Category: News

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. Even, it turns out, when we’re travelling across Europe. (We can’t promise to keep this up.)

We’re writing this particular post from a hotel room in Vienna. Having spent much of the past few days sitting on trains, we’ve had plenty of time to catch up on what’s going on in the news, and on various beer blogs.

First, this story grabbed our attention: Richard Percival, the man who collects brewery-branded tin trays, has been profiled by the BBC. We referred to his old website many times over the years and now he has a new one. It’s always interesting to hear from people who are obsessive about some niche aspect of beer. His motivation, it turns out, is that old overlap between football and real ale:

It was always linked to an away match at Notts, where you go to a different part of the world and they had different breweries, so you knew you were going to get a different tray… I started to realise, after I’d picked up about 10 from matches, that these things were really quite ornate so I decided to start collecting.

---

For Pellicle Fred Garratt-Stanley has written about how the pubs of Rye in East Sussex have been shaped by its history as one of the medieval Cinque Ports. Although it begins with some tales of smugglers’ tunnels beneath a 900-year-old pub (you learn to ask “Are they?” and “Is it?” in this game) it quickly brings in the voices of historians, and begins to dig deeper:

Dr. Chris Moore’s research often centres around uncovering these stories by digging into architectural quirks. For example, when he learned that The Mermaid’s central chimney is made from Caen stone (a type of limestone quarried in northern France and usually shipped to England to construct religiously symbolic buildings like Canterbury Cathedral,) he was immediately intrigued… “Caen stone is basically a religious stone used to construct most of our big cathedrals, it would not have been used on a pub,” he explains. “So that’s probably Reformation stone from a dissolved monastery close to Rye that’s been reused. There’s symbolism to that; did the landlord make a conscious decision to go ‘It’s a shame that monastery’s been destroyed, let’s keep a bit of it in the pub’?”

---

Jane Stuart continues her exploration of the pubs of the north of England with a visit to Lytham, just up the coast from Blackpool:

Taps is a must visit on any trip to Lytham. It’s a Greene King pub but you wouldn’t know it. There is an excellent range of ales – and, crucially, there’s always a mild on… So here’s me, sitting in an old armchair, under an old lampshade, drinking a pint of mild. I sometimes wonder if I’m turning into Ena Sharples… To add to the escape from the outside world, I can never get any phone signal in here. I’m sure that has its advantages for some, but I have beer admin to do – mainly checking into Untappd before I forget what I’ve had – so I was happy to discover they had WiFi, so I faffed about logging into that for a bit with some success… Right now it’s time for the first #LooReview of the day. My first impression was that they smelled lovely, which is always a good start. I then spotted lots of Lowry art on the walls.

---

At Beer & Soul on Substack Sayre Piotrkowski has written about the challenge of reigniting people’s passion for craft beer when the market is saturated and nothing feels new. This is the follow up to an earlier post from February. In the latest piece, Piotrkowski writes:

Perhaps it is time for us Cicerone-types to shift our focus from going broad to diving deep.… feigning enthusiasm to entice customers into an experience that does not serve them is what “carnival barkers” do. Our new normal begs that we “evangelists” update our sense of purpose. Headwinds are not a reason to surrender or shrink our ambitions. They are a reason to once again innovate on behalf of our customers, whether that entails showing them something new or adding nuance to a familiar experience.

(And here are our thoughts on whether ‘The thrill has gone’ from 2023, if you want more on this subject.)

---

The recent round of The Session hosted by Matthew Curtis had the theme of ‘critique’ which made us appreciate that The Beer Nut didn’t need prompting to do this – it’s what he does on his blog every day. A recent post, for example, dissects beers from Galway Bay, dishing out both praise and considered suggestions for improvement:

It looks like there’s a story to be told about Whiskey & Coffee, the stout they launched, quietly, in March. The badge implies that it’s one in a series called “Modern Classics” and that it’s a “celebration stout”. Celebrating what, and how do the whiskey and coffee enter the picture? Not in the flavour, anyway. This tastes very plain indeed, and though it’s not powerhouse-strength, 5.5% ABV is plenty to give a stout character. Here, the extent of the coffee is no more than you’d find in any typical dry stout. There’s nothing resembling whiskey at all, so I doubt it’s barrel-aged. Whisky-soaked oak chips, maybe? Sorry, there are more questions than answers with this one. I was a bit bored by it, not to mention confused.

