Category: News

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time we’ve got thistle glasses, more Kölsch, and an accidental cult beer.

For a generation of British craft beer drinkers, this news carries some emotional resonance: Magic Rock Brewing is appointing administrators.

It’s a brewery you could use to tell the whole story of the UK craft beer boom: family money, a talented brewer; launching at just the right time to attract a new breed of beer drinker; then, a buy-out by big beer, followed by divestment once the brand had lost a decade’s goodwill.

Breweries come and go. They rise and fall. You’re allowed to feel sad but, in this case, the magic really went a long time ago. For us, it will certainly make re-reading our book Brew Britannia bittersweet.

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Katie Mather has dropped part 2 of her report on a trip to Cologne and it’s as joyful, and envy-inducing, as the first part:

Brauhaus Päffgen is such a great place that I just got emotional thinking about it. An historic brewery beloved by hardcore Kölsch nerds, of course the beer is good, but the place itself is perfection. We sat on a wooden bench and ate delicious pumpkin soup, bread, cheese and mustard, and Tom ordered a single gherkin jsut because it was on the menu. The wooden-beamed dining hall was welcoming and haunted at the same time, flanked by windowed partitions and a “confessional” — the strange but efficient booth where the maitre d’/Oberkellner took telephone bookings on a rotary phone, controlled the lighting from a central switchboard, and thrust tickets and receipts onto a steel spike at the side of her desk.

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An article by Eoghan Walsh, one of our favourite writers, at Pellicle, one of our favourite publications? That went into the bookmarks folder for this round up before we’d even read it. It’s about a cult Irish beer, O’Hara’s Leann Folláin extra Irish stout, and the circumstances that led to its creation:

2008 was an important year for Seamus and the Carlow Brewing Company. It was 12 years since he’d co-founded the brewery with his brother, and 10 since they’d started selling beer from an old goods shed beside Carlow town train station. They’d had a solid decade of export-led growth, and with local interest finally starting to catch up, O’Hara was eyeing up a move to a larger site in nearby Bagenalstown… It was, Seamus says, an “inflection point”—for them and for Irish brewing too. O’Hara’s, together with Porterhouse and Dublin Brewing Company, had all launched in the mid 1990s into what Seamus describes as a “one-dimensional” Irish beer market lacking in adventurous or creative beers. In the mid-2000s they were joined by a new generation of breweries prompted by changes to excise rules that favoured small producers, and Irish drinkers were becoming (a little) more adventurous.

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One of Kevin Kain’s special areas of interest is glassware – something that doesn’t often attract forensic attention. This time he’s been asking when and why the ‘thistle glass’ came to associated with Scottish beer, at least from a US perspective:

The popularity led an English importer in Antwerp to create his own brand for the Belgian market. This brand, Gordon’s Highland Scotch Ale, was originally brewed by George Younger & Son in Alloa, Scotland (after changing hands many times, it is now actually brewed in Belgium). Their branded thistle glasses go hand in hand with the beer, now sold as Gordon Scotch Ale. They also often have a special Christmas edition thistle glass for their Xmas beer… So where did we get the notion that the thistle glass was somehow an important part of Scottish beer culture? The Gordon glass may have played a role. However, the 1993 book, Scotch Ale, by Greg Noonan likely had a significant impact, at least in the United States. The cover prominently features a beer in a thistle glass.

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In a post reviewing BrewDog’s Wingman Session IPA The Beer Nut says a lot in a 300 words, and much that we agree with:

BrewDog does still be Brewdogging. Whenever the discourse turns in their direction, there’s always someone saying “yer, and thur beer is shit now too,” but in my experience it’s not, and never has been (unless you got one of those Punk cans). This beer is fine, leaning to good, but most importantly is what it’s meant to be. I have no objection to it being on the market and can see it being the best available option in any number of circumstances. Now there’s a slogan for them.

