Flexibility around opening hours can be helpful for pubs – but what if they get addicted to being closed?
In the past few weeks we think we’ve noticed a vicious circle in effect: pubs aren’t open, so we don’t go out, so it’s not worth it for pubs to be open…
This year has been particularly weird, too, with Christmas and New Year landing mid-week.
As Jess’s little brother, a bar manager for several years until very recently, tells us Wednesday is the worst day for Christmas to land because of the difficulty of planning deliveries.
Restricted opening hours are also arguably what gives micropubs a competitive advantage.
When we talk to Ray’s mum about her time running a pub in the early 1980s, she says being able to stay closed on Monday and Tuesday lunchtimes would have made a real difference.
But, still, lately, we’ve found Bristol pubs closed when we have expected to find them open, or closing surprisingly early.
For each pub, we suppose it made sense in context: the cost of lighting, heating, and staffing a pub must sting if nobody turns up to drink.
But collectively, unfortunately, the message they’re sending is: stay at home, don’t bother.
What we want to do when we go out is wander to a pub, see how it feels, and maybe settle, or maybe wander on.
We don’t want to plan, or commit, booking our space days or weeks in advance. That feels… not very pub.
It’s easier these days to check an individual pub’s seasonal opening hours. If they haven’t updated Google (they should be doing this) then it’s usually on Facebook or Instagram.
But having to do that bit of detective work for eight possible pubs before you even know if it’s worth leaving the house? Too much faff.
As consumers, we want to know: are the pubs, generally speaking, open, or are the pubs shut?
Beyond seasonal variation, we want individual pubs to pick their hours and stick to them.
A couple of years ago, we chatted to a publican who was frustrated at another publican they’d been mentoring:
“They keep changing their hours! It’s quiet Monday, so we’ve stopped opening Monday. It’s quiet Tuesday, so we’ve stopped opening Tuesday. We’re opening late on Sunday now. If people keep coming to your pub and finding it shut when they expect it to be open, they’ll stop coming altogether! That place? Oh, it’s never open…”
Our advice on blogging has long been “Write as if you have an audience and eventually you might get one.”
The same might go for pubs, opening hours, and customers. Consistency and predictability counts for a lot.
In a city like Bristol, where your regulars disappear around the country and students evaporate during holiday periods, it might feel pointless – but it’s also an opportunity to connect with potential new customers:
“We live round the corner but hardly ever come in! We really should do this more often in 2025…”
Every year we share a list of our favourite beers and pubs as part of a lingering beer blogging tradition called ‘The Golden Pints’.
It was a big thing a decade or so ago but hardly anyone does it these days. That’s a shame because, like The Session, it was a fun thing that contributed to a sense of community.
We stick at it because we find it a useful summary of what was hot and what was not in wach passing year.
This year, we’ve made a real effort to get to more pubs, and try more new-to-us beers. We’ve also been taking note of our emotional responses to certain beers and breweries: which ones make us say “Oh, great!” when we see their brands on the bar?
Before we get stuck in, a quick note on the categories: these used to be fixed, and set by the ‘admins’, which made it easier to compare the results across many blogs and find the popular vote winners. Now, we more or less do what we like.
If you want to write your own golden pints post, though, you’re very welcome to use our post as a template, and steal the graphic above, too, if you like.
Right, let’s do this.
The Five Points taproom.
Best cask ale
We had quite a debate about this one. You might remember that last year we made Five Points Gold our beer of the year and, in so doing, took a side swipe at Five Points Best: “We find it muddy and confused.”
Well, guess what? Either it’s got better, or we’ve changed, because Five Points Best is a beer we’ve really fallen in love with this year.
“On the face of it, it’s a really traditional bitter, but there are a few tweaks that make it next level good. There’s a honeyed, biscuityness in the malt; and a slice of orange, Fuller’s style, alongside the hard bitterness. If we were going to make comparisons it would be something like Bathams, or the various Boddington’s clones we’ve had over the years. But like Bathams, it also tastes like its own thing.”
Honourable mentions: Bass, of which we’ve enjoyed many pints this year; Cheddar Ales Gorge Best, partly for sentimental reasons; Fuller’s ESB, which, when it’s good, is very good.
Lost & Grounded.
Best keg beer
This feels like a bit of a throwback category from the days of the cask versus keg wars. We do tend to default to cask but in some of our favourite pubs in Bristol – The Swan With Two Necks, The Kings Head – the keg selection is often extremely tempting. And at the Lost & Grounded taproom, where we end up most Friday evenings, it’s keg (almost) all the way.