---

Also reporting from Ireland, Lisa Grimm continues her Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs with notes on a pub that’s due to be demolished to make way for a public transport scheme:

This week, we are visiting a pub that will eventually (in theory) be disappearing to make way for the proposed MetroLink: Hedigan’s The Brian Boru. But all things planning- and/or transit-related in Dublin take much, much longer than they do in most other places, so you likely have a goodly amount of time to visit the pub in advance… there have been proposals to name the future station here for the pub, possibly including some of the pub’s architectural details. And while the MetroLink wouldn’t be anything on the scale of the Tube, there’s plenty of precedent for naming stations after both extant and long-vanished pubs over on the Neighbouring Island. And it’s not as though this part of Dublin, where Phibsborough turns into Glasnevin, is short of pubs – there are many excellent ones in the area.

---

Finally, from Bluesky…

I regret to inform you that I have discovered the 'wackiest' pub in England.

[image or embed]

— Paul Clammer (@paulclammer.bsky.social) March 29, 2025 at 7:03 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 the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got Irish pubs, pub sofas, and barroom fiction.

First, an interesting nugget of news: Leeds-based craft brewery Northern Monk has signed a UK distribution deal with Spanish brewery Damm. The latter will now distribute a couple of Northern Monk’s beers across the UK.

Russell Bisset, founder of Northern Monk, is quoted as saying: “2025 will see Northern Monk’s brewing capacity increase by 20%, allowing us to produce an additional 2 million pints, compared to 2024… we’re excited to join forces with Damm, a best-in-class partner, to accelerate our on-trade growth, too, using this increased capacity to raise awareness of Northern Monk across the UK.”

This is interesting to us because, first, it consolidates Northern Monk’s place in the market – no longer small or local, very much sitting alongside BrewDog as the kind of brewery whose beer you see everywhere.

And, secondly, because it’s a reminder that being taken over isn’t the only way for indie breweries to hook up with multinational businesses. We’re always a bit surprised that this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often.

---

After a well-earned break David Jesudason is back at his weekly newsletter with a new series of posts about gay pubs, and the struggle by gay people to be included in British pub life. The first post is based on an interview with queer historian Alf Le Flohic who came of age in the 1980s, and focuses on one particular gay pub in Chichester:

For someone like me who was born in the 1970s, it seems a bit OTT to describe what a gay pub is but these days single-identity spaces have become rarer and younger people – even if they are gay or queer – may never have experienced one… The Bush, as described by Alf, is… a typical gay pub complete with big glass windows that were difficult to see into. This afforded a lot more privacy than a regular pub – “people inside the bar didn’t feel on show,” Alf tells me… The entrance was down the side with the pub door sealed up. Instead you knocked on a side door, which had a little window in it where you were sized up before being allowed entrance… “Once you were in, you were in,” says Alf. “Once your face was seen a couple of times you were let in automatically – so it was like being a regular in a private bar.”

---

“My own most totalitarian, right-wing opinion is… that no pub should have sofas,” writes neuroscientist and author Dean Burnett. “Or armchairs. Or futons. Or beanbags.” In a post entitled ‘Why sofas in pubs need to be banned’ at The Neuroscience of Everyday Life he explores this personal hatred of soft furnishings in pub in some detail:

I like a sofa, they fulfil an important role. People having somewhere they can sit back and relax is a boon to any living space… That’s the key, though; sit back and relax. That’s all well and good in your own home. But at the pub, you’re there to engage, to socialise… And as any introvert will tell you, socialising is work. It requires neurologically-taxing effort. If you don’t want to invest that, fair enough. Going to the pub isn’t mandatory, and there’s nothing wrong with pursuing other socialising options… But if you do go to a pub, then you’ve entered into an implicit contract to engage in the norms of the context… You’re there to sit forward and engage, not sit back and relax. Reclining in softness means you’re more likely to be relaxed, drowsy, disengaged.