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This piece by Robyn Vinter about being snowed in at The Tan Hill Inn is a great read, including the fascinating detail that some people head there hoping for an extended stopover:

On Saturday night at the Tan Hill Inn, Britain’s highest pub, the snow is falling and the crowd of about 30 people inside know they are probably stuck here for a couple of days. Throughout the place, at the northern edge of North Yorkshire, drinks are flowing and friends are being made… Weather warnings for snow are in place across much of the UK, and the Met Office has advised the public to only make necessary journeys, with road closures, train and flight cancellations, and rural communities becoming cut off… That is something the staff at the Tan Hill Inn, which is 528 metres (1,732ft) above sea level, are used to. The pub has a history of what people call “snow-ins” – in 2021, 61 punters who had come to watch an Oasis tribute band were trapped for three days.

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Finally, from BlueSky, a very desirable drinking vessel…

It's not incredibly rare, but I picked up this nice ceramic tankard recently. Made by Coceram (like Orval, a Belgian company) and I'm not sure of the date – 60s-80s maybe? I love the shape and especially the handle, and curiously, it holds exactly one imperial pint! …

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— IrishBeerHistory (@beerfoodtravel.bsky.social) January 8, 2025 at 7:57 PM

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

Every Saturday we round up good writing about beer from the past week. Here’s the first for 2025, with landladies, pork pies and Golden Pints.

First, a set of stats, released annually, that we find helpful in gauging what’s up with the state of beer in the UK: how many London breweries are there? And how many pubs and bars are there worth including in a guide to drinking in London? These are now compiled by Stephen Jackson, who took over stewardship of Beer Guide London when founder Jezza moved to Belgium. The headlines are:

• “2024 started with 108 London breweries on our list and the year ends with 103, a decrease of 5 over the year. This is the smallest net decrease for a number of years…”
• “2024 started with 315 Guide entries… and we end the year with 291 entries, a reduction of 24…. Of the deletions the bulk (25) came about following an editorial decision to remove all BrewDog bars and all Laine Brew Co bars…”

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Just before Christmas The Standard published a piece by Millie Milliken profiling six female publicans from across London:

A black eye, an armed robbery, a run-in with British acting royalty: Natasha Purdom’s 25-year career working behind pub bars has been colourful to say the least. Her first pub job was at The Flower Pot in her hometown in Bedford. She remembers being in awe of landlady Kathy: “She was a strong woman, the driver of the business… Whenever she worked a Saturday night, she was always dressed up: she put on her makeup and clothes and her job was to engage with the customers – I liked the glamour of it.”

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Katie Mather has been in Cologne and her write up is a joy both in terms of the writing (she’s cut loose a bit here) and the pleasure at experiencing new things and places she conveys:

It’s illegal, or at least impossible as far as we could work out, to park a van in the centre of Cologne, so I booked a very cheap hotel for two nights. This was actually an amazing idea and a stroke of genius too, because Mühlen Kölsch ended up being right around the corner… This being our first Kölsch in Cologne, we were excited to be ushered to a tall drinking table in the heart of the building. The building itself is an historic brewery hall, dating from 1858. To get in you must navigate a heavy revolving wooden door and then push yourself through an equally heavy velvet curtain, adding a definite feeling of pizzazz to the dining room you enter into. As most people in there have been seated and enjoying a peaceful meal until you arrived, they probably won’t enjoy your squeals of delight at being shoved through into what is essentially German Narnia.

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When Ferment went behind a paywall we lost access to some good writing, and good writers, so we were pleased to see that Charlotte Cook has shared something she wrote for them about Zoigl on her own personal Substack:

In the Upper Palatinate of Bavaria, nestled in a hilly landscape of broadleaf forests and gently peregrinating rivers – very close to the Czech border – there are a handful of small towns that have a unique brewing culture. After brewing rights were bestowed on these towns in the 15th century they established communal brewhouses, and a tradition of serving beer from the homes of the brewers, which has remained largely unchanged ever since… This style of brewing used to be fairly common across Europe, in England women would serve beer from their homes, but this gradually died out, with permanent inns and taverns replacing the temporary domestic openings. In these Zoigl towns, however, you can still turn up to a strangers house, sit in his living room, and for the very reasonable price of €2,40 per beer, have as many pints as you care to imbibe, often with the whole family chipping in to serve beer and small snacks.