A beer we both loved, and were excited to drink, and were gutted to see disappear from the menu, was Lost & Grounded Newstalgic 8, a West Coast Pilsner at 5.2%. Here’s what we wrote in our notes in July:
“We’ve been drinking this wonderful beer at the taproom for the past couple of weekends. It’s confusingly listed on the printed menu as a West Coast IPA but it’s definitely a lager – albeit a distinctly zingy, bitter, flowery one. It’s ultra pale and looks gorgeous in a German-style Willibecher glass with a few inches of foam. If you liked the much-missed Five Points Pils, you’ll also enjoy this.”
We’ve been trying hard to drink in pubs and consume less booze at home. Our ‘cellar’ (the corner where we keep some beer crates) is mostly stocked with Belgian beer (Westmalle Tripel, Orval) and German lager (Augustiner Helles, Jever, Schlenkerla Helles).
From the supermarket, we’ve occasionally picked up bottles of Schneider Weisse and Duvel, or cans of Thornbridge Jaipur.
So, have there been any standouts? Well, again, we have to shout out Lost & Grounded whose canned Hop Hand Fallacy Witbier is convincingly Belgian, fresh, and zesty.
Best overall beer
Our overall beer of the year is Five Points Best. We’re cask drinkers by default, that was the best cask beer we had this year, so what else could it be?
Best brewery
This was another category that prompted a lot of pondering. One brewery sprang immediately to mind not because its beers were the best we had – though they are very good – but because we were so consistently delighted to see them on offer. And that is Cheddar Ales.
We’ve always liked them but in the past year or so have come to regard them as a sign of a publican who knows what they’re doing. They’re often on at The Merchant’s Arms in Hotwells, at The Bank in the centre of Bristol, and now at The Crown in St Judes. A range of clean, well made beers in a range of styles, served in good condition, is all we really want.
Honourable mentions: Five Points, of course; Thornbridge, whose beer we’ll go out of our way to drink; and reliable old Butcombe.
Best pub
We decided The Swan With Two Necks in St Judes, Bristol, was going to be our local and have been trying to go at least once a week for the past year.
We’ve now seen it in all its moods, from Friday night riot to sleep Sunday chillout zone, and find ourselves very attached to it.
It’s also the pub we recommend to visitors because it’s somewhere they might not go without a nudge, and because when we take friends there, they tend to love it. We’re not saying it’s perfect but it works for us.
Honourable mentions: The Kings Head, Victoria Street, Bristol, which would be our local if it was a little closer, and if we could rely on finding space to sit; The Pembury Tavern, our London local; The Evening Star Brighton, which we revisited in February and loved… Oh, look, we could go on. Pubs are just great.
Best non-pub boozer
By which we mean taprooms, bars and cafes. The Lost & Grounded taproom has this one easily. It’s beginning to feel more and more pub-like as the years pass. The team behind the bar is great. There’s almost always one beer that’s new to us, and at least one standard beer that’s on top form. It’s not the cheapest place to drink but still tends to feel like good value because the beer is so beautifully presented.
Honourable mentions: It was nice to get one session in at the Good Chemistry taproom this year – another quite pub-like space.
Best beer book
CAMRA publishing continues its streak with Dr. Christina Wade’s The Devil’s in the Draught Lines: 1,000 years of women in Britain’s beer history. We wrote a full review of this book in which we said:
“If you want to understand the deeper history of brewing in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, it’s a readable survey of previous research. And it’s a must-read if you want your world view shaken up a little – something which is good for all of us to do from time to time.”
Fagans, Dublin, photographed by Lisa Grimm.
Best beer blogger
We’ve done a separate list of our favourite blog posts and articles – a version of news, nuggets and longreads that wraps up the whole year. But here we want to recognise someone who has posted consistently throughout the year and created an evolving composite picture of the drinking scene in Dublin. That is, Lisa Grimm, and her Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs project. It’s frequently featured in our weekly round-ups, or in the bonus links in the footnotes to those posts we share on Patreon.
It’s also a great example of how to create and sustain a blog: pick a topic, or give yourself a mission; find a format; research, write, post, repeat. Anyone can do this! You should do this.
Honourable mentions: We frequently refer to Martin Taylor’s blog when we’re trying to work out where to drink and, like Lisa, he’s consistent in posting, and has a clear project. And the Beer Nut continues to write the best tasting notes in the game, with a new post almost every day.
Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from Samuel Smith to red hot pokers.
First, some news that’s created ripples among beer geeks, even if it’s not likely to trouble civilians: RateBeer is closing down. Founded in 2000, it was acquired by AB-InBev between 2017 and 2019. Jeff Alworth has commentary: “It was an old platform with a mission that has grown obsolete. At the turn of the century, a few years after the birth of the internet, it helped beer fans locate and sort good beer, a task that became ever more hopeless with the proliferation of breweries and beer.”
By way of contrast, a story that did break out of the bubble was Mark Blacklock’s forensic investigation into Samuel Smith’s brewery, and Humphrey Smith’s influence in particular, for The Guardian. We get an attempt at an article like this every now and then, usually recycling the very limited information that’s available, but this piece has both some new facts and, crucially, some fresh insight:
Throughout the months I have worked on this article, I have tried to gain a sense of why Humphrey Smith rules his empire as he does. Perhaps it’s as simple as a desire to turn back the clock to an earlier period, when business owners ruled their realm as they pleased, even if that meant self-destruction. Even so, one mystery has continued to dog me: his obsession with blocking development in the green belt… The Labour government had built a busy road at the bottom of Humphrey Smith’s garden on the advice of a planning expert, and there was nothing he could do about it. His childhood home was invaded by planners who claimed to be bringing progress. Ever since, Smith has militantly resisted both planners and progress. He has built an alternative world, one whose every aspect he tries to control. And if the little king cannot do as he pleases, everyone else can go hang.
At 8-Bits and Bobs hospitality pro Michael Deakin has written about the tension between the need for pubs to be open at Christmas and the need for hospitality staff to have time off. On the one hand, it’s a time of year when loneliness can feel especially acute, and when we’re most eager to connect with (willing to tolerate the company of) our neighbours. On the other hand…
I have spent almost my entire working life in an industry and a system where if you don’t carve out time for yourself where you can, it will be carved out of you. In most other industries there is no consideration as to whether you should work Christmas or not, but I expect this to change. As we hurtle towards ever more extreme forms of capitalism, worker rights will continue to be eradicated and more and more people will be expected to give up the last few remaining bastions of free time they have… There will be tens of thousands of well wishes sent between hospitality staff and regular pub goers this Christmas Day, in both directions, because, like a proper family Christmas, through the drinks,toil, and festive friction, lingers genuine affection. That’s the essence of the struggle we face. The possession of empathy in a system that will not credit you for it, rather use it to exploit you and wring out those last few precious pennies.
In the middle of November the Hand in Hand brewpub in Brighton staged an unusual ceremony in which a red-hot poker was plunged into pints of Hand Brew Co’s old ale, Kora, to mark the dark beer style’s return to the bar after its long summer holiday… The brew bubbled, hissed, steamed and overflowed, leaving a warmer, and slightly caramelised drink. There was a time when this was common practice. My dad, who was brought up in a pub between the world wars, remembered pokers being heated in the open fire in winter so customers could heat their mild ale to taste. There were no reports of casualties… These days it seems to me that beer pokering is a great theatrical way to introduce the festive season, when plain beers are not enough and the dark depths of winter demands something special, an extra spice.
Cask ale at Suarez Family Brewery. SOURCE: Kevin Kain/Casket Beer.
For some reason, we’re always fascinated by stories about cask ale in the US. Perhaps it’s a latent desire to exert some kind of cultural influence over the most powerful country in the world. Or maybe it’s just that it seems odd and interesting. At Casket BeerKevin Kain has written about the influential Suarez Family Brewery in Livingston, New York, which recently acquired a hand pump for its taproom:
Though the taproom hand pump is new, Suarez planted the seeds for their cask beer service years ago. They’ve been making a few beer styles associated with cask beer that have been well-received. This includes their English-style Dark Mild, Saunter. That’s a style that many were not familiar with here in the US, and, like the influence they’ve had on lager, Suarez’s production of Saunter has likely helped many appreciate the traditional English ale. As a result, it’s not hard to find the style now… Inspired by Theakston’s Old Ale, a beer that recently began being distributed here in the US again, they also released their take on that style late last year. The beer, Be It Known, is nitrogenated when canned to provide a texture that mimics cask beer.
We don’t usually listen to beer-related podcasts but long-time reader Oliver Holtaway particularly recommended this episode of Footprints about community pubs, with a focus on three community pubs in Bath in Somerset:
Finally, from Bluesky, a treasure trove…
I decided a while ago on my #12BeersofXmas.