---

For Smithsonian Magazine Liza Weisstuch achieves something that defeated us: gets the people from the company that designs and exports pre-packed Irish pubs to tell their story. Honestly, we wrote so many letters and emails trying to get an interview, or just anything out of them for our book 20th Century Pub. And we know they got the messages because, though they never replied, they did add us to their sodding email marketing list. Oh, well, enough of our moaning. This article, which has the faint whiff of PR about it, nonetheless does a good job of setting out the history of The Irish Pub Company, explaining its business model, and unpacking the aesthetics of the global Irish pub:

Mel McNally is not in the business of just shipping pub-in-a-box packages around the world. Each one is custom-designed to fit a specific space in collaboration with the local owner, who has creative control over the many, many, many details involved. The company’s stock-in-trade is not the Irish pub as a commodity; it’s the Irish pub as a vibe. You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy… The Irish Pub Company evolved out of a project McNally did about pub design for a competition when he was an architecture school student in Dublin in the 1970s. What the professors believed to be a cheeky excuse to spend time drinking pints turned into a two-year expedition through Ireland in which McNally and some architect friends visited more than 200 pubs in cities and remote country villages… “We recorded the essence of what makes a pub a pub—in the scale, the architecture, the mix of details, the craftsmanship,” McNally says. “No two are the same, but they have an essence that we carry into projects we do now.”

---

For Belgian Smaak Eoghan Walsh has written about Brussels brewery Brasserie de la Mule and its founder, Swedish-born Joël Galy:

Fitzcarraldo’s dream of introducing European high culture to a remote Amazonian trading post involves, among other things, hauling a 320-ton steamboat over a steep hill separating two rivers. Belgian brewer Joël Galy may not share Kinski’s mania, and his dream—introducing German beer styles to Brussels in a neighbourhood brewery and taproom—was less outlandish. But the pair do share a persuasive glint in the eye, the same near-quixotic, evangelical passion. A tête de mule, Galy calls it, a mulish determination… You need to be stubborn, pig-headed, if you have—like Kinski’s Fitzcarraldo—a grandiose dream. As Galy was to find out too, a tête de mule comes in handy when you’re trying to get anything done in the complicated chaos that is Belgium’s capital city.

We always feel the need to justify “How we founded our brewery” stories here, because they can feel rather generic. In this case, the points of interest are (a) the brewery’s “no geeks” policy and stated intention to produce good but ‘normal’ beers; and (b) the seeming difficulty of getting anything off the ground in Brussels, let alone when there’s a pandemic in the way.

---

We don’t often feature fiction here but every now and then a story pops up with a pub at its heart and we can’t resist. Lucie McKnight Hardy’s latest, ‘Wild Horses’, is about a woman returning from America, and a disastrous marriage, to the Welsh pub where she worked as a young woman:

Sandra is behind the bar and she doesn’t look up. She’s pouring a pint for an old guy who’s perched on one of the bar stools, the usual sort: flat cap, tweed jacket that will be pungently reminiscent of sheep dip and creosote. Sandra’s hair is still bleached and scraggy, and pulled up in a tight ponytail on the top of her head—what they’d have called a council facelift, back in the day. She’s scrawny-thin, but the tops of her arms where they peer from the sleeves of her blouse are glutinous, like cheap ice cream melting in the tub. She’s still wearing the low-cut tops, and Alison can see the curve of her breasts, hoisted artificially high, wrinkled and parched. When Sandra does look up, Alison is absurdly shocked that she is still wearing her trademark plum lipstick. At her age.

The story contains depictions of sexual assault, by the way, so proceed with caution.

---

Finally, from Bluesky, behold this excellent T-shirt…

[image or embed]

— David Bailey (@bathedailey.bsky.social) March 27, 2025 at 1:29 PM

There will be even more links, and further commentary on the links above, in a ‘footnotes’ post for Patreon subscribers. Sign up now (£2 a month) if you want to access that, and other bonus features.

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

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got faux-Victorian pubs, mountain retreats, and indie beer.

First, some bits of news, as we approach the end of the tax year and Quarter 2 of 2025, and various press releases get dropped (both via Beer Today):

• Shepherd Neame reports a decrease in sales of ‘premium bottled ales’ – perhaps the least fashionable product in the market today?
• Stats from a consulting firm suggest that hospitality is finally beginning to feel the bite with an increase in insolvencies.

---

At A Tempest in a Tankard this week Franz D. Hofer took us to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, an Alpine town near Germany’s highest peak, with plenty of beer:

With all the Alpine charm you could ask for, the Bräustüberl skirts the boundary of kitsch without crossing it. As you enter, you have your pick of a cozy Stube to one side and a rustic beer hall to the other… Locals gather in the snug Stube wrapped around with roughly hewn plank paneling. The beer hall welcomes larger groups out for a hike, or winding down the day for dinner. Pot-bellied beer pitchers line the mantel above the paneling, vaulted ceilings shelter lively conversations, and Alpine motifs depict idealized scenes from the town’s rural past. A striking indigo blue Kachelofen rounds out the ensemble. Beer issues forth from the König Ludwig Schlossbraureri Kaltenberg, and the menu offers up hearty Bavarian fare fit to fill you up after a hike.

(Wankberg. Hurhurhur.)

---

David Jesudason’s latest piece for Pellicle is right up our alley: it’s about The Persevere, a handsome Victorian pub in Leith, that is not actually Victorian, and is run by Poles. We’re not surprised that people were surprised to learn that it’s not as old as it looks because it only takes a decade or so for pubs to feel worn-in, and for the collective memory to distort:

That old time, Victorian feel I mentioned, was in fact created in 1992. While other pubs were becoming identikit by stripping out the carpets and the old wood, the Persevere charted a different course with then owner, Kevin Doyle, and righthand man Graeme Arnott deciding to go back to a previous century when designing the interior… They also commissioned the five paintings to foster a retro aesthetic and these were the work of New Town resident Kenny Skeel—it’s odd to think that ‘Mary Queen of Scots Landing at Leith Pier 1561’ was probably painted when MasterChef or Countdown was on the TV… In fact, the building became a pub in 1974, converted from a former Co-Op and butcher’s…

---

We appreciate Chris Dyson’s write-ups of his travels around Britain because he often goes to the kind of places we think of visiting – and his detailed notes are generally evocative enough to move those towns to the ‘to do’ list. This time, he’s been exploring ‘The Marches’, that bit where England butts up against Wales, and specifically Leominster and Ludlow:

The [Blood Bay in Ludlow,] sandwiched between a butcher and a kebab shop, is an absolute gem, a real step back in time. Back to Victorian times, in fact, as the pub incorporates many traditional features from that period. However it is essentially a re-imagining of how a Victorian parlour pub would look, as this former newsagents only became a pub in 2017. It was opened by Jon Saxon who has The Dog Hang’s Well I referred to earlier. He spent 9 months refurbishing the place during which time many traditional features were uncovered and incorporated into the pub. The curving bar and beer engines were salvaged from a pub in London that was facing demolition, whilst a public bar and a snug were created in the front of the building, with a tiny room added at the back of the bar, complete with its own serving hatch. Wood panelling, traditional seating, and period lighting add to the authentic look of the Blood Bay.

We love it when a theme emerges between links!

---

This next piece is from Phil Mellows at Beer Breaks Britain on Substack and is actually from last week but (we’re human) we missed it. It’s about the distinction between mainstream craft beer (your Beavertown Neck Oils) and indie craft beer, which has a different “aura”, as Phil puts it:

[It] seems to me that pubs, bars and taprooms that have grasped this difference, and chosen to focus on the more adventurous end of craft beer, are doing okay. At least that was my experience researching our book, Beer Breaks in Britain… So, intrepid beer tourist that I am, I took a stroll across the road to one of my Brighton locals, the Independent Taproom and Beer Shop for some in-depth investigation… “If I were to start selling the kind of beers you find in most pubs, I’d lose half my customers,” says Matt. He believes that by getting involved in craft, big brewers have, “devalued the product”, and that explains the decline… After all, you don’t want to be travelling to distant destinations to drink beers you can find at any old pub at home.