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Jane Stuart has kicked off 2025 as she means to go on: with a pub crawl and a beer festival, this time in Derby. This description made us want to get on a train:

Now I visited the Furnace almost ten years ago and it has stuck in my mind because, on that visit, I enjoyed the Best Pork Pie Ever. I don’t actually like pies, least of all pork pies. But this one was outstanding… I was dismayed to learn that they had sold out and were awaiting their next delivery from Barry Fitch Butchers in Little Eaton… Pie famine notwithstanding, this was an epic pub – not least because of our incredibly knowledgeable hostess. I smiled to myself as the three women enthused about various beers and I trotted off to take some pics of the interior.

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We were pleased to see quite a few ‘golden pints’ posts around – as well as some ‘definitely not golden pints’ which do the same job. Here are those we’ve spotted:

• Paul Bailey (no relation) – Thornbridge Jaipur Union
• John ‘The Beer Nut’ Duffy – ‘end of year content filling’
• ‘Lilliput’ at What’ll You Have – best pub experiences in 2024
• Benjamin ‘Ben Viveur’ Nunn – Ilkley Dad Jokes, among others
• Robbie Pickering at Refreshing Beer – with a top ten best beers
• Roy at Quare Swally – with a focus on Northern Ireland
• Simon at Simon Says – Lineman Underline
• Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer – with offbeat categories

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Finally, from BlueSky, a reminder…

Not all good pints are about the beer. Pint of Madri in a plastic cup 1.34 miles out to sea on Southend Pier last year. The donuts were bangin’, and we sipped our pints watching locals fish off the end of the pier.

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— Bramling Ross (@rossisdead.bsky.social) January 2, 2025 at 8:55 AM

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

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from Guinness to barley wine, via dark mild.

First, news of the ongoing hype – hype! – around Guinness.

Will Hawkes spotted this story in The New York Times about the rising popularity of Guinness in the US: “Oran McGonagle, an owner of the Dubliner, a two-year-old pub in Boston. In 2023, his bar sold more Guinness than any other bar or restaurant in the city. And this year, the Dubliner’s purchasing volume of the stout is up 63 percent to meet rocketing demand.” (Paywalled, but the link worked for us the first time.)

And on this side of the Atlantic Diageo is reportedly limiting supplies of Guinness because of rising demand in the run up to Christmas: “While overall beer drinking was slightly down between July and October, the volume of Guinness consumed from kegs was up more than fifth.” The last thing Diageo would want you to do, of course, is panic buy.

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For British Beer Breaks Phil Mellows has been considering what the discontinuation of Banks’s Mild on cask means for pubs which have made a name supplying it:

At the Royal Oak, Chapel Ash, however, the matter is more than an academic debate. Run by Emma and Terry Cole, the Royal Oak is a brilliant community pub that cares about local people and understands the role a pub plays in their lives. It’s also proud that it keeps a great pint of Banks’s Mild only a few hundred yards from where it’s made at CMBC’s Wolverhampton brewery, serving up to 200 pints a week… In fact, since we learned the brand was in its final days, the pub has been especially busy, Terry reports, with people coming in for what might be their last ever cask Banks’s Mild.

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For the blog of a homebrewing supplier Matthew Curtis has written his list of the best beer cities in the UK. If he was expecting furious disagreement, he might have been disappointed, because the chat online was unusually constructive and harmonious, with most people broadly agreeing with his judgement – or at least understanding his rationale. We didn’t find much with which to argue, either, including this bit on Bristol (at number 5):

What makes the scene great here is each of its many different layers. You’ve got genuinely world class breweries – the aforementioned Left Handed Giant for starters – but also Lost and Grounded, Wiper and True, and several more besides… The only funny thing about Bristol is that its scene is quite insular. It can be difficult to find a variety of interesting beer that isn’t made in Bristol sometimes, because here is a city that prefers to look after its own. When the offer is as good as that of the breweries I mentioned earlier, however, you can see why it’s one of the best cities for beer in the country.