Every Fullers Vintage from 2023 back to 2012.
While I still buy these every year, the excitement has gone since the big overlords took over the brewery, so it feels like time to drink up and close the chapter.
Here’s our pick of writing about beer and pubs from the past week, including NIMBY neighbours, Czech lambic, and Keighley.
First, a couple of related pieces about a common problem facing pubs: neighbours who don’t like the noise. The famous Sekforde in Clerkenwell, London, is struggling with complaints from neighbours, and its operator says further restrictions will make the pub impossible to run.
The Rising Sun in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire was built alongside the Grand Union Canal in the latter half of the 19th century. But, despite being a fixture of the area for well over a century, its future has been potentially jeopardised by a new arrival to the neighbourhood… According to Granger, the new neighbours, who have not been named, have lodged numerous complaints over the last three years to Dacorum Borough Council, the authority covering Berkhamsted, Tring, Hemel Hempstead, and nearby villages.
There is a joke told repeatedly here, that even while South Moravia is the heart of the Czech Republic’s winemaking industry, lager is still its most popular drink. And yet, Mikulov did not have its own contemporary lager brewery until 2011, when Jitka and her husband, Libor Ilčík, founded Pivovar Mamut, or Mammoth Brewery. Its name is a tribute to the region, whose soils continue to yield whole mammoth skeletons today… Since its inception, Pivovar Mamut has brewed what it calls “honest, unfiltered, and unpasteurised lager”—ordinary beer made with care and quality ingredients. That ethos would resonate with many in the beer world, but Jitka was interested in a different kind of brewing. She had made repeat visits to Belgium for work, and while there, encountered lambic: a tradition and set of practices that she instinctively understood from her winemaking upbringing.
The Albert, Keighley. SOURCE: Chris Dyson/Real Ale, Real Music.
At Real Ale, Real MusicChris Dyson has an interesting companion piece to the recent Pellicle article about Timothy Taylor – that is, a pub crawl of Keighley. Where, of course, Taylor’s rules:
It had been years since I’d last had a beer in Keighley. Back in the 1970s and 1980s.. Keighley town centre back in those days had plenty of Taylors pubs to go at, with the brewery having a virtual monopoly. However, over the years, places such as the Cricketers, the Burlington, Globe, Vine, Eastwood Tavern, and Burlington have all gone. Others such as the Friendly, Brown Cow, and Volunteers still operate, but are no longer run by Taylors. Of the original town centre pubs, only the Boltmakers, Royal, and Albert continue to be operated by the brewery, along with another pub they acquired a few years ago, the Lord Rodney, which now operates as Taylors On The Green… I broke my journey at the Albert. A large pub situated beside a busy roundabout, it is one of the longest-standing of Taylor’s current portfolio of 19 pubs.
Long Arm. SOURCE: Will Hawkes.
Will Hawkes’s newsletter London Beer City is always essential reading. If you’re not a subscriber you can now read last month’s edition online. The format’s not ideal (a PDF in a window) but the content is good enough that we’re happy to put up with it. The most interesting bit in November’s edition is about a brewpub in London we’ve never heard of, created at the height of the craft beer boom, then neglected, until the recent arrival of a brewer from America:
Founded at the Ealing Park Tavern in 2015, Long Arm moved into The City two years’ later and was, to all intents and purposes, then largely forgotten… Until recently the bar was bedecked with various bits of naff American sports paraphernalia, but a new broom at the company – Danish COO Michael Farquhar, once of Ottolenghi and D&D – has done away with that. The intention now is to focus on beer… Which brings us, finally, to the important bit. Head brewer Jason Leeman arrived in London from the USA about five years ago when his wife got a job here; by then, crucially, he had acquired 15 years of experience at small breweries in Colorado… Perhaps because he’s been away from the US for a while, perhaps because he clearly knows his own mind, Leeman’s beer evokes an earlier era in American craft-brewing, before a shrinking market and hopmania combined to make everything less balanced.
SOURCE: David Jesudason.