---

Next, another old article from Ferment, the promo mag for a beer subscription service, that’s made its way onto the open internet via its author, Charlotte Cook. This one reveals an interesting detail about attitudes to beer in India, where there are “restrictions on producing, selling and transporting alcohol” during election periods:

This means that a craft brewery in Mumbai will find it increasingly difficult to send beer south to Goa or Karnataka during the election period, and even multinational producers have to adjust their supply chain projections during the election to attempt to keep a semblance of normal distribution going. Couple this with additional checks at state borders, and your chances of getting that delicious mango beer are increasingly diminished… For tourists the thought of not getting to drink a crisp lager whenever you fancy it can feel like a draconian restriction, but the locals I have spoken to are used to alcohol bans during times of national importance, and feel that the continuity helps to maintain peace and order during a time when many Indians are keen to see change in their country and tensions can flare.

---

Finally, from TikTok via Bluesky, an update on the present value of the BrewDog brand…

This is class

[image or embed]

— Ruth Husko (@dankackroyd.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 8:54 AM

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

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got Ringwood, pub quizzes and village bars.

First, some news from France, where the government is seeking to “bring back village bars”, as reported by Jaroslav Lukiv for the BBC:

France has seen a sharp fall from about 200,000 bars and cafés serving alcohol in the 1960s to some 36,000 by 2015. Most of the closures were in rural areas… In France, a type-4 alcohol licence is required by law to open a bar selling alcoholic drinks… Currently, no new such permits can be granted, and those planning to open a bar must wait until an existing drinking spot closes to acquire its licence… The new legislation would allow prospective bar managers in communities with fewer than 3,500 people and without a bar to request a brand-new permit without such a wait.

This news, and similar news from Northern Ireland, suggests to us that there might be a post-COVID reaction underway. Perhaps the balance is tipping away from moral panic over alcohol to moral panic over social isolation.

---

Social isolation is also a theme in Jeff Alworth’s five-years-on reflection of COVID-19 and its impact on the bar and beer industry in the US:

Nearly every measure of human health, physical and mental, goes back to human connection. When we have meaningful social ties to family, friends, and our communities, our minds and bodies are healthy; when they break down, we get sick and depressed. The pandemic isolated us and broke our routine social habits, but more than that, it caused us to regard each other with suspicion. Humans are tribal by nature, and we became more so during Covid. Political polarization, political tribalization, really, has become a universal, transcending cultures as diverse as the U.S., India, France, and Hungary… Blue states, where shutdowns were more common and durable, seem to be in worse shape. In the middle of the pandemic, that seemed like the smart move—those shutdowns resulted in far lower infection and death rates than in red states. But there may have been hidden costs to those policies.

---

For Pellicle Imran Rahman-Jones has written an excellent and much-needed reflection on what it feels like to lose a brewery you love to the takeover process. In this case, it’s Ringwood, one of the original real ale microbreweries, which hasn’t been beloved for a long time – unless, of course, you grew up and lived near the brewery:

In 1978, veteran brewer Peter Austin was approaching retirement, but he had one last project in him. This was a time when the industry was dominated by the Big Six brewers—Allied Breweries (Tetley, Ansells and Ind Coope), Bass Charrington, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Whitbread and Watney Mann.—producing low-quality froth. In the face of this he decided to set up a new microbrewery… In 1990, Peter Austin sold his share of Ringwood to David Welsh, his long-term business partner. Welsh continued running the brewery in a similar fashion. It only grew more successful, which is why Marston’s was willing to pay £19.2 million for it in 2007.

We wrote about Ringwood and Peter Austin quite a bit in our 2014 book Brew Britannia but very much through the lens of his national and international influence. Taking it back to Hampshire, to one community, to one pub, makes this story feel fresh.

---

For the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) newspaper What’s Brewing Laura Hadland has written about pub quizzes. She pushes the date of the earliest pub quizzes back a few years from our previous best effort of 1959 and (of course, this seems obvious) points to a working men’s club as ground zero:

[The] York CIU (Club & Institute Union) Quiz League [was] recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest in Britain – formed in 1946. Gordon Falconer was a member of the Fulfordgate Club in York. He was the last surviving player of that first match – making him the world’s oldest quizzer prior to his death in 2008… There is so much quirkiness to admire about pub (and club) quizzes. I feel like team names should really receive their own dedicated book, because they sop up so much popular culture. Each is like a little time capsule, often wrapped up in a delicate packaging of delightfully crude puns. Without Dizzee Rascal, whose hip-hop and grime career took off in the early 2000s, my quiz could not have been won by the Quizzy Rascals. I think it unlikely that last week’s winners, Hot Tub Quiz Machine, would have come up with their moniker without the 2010 film Hot Tub Time Machine.

