
Nor did it take us long to start noticing empty bottles on pavements, and the men who make a living collecting them for the deposit.
Even in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate they dodge between American tourists filling tattered carrier bags, clink, clank.
When our pub-crawling companion – otherwise a very tidy, law-abiding sort – finished his Wegbier, he placed the bottle carefully on the ground near a bin.
Why make the professional scavengers dig around in the filth?
And it’s not as if it will be there long.
It’s a very efficient system, exploitative as it might be.
Wegbier isn’t the preserve of rebels and youngsters, either.
One weekday afternoon we watched a smartly-dressed thirty-something couple escorting their small children along the street.
Both parents were carrying open bottles of lager as casually as someone in Britain might carry a to-go cappuccino.
What if you can simply decide not to be drunk?
What if you can drink constantly, without a Teku glass in sight, and retain total responsible respectability?
Though it didn’t come naturally to us, we decided to try to fit in. We popped into a Späti for a between-pub pick-me-up and, overwhelmed by choice, also went for Sternburg Export.
It’s not the most exciting beer in the world but it doesn’t need to be when you’re swigging straight from the bottle on a busy street in one of the most interesting cities in the world.
Under the glow of traffic lights and kebab shop neon it felt positively glamorous, or delightfully seedy. It adds a swagger to your step.
Looking down into the gutter, we laughed. The road surface was studded, of course, with hundreds of rustling bottle caps pressed into the tar. And a layer of fresh bottle caps had already begun to form, like a tide line.
“We should do this more often,” we said.
Then, on our last morning in Berlin, we saw another bottle of Sternburg swinging past in the street.
Glancing up at its owner we saw a face that looked as if it had been hit by a brewery dray. Yellow eyes, bloody nose, bruises, and a look of forlorn befuddlement.
Perhaps, after all, it is good to pause.
Maybe we can just enjoy some fresh air on the walk between pubs.
And keep Wegbier as a treat when we’re in Germany, doing as the Germans do.
Another year begins and, once again, things feel uncertain and unsettled for pubs, breweries and beer drinkers.
For most of 2020/21 there was a sense that if businesses could survive the worst of COVID-19, and make it out the other side, things would get better.
There was evidence of pent-up demand. Consumers were keen to get out and about and had perhaps learned not to take hospitality for granted.
Government grants and loans, though inevitably regarded as miserly by those on the receiving end, helped keep businesses afloat and even to invest in improvements.
Others were given the nudge they needed to develop online sales and delivery capability.
Then 2022 happened, with a whole new set of challenges on top of a lingering long-tail of pandemic-related problems.
It’s no wonder we’re entering 2023 with people saying things like “I have a generalised bad feeling about what 2023 will bring to the small and independent brewing sector”.
We’re not completely pessimistic – more on that later – but it’s certainly worth facing the facts head on and sitting with them a bit.
We’re not used to breweries closing
In 2022, especially towards the end of the year, a number of UK breweries closed. Steve Dunkley has taken on the administrative job of maintaining a log. At the time of writing, he lists more than 80 closures, including:
Box Steam
Exe Valley
Leeds Brewery
Newtown Park
Twisted Wheel
The Wild Beer Co
It feels mean to say what’s going to come next but if we’re not here to be honest, what’s the point?
The breweries above were known to us but many of the others that have closed so far were relatively obscure and/or second-ranking.
We’d never heard of most of them, and we do pay attention somewhat. Those we did know weren’t necessarily highly regarded, or “hyped” if you prefer.
That’s not to say they were bad, only that they were no doubt already having to work harder to stay afloat without word-of-mouth and national profile.
Kelham Island is an interesting example. It closed and was then saved by Thornbridge. Kelham Island is a beloved brand with plenty of clout behind it; and Thornbridge is clearly not struggling if it felt able to make this move.
And we’ll never get any brewer to say this on record but surely there’s a certain sense of relief that comes with a thinning out of the field, at last.
“There are too many breweries” has been a constant refrain for the past decade and we’ve heard plenty of off-the-record complaints about undercutting and amateurism.
There’s a general expectation that more closures will be announced in January, when breweries tot up their Christmas take and decide whether slogging on is worth it.
Each individual closure is, of course, sad. Jobs gone. Someone’s dream shattered.
But if we try to float above all that, aloof and objective, if 2023 ends with half the number of breweries in the UK, that’s still more beer than we’ll ever get round to drinking. And certainly more than there was in 1984.
Watch out for…
brewery closures to be announced in January 2023
the number of breweries listed in CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide in autumn 2023
When were pubs ever not under threat?
Earlier this year CAMRA published statistics on pub closures during 2021. The numbers aren’t entirely dismal and this table in particular might suggest reasons for cautious optimism:
Region
Net change
East Midlands
+4
East of England
-3
Greater London
+14
North East
-1
North West
-11
South East
+3
South West
+1
West Midlands
0
Yorkshire and the Humber
+36
Long-term closures July-December 2021 based on data from whatpub.com
Stats from the Office for National Statistics published a few weeks ago were similarly uncooperative in the decline-and-fall narrative:
“There are 1.6% more high street pubs and bars since the first Covid lockdown… The data, which tracked the percentage change in the number of establishments between March 2020 and March 2022, was conducted by the Ordnance Survey and the BBC. The Ordnance Survey data found 700 more pubs and bars were operating after the pandemic.”
But even if you take these figures at face value (and not everyone does) things feel very different in January 2023 than they did in March 2022. Increased fuel bills are just now beginning to bite both drinkers and drinking establishments.
And many pubs will have been hanging on for the combined World Cup, Christmas and New Year take before deciding on their future.
There’s no doubt it’s going to be tough. But perhaps a combination of tactical closures – shutting early if it’s quiet, going into hibernation – and temporary adaptations to the offer can help fundamentally healthy pub businesses weather this, like they weathered COVID.
We’ve also provided a couple of hefty updates, in 2015 and 2018, covering notable developments on the scene.
All of which is to say, we think we’ve been watching pretty closely, and thinking about the mood as much as the facts.
In a nutshell, we think pubs feel at marginally less risk now than a decade ago, but brewing feels deflated and tarnished.
Accepting that the plural of anecdote is not data, and so on and so forth, anecdotes are helpful when it comes to checking the vibe. In Bristol, it feels as if pubs are back – at least in the city centre, and more affluent suburbs.
The reopening in November of The Kings Head near Temple Meads under the stewardship of Good Chemistry is perhaps a sign of a fundamental shift. It’s a proper pubby pub with a low-key craft beer offer and has been constantly busy. And they’re not daft; they wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t good business.
Micropubs might be an evolutionary dead end, the jury’s still out, and of course they’re not all wonderful. But those that work really work. In our old neighbourhood on the other side of Bristol, The Drapers Arms, now seven years old, has become a fixture of the community, varying from full to uncomfortably crowded on our recent visits.
Further afield, in London and Sheffield, we keep finding ourselves unable to get into, or find seats in, pubs that have any kind of reputation.
If a pint of beer has become a luxury, perhaps it’s at least a relatively affordable one. And if what your soul needs is to be out with friends, even £5 pints are a cheaper way to achieve that than a £60-a-head restaurant dinner.
Brewing is different and perhaps the feeling there is tied to the rise and fall of BrewDog, and the other members of the United Craft Brewers:
