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News, nuggets and longreads 9 March 2024: Heroes & Villains

Here’s our selection of the best beer writing from the past week, including Meteor, Elusive and Lokalbiere.

First, though, some news. We wrote recently about what we’ve gained and lost in British beer in the past decade and had Meantime in the ‘lost’ column. Now, it’s got even more lost, as Asahi has announced it will be moving production from South East London to Chiswick, consolidating its UK brewing at Fuller’s.

And there’s more: from this fascinating story about a Ukrainian woman who has taken on the running of a pub in Newport, South Wales, we learned that Tiny Rebel is closing its flagship bar in its home town because of “decreasing footfall and rising operating costs”.


Meteor beer advertising sign, Strasbourg, France.

For Good Beer Hunting Anaïs Lecoq has written about Brasserie Meteor whose distinctly superior lager we enjoyed in Strasbourg a few years ago:

It’s unusual to find a big production site in a town center in France, but Meteor brews its 500,000 hectoliters (about 420,000 barrels) right in the middle of Hochfelden. The gigantic silo, with the brewery’s name in large, bright red letters, is unmissable from afar, giving Meteor a place in the skyline… The aroma of wort that blankets the streets is also part of the town’s atmosphere, with Meteor brewing as often as seven days a week in the busy season.


Lager illustration.

At Daft Eejit Brewing Andreas Krennmair tackles a persistent gripe: “All beer is IPA these days!” As he explains, with reference to German language sources, people have been complaining about the dominance of one beer style or another for centuries:

150 to 200 years ago, German beer and brewing experienced a massive shift. Small breweries were previously mostly brewing relatively small amounts of beer solely for the local market using little to no automation, brewers were organized in guilds, not interested in scaling out their businesses, and sometimes even bound by local law to brew and sell their beer on a rota (Reihebrauen). Then the industrial revolution came and destroyed a lot of these structures… Within just a few decades, a lot of small, local breweries simply shut down because they couldn’t compete, and local beer styles… simply went extinct because nobody wanted to drink them anymore. A lot of these beers we only know by name these days, a few have been preserved in the form of recipes, though a lot of details like how specific malts were prepared are not so well documented, leaving more questions than answers.


A smiling Andy Parker with a glass of beer outside Elusive Brewing.
SOURCE: Pellicle/Matthew Curtis.

At Pellicle David Jesudason has profiled Elusive Brewing and its founder, Andy Parker, who has acquired the perhaps burdensome reputation of “the nicest man in brewing”:

Andy’s journey from experimental homebrewer to Elusive owner and operator was documented in detail in his 2018 book CAMRA’s Essential Home Brewing. He also blogged about beer and homebrewing from 2010 under the name ‘Musings of an Elusive Beer Geek.’ But to properly understand his origin story we have to go back to 1983… At 10 years old, Andy first caught a glimpse of a beige plastic box that would change his life. The BBC Micro is now the kind of retro computer that looks garish from the harsh glare of tech-savvy 2024—a box monitor, sat on a basic 8-bit processor and Cold War nuclear launchpad-style keyboard. But to schoolchildren like Andy, it was a glimpse into the future.


BrewDog bar sign.

At VinePair Will Hawkes has dug into the collapse of BrewDog’s reputation among UK craft beer drinkers and the possible future of the company:

Every so often, Brewdog goes viral on British social media. An ill-judged spat with a much-loved Scottish lager brand; anger over the revelation that it was going to stop paying Britain’s real living wage; a skit that appears to make fun of the middle-aged, baseball-capped owners; an arch review of the brewery’s flagship London bar, which describes it as an “infernal pint crèche for confused children and the wife-dodging salarymen they’ll one day become.”… As one Twitter user put it recently, “When you see Brewdog trending it’s never because they’ve made a lovely new beer, is it?”


The City Arms, a Victorian pub in central Manchester.

On Substack, Jim Cullen recounts a crawl of central Manchester pubs, including old favourites, famous classics, and some that were new to him, despite his decades of drinking in the city:

As we approached [The Circus Tavern] Jaz said “At least the doors are open”…. Which reminded me that when the pub used to reach (its very small) capacity, they’d lock the doors. At the front. (Those in the know could access via the rear of the premises.)… In this pub, the great thing is that you don’t have a choice but to interact with the other customers. We got chatting to a lovely couple from Maghull and shot the breeze for a while. Just one of the things that makes The Circus special.


Finally, from BlueSky

IrishBeerHistory (@beerfoodtravel.bsky.social) on BlueSky: "There are those who say we shouldn't be doing  this kind of thing. Those people are wrong, of course..." The accompanying photo is of Rye River Big Bangin' IPA blended with Saison Dupont.