---

At St. John’s Wort Jordan St.John continues his series of written lectures on aspects of how the beer industry works. This week he focused on novelty and our collective passion for what is new:

There aren’t a huge number of industries that expanded as quickly as craft beer. If the last fifteen years were about anything, they were probably about novelty. There are new releases on LCBO shelves! There’s a new brewery down the street! There’s a new brewing school in Niagara! There’s a new beer at the new brewery! A new festival!… I’m as guilty as anyone. When I chose where to live in Toronto after moving back from university, I chose Yonge and Davisville mostly on the strength of The Bow and Arrow. Not only did I know some of the bar staff, but they had Ontario Craft Beers on tap. When I moved back the best, most dependable beers in Ontario were King Pilsner and Black Oak Pale Ale and Nut Brown Ale. They were very good, but they were always available and for that reason people took them for granted.

---

Martin Taylor spent a quite hour in The Kelham Island Tavern in Sheffield as the sun went down and wrote it up. And that’s it. Well, almost, because there’s also some commentary here about how CAMRA members score cask ale quality and how the organisation selects pubs to include in the Good Beer Guide:

Last week on CAMRA Discourse [messageboard] I attempted to inflame a lively debate about reducing the number of Beer Guide entries by declaring that cask beer in GBG pubs was, all things considered, pretty good… “My own experience of visiting over 500 GBG pubs in the last year is that only a tiny number scored below NBSS 3, which to me reflects well on the ability of local CAMRA branches to select quality pubs for inclusion in the Guide.”… Blue Bee Five Hop [was] in pretty much perfect condition…. I scored it 4.5 though, as it’s common knowledge that NBSS 5s are discounted as perfection is impossible (unless it’s Doom Bar) or something.

---

Finally, from Bluesky, Liam K’s enviable collection of vintage glassware…

I possibly need to revive my Friday night #BeerGlassology posts on this platform for a new audience, with apologies to the old audience. It'd be an excuse to tidy my shelves if nothing else …

[image or embed]

— IrishBeerHistory (@beerfoodtravel.bsky.social) March 14, 2025 at 10:04 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 the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got cans, cycling, and collaboration brews.

First, a bit of news that isn’t, in itself, massively interesting: Peroni is to be made available in smaller ‘stubby’ cans on the UK market. What caught our attention is (a) the claim that this will appeal to younger drinkers and (b) the stats that are given on the popularity of cans:

Following feedback, the brand will move its 330ml cans from a slimline format to a ‘stubby’ can, reflecting changing shopper perceptions and preferences associated with premium lager… Cans have been growing their share of lager in recent years, reaching a value share of almost 64% in the latest year, up from 59.5% in 2022.

---

It’s fairly obvious (we hope she won’t mind us saying this) that Katie Mather wanted to write an article about the relatively obscure sport of cyclocross, with beer as a sidenote to justify its presence at Pellicle. But that’s fine with us, and definitely with Jess, who grew up with Radio 3 on in the kitchen (Dad) and the TV in the front room tuned to whatever tournament might be showing, from sumo wrestling to skiing (Mum). Katie’s piece picks up on a key feature of real Belgian beer culture – the dominance of pils:

In Belgium, the heartland of the sport, it’s a beloved national institution. Given the country’s deep love of beer, it makes sense that the two are inseparable… However, there are no oud bruins here; not a single lambic nor abbey tripel to be found at the bars around a European cyclocross event. If you want something other than lager, bring your own… Back in Namur I buy a round of Maes. It’s a nondescript 5.2% pils brewed by Alken-Maes (Carlsberg/Heineken) in Mechelen, the Flemish part of Belgium. They are a key sponsor of this particular race, and so despite being in the heart of beer nerd Disneyland, this is the only beer available. It’s fine. In fact, the sponsorship marketing works well—I now have a Maes cup to prove I was part of the crowd.