Award-winning beer writer David Jesudason has taken a bar job, doing one shift a month at The Shirker’s Rest, New Cross, South London. His first shift was prompted by a desire to help sell a beer he brewed with St Austell but he found the experience eye-opening:
[Working] in a pub gives you a rare gift of seeing the space for what it truly is even if that is amorphous – at first it went from being a slew of self-contained tables and then a communal mass with multiple conversations tied together with the love of beer. And, at times when I wasn’t part of the fun or the work, I had a vision of it being a high-street shop – the marvel of the micropub unwrapped… The most shameful confession is that for a few seconds when facing random customers I felt like I over-explained to somehow overcompensate that I was more than a bartender – maybe James’s intervention was warranted. That I had somehow failed in my career as a writer and become perma-frosted since 1999, which reveals how I may subconsciously view service industry jobs as somehow inferior to other pursuits.
As we wind up, let’s visit a couple more pubs. First, Martin Taylor has notes on one of his absolute favourite top ten pubs, The Sutton Arms in London:
Not many loo stops pubs at all, full of Santas or not, on the walk up from St Pauls through the Barbican to Angel… But I’d found my target, a pub which 3 years ago I immediately warmed to, as much as for the wonderful Old School landlord as the crafty keg, which in all fairness should have invalidated my completion of the GBG… Then the Sutton Arms was almost empty. Now it is heaving on a Thursday evening, almost entirely youthful post-work trade, and my photos are restricted to wall art,
Meanwhile, in Dublin, Lisa Grimm has been to a totally new pub, Molly’s Bar, which sounds as if it might make an interesting case study in years to come:
While much of The Liberties is blessed with Georgian and Victorian architecture, the building housing Molly’s Bar is relatively new, and not as characterful as many of its neighbours. The exterior is giving ‘breezeblock TARDIS’ in its current deep blue – quite a change from the bright pink everywhere when this was drag bar Doll Society, now decamped (well, ‘relocated’ is more apt here) to a spot inside Hyde, nearer Grafton Street.
Finally, one of the things we missed most after leaving Twitter was Martin’s posts about his pub crawls…
Stop 3 in Gent. Trappistenhuis (Orval ambassadeur) Draught beers include Three Rules Trappist collaboration and Chimay Grand Réserve.
“This week I’ve been thinking about the lack of criticism in beer writing. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the years, because beer and pub reviewing doesn’t really exist in any meaningful way compared to how it does in wine or food writing.”
This isn’t quite the same issue as one we’ve addressed various times over the years: why is beer writing so uncritical?
The answer to that question is mostly that there’s a collective sense that small, independent breweries need to be supported, not kicked at.
It’s a choice each beer writer (pro or hobbyist) has to make for themselves. As Katie Mather observes…
I generally don't write negative reviews because I can't be arsed with the backlash. People online are rude, and brewery owners get personally offended and DM-y. For the sake of my sanity, I just say nothing.
But Matt’s question is about why more publications don’t have a beer critic on their books.
Apart from the odd exception, we cannot generally pick up a newspaper at the weekend and get intel on which beers to seek out or buy.
But the thing is, we do not need that intel.
If we see a beer for sale that looks interesting, we’re willing to invest a fiver in a pint, or a couple of quid in a half. If it’s bad, we haven’t lost much in terms of cash or time.
Compare that to a film, for example, where a critical review could save you £15 and two and a half hours of your life.
From our own small experience writing a small column for the Guardian Guide for a small amount of time a decade or so ago, we also know that beer criticism is limited by the availability of the beers in question.
There is no point in recommending a beer that is only produced in limited volumes, or only available regionally.
So, you end up writing about national brands from larger producers, available in supermarkets or mainstream pubs.
That can be interesting – especially if you’re able to highlight hidden gems that might otherwise be overlooked. For example, we discovered McEwan’s Champion because Martyn Cornell took the trouble to explain why it was a more interesting beer than we’d realised.
There’s also the problem that our review of a pint of a cask ale from, say, Ashley Down Brewery at a pub here in Bristol might reflect a totally different experience to yours at a festival in Leeds in six months’ time.
When a wine reviewer says “Grab the 2021 Riesling from Château Bloggs” yes, there are variables, but far fewer than for a pint of ale.
Batch, storage, age, condition, presentation… There are so many ways a beer can be screwed up in the supply chain – or enhanced.
Talking this over between ourselves, though, we can think of some instances where beer criticism might be useful.
First, for hyped-up, expensive, limited edition beers. Should you blow £30 on a 750ml bottle of a sour beer from a brewery with a mixed reputation? Or save your money?
Secondly, where the styles or production methods are strange or unfamiliar. Last week, we drank two Grodziskie beers in Poland, but did not have the critical framework to know if they were good examples of the style.
Even in these cases, though, as beer geeks, we like taking a punt. Being lost and trying to find our own way is where the enjoyment comes from.