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

Categories
pubs

The lesser-spotted underage drinker in 2024

When did you last see underage drinkers even try to get served in a pub? It’s what you might call a dying tradition.

Ray’s dad says he started drinking in a pub on the Somerset Levels when he was 12, surrounded by adults who made sure he and his brothers (mostly) behaved themselves.

And in the mid-1990s, Jess went to East London pubs from 16 hiding behind her tall friend, though nobody ever got asked for ID.

She’d sit in the darkest corner of the back room with all the other juvenile boozers, tolerated by management on the understanding that they behaved. 

(Teenage Jess’s drinks of choice, in case you were wondering: snakebite and black, or Newcastle Brown Ale.)

It sounds sort of cute and nostalgic but there are good reasons why you might not want actual children to drink. Pubs have quite rightly been put under pressure to apply the law, check for ID, and refuse service if they’re in doubt.

Still, the other day, we saw what looked to us like a group of adolescents getting served in a pub without too much trouble.

We say “what looked to us like” because we’ve reached a point where people under, say, 25 all look about the same age to us. What we think is a schoolboy turns out to be a bloke on his way to the office or, worse, a teacher. That kind of thing.

Anyway, these lads definitely looked young, and the bar staff thought so too, because they asked for ID. One of them produced a document which, even from a distance, looked unconvincing. After a bit of conversation, the person behind the bar was convinced, or gave up, and agreed they could have their drinks.

They ordered, nervously, three pints of lager, without specifying which one.

As they made their way to a table they all but gave each other fist bumps. Their conspiratorial manner and excitement were obvious.

“Alright lads, play it cool, play it cool,” said Jess.

At which point, they took out their phones and started recording videos of themselves with their beers, pouting and posing for, we suppose, Tik-Tok or something similar.

The middle-aged group on the table next to them asked, amused, what they were up to. The phones went away and some polite, good-natured conversation ensued.

There’s no astonishing twist to this story. The lads drank their pints, slowly and a bit weirdly, as if they’d never held a glass before, or tasted beer. They made quiet conversation. And after a while, they left, with a round of shy waves and goodbyes to their neighbours and the pub staff.

Legally, they probably shouldn’t have been served – one ID, even if it is legit, doesn’t cover three people. But it was hard to find the whole business anything less than rather sweet.

And we need them to develop the pub habit, don’t we, if we want these places to exist at all in 20 years time?

Back in the 1990s and 00s there were conversations about lowering the legal age for drinking in pubs so that this could be a safe, supervised activity. It was tied into various moral panics over kids ‘hanging around’ on the streets, alcopops, and lager loutism.

Which politician would bother arguing for that now?

There are some additional thoughts on youthful drinking habits and the avocado toast paradox for subscribers to our Patreon.

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News

News, nuggets and longreads 2 March 2024: Because of the Cats

Here’s our pick of the best reading about beer and pubs from the past week including old breweries, writer’s pubs, and at least one machine gun.

First, a couple of bits of news that grabbed our attention:

  1. The Crooked House, the pub that was burned down in suspicious circumstances, is to be rebuilt by order of South Staffordshire Council. Here’s the news story from the BBC and there’s detailed commentary by Laura Hadland on her website at the bottom of a long page we bet she now wishes she’d structured in reverse order.
  2. A slew of new flagship pubs and taprooms have opened or been announced which strikes us as interesting in the wider gloomy context around hospitality: the Craft Beer Co’s new vintage beer pub, a St Austell and Harbour partnership in Cornwall, and a big Siren place in Reading. All via the indispensable Beer Today.

An old sign advertising Stella Artois on the corner of a bar in Leuven.

At Beervana Jeff Alworth digs into a thorny question: how old really are these breweries that claim to be old? And from where do they get these fantastic founding dates?

According to its own history, Weihenstephan started life as a monastery, going back to the 8th century. A nearby farm produced hops, so the brewery believes the monks were making beer there, but they don’t mark their start date until 1040, when the abbot received a license to brew on the grounds. Over the next four centuries, the monastery burned down four times and was depopulated by three plagues, and hit by armies and at least one earthquake. Still, the monks rebuilt. While the history through this period is pretty sketchy, I don’t have any problem calling this legit continuity… However, here the historical record fragments for the next 400ish years and we skip to 1803, when the monastery was secularized. Did the monks continue to brew consistently that whole time?


A drawing of a man with a pint of beer and his hand raised to his head, looking troubled or pained.