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Eoghan Walsh has been to “the most Christmassy pub in Brussels” and now, of course, we want to go there too:

I must have walked past Le Saint Nicolas, on the narrow Little Butter Street just downhill from Brussels’ Grand Place, innumerable times and never noticed it. The café is opposite the compact St Nicolas church, and its entrance is overshadowed by the large rainbow flag hanging outside a neighbouring LGBT bar. Whether it was named for the church or the Greek saint who delivers pepernoten and mandarins to good Low Countries children in early December is immaterial, because the owners have leaned fully into the latter as Le Saint Nicolas’ overriding leitmotif. A sign hanging over the entrance has Sinterklaas in white beard and red mitre painted on it, and the rest of the bar takes its cue from there.

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It’s easy to think that Thomas Hardy Ale just materialises under one owner or another every year, or every few years. But Ed Wray has shared some insider info on when he was involved in producing a batch a few years ago:

The last is of particular interest to me as I worked at Hepworths when production moved there. For this legendary beer another beer legend, Derek Prentice, is the brewing consultant employed by the brand owner and we worked with him to bring the beer back again… I wasn’t doing much actual brewing by that stage of my work at Hepworths but I made sure I brewed one of the batches of Thomas Hardy. Oh yes, I wasn’t going to miss that opportunity. Unlike at Eldridge Pope it’s brewed as a single gyle and it proved to be surprisingly problematic… We had to throw everything we could at it to get the beer down to target gravity and the ABV up to the strength we wanted. It spent a long, long time in tank.

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Katie Mather has some helpful suggestions for your relatives on what to buy you for Christmas, instead of the gift set of world lagers they’ve currently got their eye on. You might want to print it out and leave it lying around. This is a particularly good idea:

Put Money Behind Their Favourite Bar… Genuinely, genuinely do this if you’re feeling generous. Instead of getting a gift card for an online beer company or buying them a crate of something they might not like, go to their favourite pub or bar and put some money on tick for them… Not only will the bar absolutely love you for giving them a little cash boost at an important time of year, your mate will love you because they can go in and get pints whenever they want for free until the money runs out… From personal experience as a bar owner, this also encourages people to try things they wouldn’t normally buy, which is also a brilliant thing.

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Finally, from BlueSky, a snapshot of a brilliant pub…

Great night at the Dog and Bell. One of London’s most unique pubs.

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— Will Hawkes (@willhawkes.bsky.social) November 30, 2024 at 8:44 AM

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

Here’s our weekly round up of the best writing about beer. This week, we’ve got cask ale, Belgian beer, and lots of different boozers.

First, some news: Carlsberg-Marstons has decided to stop brewing a bunch of the cask ale brands it has acquired over the years. Some have shrugged – these aren’t beloved beers, on the whole, and why brew them if nobody wants to drink them? Others, like Tandleman and Pete Brown, are concerned about the message it sends: “Are CMBC honestly trying to deliberately destroy the UK’s cask ale market? Of course they’d say no, if they could ever be arsed to comment on the situation. But if they really were trying to murder cask ale, what would they be doing differently to what they’ve done so far this year?”

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For Belgian Smaak Jonny Garrett has written about one of the great puzzles of beer geekery: why did we all decide Westvleteren 12 was “the best beer in the world”?

Local news stations reported chaos in that late summer of 2005. Drivers in the Flemish village parked wherever they could, churning up grass and leaving debris. The police were summoned. Helicopters scrambled. People queued for hours outside the village’s monastery, bringing traffic to a standstill… Then the world saw what was going on and the press started calling. They asked how a handful of monks had achieved such a thing, and why they would even want to… The monastic inhabitants of St Sixtus Abbey, a few kilometres south of Westvleteren, had brewed beer for centuries, using the profits to support their peaceful way of life. Like any conscientious brewery, they wanted their beers to be as good as they could be, but it was far from their focus. They certainly didn’t list Westvleteren 12, their Belgian Dark Strong Ale—or “Quadrupel”—on any beer rating sites. So they were probably more surprised than anyone when, in 2005, an American website crowned Westvleteren 12 the “best beer in the world”.