---

For the SIBA magazine Ruvani de Silva has written about the impact on brewing of the pushback against the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in US politics:

As we ready ourselves for the advent of Trump 2.0 stateside, DEI has moved from the passé of 2024 to actively ugly, readily dismissed and ridiculed… Never forget, money is huge. Supporting breweries who are owned by and/or advocate for the rights of marginalised groups is one of the easiest ways to promote DEI – putting our money where our mouths are matters. Digging into resources on allyship and diverse beer history might sound daunting, but it will enable you to push back against misinformation and know how to support struggling activists, helping to allay burnout. Check out stats from reports by Sightlines and Dea Latis as to the fiscal importance of marginalised groups to the industry.

(Unfortunately, it’s in a flippy-flappy skeumorphic magazine format but is readable.)

---

A blog that is new to us, via Matthew Curtis, is Craft Beer Della. In her first post, Della writes about the value of all-women brewdays to mark International Women’s Day, and what might fuel the complaints against them:

The Ladies of Darkness brew day at Tom’s Tap in Crewe, was not only a coming together of strong, intelligent women. But it highlighted how much we need to move forward. Laura Hadland’s article about the day has been published via the CAMRA facebook page and website. It was met with incredible vitriol from some. The comments ranged from her body to the competence of the brewing. Just look through the CAMRA facebook, it’s painfully clear the comments under on posts surrounding IWD brews are heavily edited, deleted and sometimes just disabled. Leaving us all in no doubt as to why IWD days and education are needed.

(And here’s the piece by Laura Hadland reference in Della’s post.)

---

The latest edition of Lisa Grimm’s Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs is about Tapped, which used to be The Porterhouse Central. We’re fascinated by the Porterhouse brewery and chain, because it was one of our early encounters with ‘interesting’ beer, and also because we wrote about it in Brew Britannia. That it’s still going, and still updating its bars, is amazing:

While still a part of the larger Porterhouse group, it’s been styled very much more as a ‘bar’ vs a ‘pub,’ and it’s taken a while to settle. My first few visits were, it must be said, not great. The initial redesign felt rather like they’d ordered a ‘taproom’ kit from the early 2000s – lots of plastic, colours just a bit too bright and faux-industrial, and the service was, frankly, poor. Even on the relatively quiet times I’d stopped in, it seemed nearly impossible to get served…yet that was rather less difficult for the younger men around me, or so it seemed. Comparing notes offline at the time, it seemed quite a few other women had a similar experience, and so I essentially gave up trying for a few years.

(Yes, it was one of the bloopers in Brew Britannia. And, yes, this haunts us still, and keeps us awake at night, more than a decade on.)

---

Jane Stuart has been exploring the pubs of Buxton in Derbyshire, partly as a balm for her troubled soul. As always, her writing puts us write there in the thick of an away-from-home pub crawl, with all the logistical challenges and randomness they tend to create:

I’ve been struggling with my mental health of late. I’m going back to basics and trying to occupy my mind and time with things that I enjoy. This of course involves getting on a train, meeting pals, going on a pub crawl and writing about it for you… As if by magic, I spotted this [map of Buxton pubs] in the living room… I vaguely remembered this being handed to me by a man I met on my travels last year, who foisted it on me and said “here’s an idea for your next trip”. I had indeed been struggling for inspiration for a location; I also like to have an ‘occasion’ or purpose for a visit (the football is a good one, but I haven’t been going). I messaged Wendy and she was up for the trip (sadly Karina was otherwise engaged) so off to Buxton it was.

---

Finally, from Bluesky, news of a new Westmalle beer, with a very appealing photo:

Westmalle Duo is "available for a limited time only and exclusively on draft", so no doubt I'll develop a taste for it and & then it will suddenly be unavailable. But the other day I picked up a bottle of Westmalle Trappist Extra (4.8%) from Albert Heijn, which I shall be sampling very soon.

[image or embed]

— Anne Billson (@annebillson.bsky.social) March 7, 2025 at 8:33 AM

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