There’s a rather soul-bearing piece by Adrian Tierney-Jones on Substack about loneliness and the pub:

There are certainly times when I have been lonely, a state of mind desperately endless it seemed, alone in a flat that once held someone else’s voice and still contained some of her items, the lack of promise petering out and the slowness of the tick-tock of the clock stifling — anxious times as I thought then, when I thought I wanted to sleep for a long time, even though not long afterwards I realised this feeling was an indulgence… Now though, if I feel I am lonely what am I really asking myself and how do I deal with it? Maybe it is a case that the loneliness I feel can be assisted, as well as resisted, by the imagination and the memories of friends, past lovers, family members and that small island of delicious and decadent solitude I experience when in a crowd, sitting in a pub that is slowly being filled with people for instance. They bring with them their lives, their voices and their happiness…


Illustration: a quiet corner in a quiet pub, with table and stools.

Katie Mather has been thinking about what might constitute a “writer’s pub”:

I’ve been trying to plan a short pubs-and-pushbikes break for myself over the summer where I can also get a little reading and scribbling done, and honestly, it’s become a fixation. No matter where I look I can never be sure what I want. Comfy seats? Not old enough. Rural and quaint? Too isolated. What am I looking for? Does the ideal writers’ pub actually exist? I’ve been zooming in and out of Google Maps all week trying to find a place that strikes the balances I require—most of which are incredibly hypocritical.


The Dirty Shame Saloon, a simple wooden building in wild west style, in the snow.
SOURCE: The Beer Chaser/Yaak Real Estate.

You know when you discover a website that’s apparently been around for years and you’re not sure how you missed it? The Beer Chaser is written by Don Williams, a retiree and compulsive ticker of bars and pubs across America. He has a particular interest in dive bars and one of his favourites is The Dirty Shame Saloon in Yaak, Montana, which sounds very… American:

Joan Melcher’s two books on Montana Watering Holes [suggest] there are at least three and possibly four incredible stories strictly on how the Shame was originally named… One involves fighter Joe Lewis and a second relates the saga of seven dead cows – shot by a guy named Jimmy who left them on the road in front of the bar.  Don’t forget the other about a mother-in-law of one of the original owners who would sit in the corner of the bar and admonish him “What a ‘dirty shame’ it was that you bought this bar.” 

There are a few things in the post that made us say “Oh dear” and “Yikes”, including a weird reference to someone as “a female”. But as a portrait of a place, and a people, and a pub that is not our world it’s fascinating.


A view of the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle.

Stephen Liddell has been putting together some historic pub crawls which has led him to investigate the story of Newcastle pub landlord William Campbell, “the heaviest man in the world”:

Born in Glasgow in 1856, Campbell was one of seven children in a family who were all of average proportions, but his parents will have realised they had a whopper on their hands when he’d reached four stone at the age of nine months… Inspired by a freak show that visited Glasgow, Campbell decided to exhibit his vast body for money. He billed himself as ‘The Biggest Man In Britain’, ‘Her Majesty’s Largest Subject’ or ‘The Heaviest Man In The World’, depending on how the fancy took him… The Duke of Wellington public house on High Bridge in Newcastle was owned by the brewers Bartleman & Crighton and had been raided by the police for illegal gambling, coming within a whisker of losing its licence. The brewery decided to change the tone of their business by hiring a celebrity to run the pub, and celebrities didn’t come any bigger than William Campbell.


A selection of crisps and nuts on a pub bar.

As you’ll know if you’ve been following us for a while ‘pub grub’, pub snacks, and the rise of the gastropub are favourite subjects of ours. Ron Pattinson is currently mining 1970s editions of The Brewers’ Guardian for nuggets and has shared a few posts on related subjects this week, including a survey about pub food from 1970:

“Apart from the obvious things, like bad hygiene, I think what I dislike most is that one can never really tell how long the food has been standing in the warming cabinet. It’s easy enough to spot a curled up sandwich or a piece of mouldy cheese but if you fancy shepherd’s pie or sausages I am put off by the thought that they may have been re-heated from the morning session. Perhaps I am too nervous.”

This also reminded us of a joke in the 1940 Ealing comedy Saloon Bar, in which a pub landlord asks a barmaid since when the sandwiches have been on sale. “Last month,” she replies, “but they’ve been under glass you know.” He drops one on the floor, picks it up, blows off the dust and puts it back. “Well, see that they go tonight.”


Finally, from social media…

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

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pubs

An unscientific approach to Brighton

Its a sign of a good drinking town that you can find multiple decent pubs without doing much research.

In Brighton last weekend, on a trip with Ray’s parents, we weren’t sure how much time we’d have for the pub.

So, we didn’t bother studying the books or blogs, or scouring Google.

The only thing we had in the back of our minds was that it might be nice to revisit The Evening Star after 15 years, on the other side of the Dark-Star-Fuller’s-Asahi situation.