(Public service announcement: to close the ‘Sign up to our newsletter’ popup you want the little cross hidden in the top right corner of the screen, nowhere near the popup itself.)

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At Tempest in a Tankard Franz D. Hofer has been exploring an important Austro-Bavarian institution – the Wirtshaus, or village inn. It starts with a typically delightful anecdote from his travels:

A small group of burly men with broad grins joined us at our table, curious to hear about these two wanderers who clearly weren’t from this Bavarian village snug up against the border with Bohemia. So it goes at the Wirtshaus, where tables for two are rare. Some had worked in construction. Another was a local farmer who supplied pork to the butcher around the corner. The conversation grew more animated as the empty glasses lined up and the talk turned to the state of the world today. Our food arrived and we tucked in. After a few minutes the farmer proudly proclaimed that the Schweinsbraten and Schnitzel on our plates had come from his farm.

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Closer to home Chris Dyson at Real Ale, Real Music has been exploring Leeds and provides a useful update on the state of the city’s beer scene:

I carried on down past the Duck & Drake under the railway bridge towards the Minster where on one side was the Lamb & Flag… This lovely brick-built pub dates from the 19th century and was formerly run by Leeds Brewery until their demise, when the small pub estate was acquired by Camerons and the beers were taken on by Kirkstall. With its mullioned windows, interior featuring exposed brickwork and timbers, wooden floors and fittings it is one of the most attractive pubs in the city… I ordered a pint of Kirkstall Three Swords, missing out on the few Leeds beers that were amongst the 8 hand pumps on the bar, and took it to a corner table at the side of the door facing the bar… 

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For news outlet CNN Will Noble has done his best to explain the UK’s Wetherspoon pub chain to Americans. We suspect British readers will enjoy it, if only for the strange sensation of seeing our own culture presented as alien and exotic:

Utter the single word “Wetherspoon,” or even the colloquial “Spoons” to a Brit, and they’ll know what you mean. Some will grimace. Some will groan. Others will excitedly rub their hands together like you’d just cooked their favorite meal… Wetherspoon pubs are an institution in the UK. They enjoy cult-like status both among admirers, lured in by real ale and “pub grub” sold at astoundingly low prices, and detractors, who see them as emblematic of everything that’s wrong with modern Britain… More than 800 Wetherspoon chain pubs freckle the country — from The Muckle Cross in Scotland to The Tremenheere in Cornwall. In just a few decades, “Spoons” have become so ingrained into British daily life that they probably now deserve to be up there with Stonehenge on the list of UK cultural institutions.

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As we near the finish, let’s pop into a few pubs around and about.

First, in Dublin, Lisa Grimm takes us to a pub with the brilliant name The Glimmer Man: “The name comes from the Emergency/WWII-era job title – think a sort of proto-TV license inspector role – tasked with seeking out people using too much gas. It’s been applied to the pub here since at least the 1980s, though a previous proprietor, T. Lyster, is still commemorated in the tiled entrance.”

Then we’ll bob over to Ramsgate in Kent with Alex at Pub Vignettes for a snapshot of life at The Hovelling Boat Inn, among others: “You here for the Meat Raffle, son? Wasn’t aiming for a whole side of lamb kind of afternoon, but carpe diem. Strip of five tickets. Sonny and Cher. Simon and Garfunkel. Micropub and Butcher. Get the collab while it’s happening, nothing’s eternal.”

Finally, with Adrian Tierney-Jones, let’s visit Whitelocks in Leeds: “I engage in the tradition of vertical drinking at the long bar, its polished copper top gleaming like a much-loved child on Christmas morning, while the well-polished glasses standing on shelves at the mirrored back bar add to the impression that this is very much a glittering palace of beer…”

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Finally, from BlueSky…

The AEB – GEB yeast packet designs go so hard. Would have each of these on a t-shirt. (Pic from geterbrewed.com)

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— Katie Mather (@katiematherkm.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 11:26 AM

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