As it happened, we did get a couple of hours free on Saturday afternoon and went straight there.

We caught it between lunchtime and the post-football-match rush and so had our pick of scrubbed wooden tables. It felt like a country pub, with solitary readers and groups of older men in wax jackets and battered hats.

On the bar were cask ales from Burning Sky and others. There were also interesting keg beers such as Saison Dupont.

Everything we drank was in excellent condition, served with distinct pride, but we got stuck on Evening Star (Downlands) Revival at 4.8%. It’s the kind of clear, clean, citrusy pale ale that briefly bloomed for a decade at the start of the century. You know, the kind of thing for which Dark Star became famous.

“…the cashless thing is about complete control of the population…” “…used to brew at Partridge Green…” “…these hoppy IPAs gripe my guts…”

When the football fans began to turn up, the atmosphere changed, but not for the worse.

This remains an utterly great pub.

A wall at The Brick with a vintage German poster from 1954 with a stylised stag's head. There are dangling lamps and simple wooden tables with candles.
European signifiers at The Brick.

We heard about The Brick when The Brick followed us on Instagram two days before our unannounced visit. Spooky.

Its branding and proposition appealed to us immediately: warm minimalism, Czech and German beer.

On a rainy Sunday evening, in the wake of the half marathon, it was a little quiet. But that’s not a bad test of the fundamental fitness of a pub.

With its dark green walls, vintage furniture and antler-themed greebling, even with six customers, it felt alive.

One of the owners was pottering about tidying up and stock taking; two lads were chatting in, we think, Italian; and a group at the bar were exchanging horror stories from working in commercial kitchens.

The highlight of the visit was Vinohradský 11, a Czech pale lager with a delightful flowery aroma, a hint of butter, and a heavy layer of pure zing.

When we ordered, the loitering owner intervened to tell the person behind the bar: “I think we’ve got a nice little Vinohradský glass for that one…” They did, and it enhanced the pleasure enormously.

Squint and, with that handled mug to your mouth, you could convince yourself you were in some eastern bloc bar in 1983. In a good way.

The interior of a modern pub with tiled back bar, keg taps, bunting, chalkboards, and very bright lights.
Craft beer signifiers at The Maris & Otter.

Much as we enjoyed this modern bar, and its continental beer, we then had an itch to drink Harvey’s somewhat on its home turf. A 6-minute walk away we found The Maris & Otter, which we’d clocked on an earlier walk.

Again, it’s tough to judge a pub on a rainy Sunday evening, but this felt inherently bland. It’s an attempt by a trad brewery to do ‘contemporary’ which means:

  • bare brick and concrete walls
  • prints of otters in Peaky Blinders hats
  • the words ‘craft beer’ in random places
  • bright lights
  • pop music

If it hadn’t been for the line up on the bar, we’d have walked, but when you offer us Harvey’s best bitter, mild, porter and old ale, you’ve got us hooked.

The porter was wonderful, we might even say magical, with everything you get from something like Fuller’s London Porter plus that distinctive funky yeast character. The best bitter was in wonderful condition, too, but served in a highball type glass which did it no favours.

The door of a pub toilet with signs warning that drugs are not allowed on the premises, and that only one person at a time is allowed in the cubicle.
Normal pub signifiers at The Waggon & Horses.

As a footnote, Ray also enjoyed Sussex Best at The Waggon & Horses, a city centre pub chosen by his dad because (a) it was handy and (b) looked down-to-earth.

It wasn’t anything special, as a pub, except, somehow, it was. Extraordinarily ordinary. Buttered white toast. A Rich Tea biscuit.

The staff weren’t obsequiously friendly but seemed to have the knack for treating customers like human beings.

The other customers were damp shoppers, lads on crawls, and a trio of older fellers, evidently from London, who made welcoming chat with Dad while Ray was at the bar.

And the beer was… excellent.

Dark Star Hophead, that 3.8% wonder, as good as it’s ever tasted, and Harvey’s Sussex Best in similarly shimmering form.

It seemed to bring Dad, not long out of hospital, and still not quite himself, back to life, as only a really good pint can do.

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News

News, nuggets and longreads 24 February 2024: Pretty Flower

Here’s our pick of the week’s writing about beer and pubs, with breakfast pints, social awkwardness, alder wood, and more.

First, some sad news from our old stamping ground of Penzance: The Star Inn at Crowlas is closing, getting a tidy up, and going on the market along with the attached brewery. If you followed us during our time in PZ you probably got sick of hearing us go on about Potion 9, the brewery’s flagship beer. When Pete Elvin, the genius behind the brewery died at Christmas, we did wonder what might happen next. And perhaps this was in the back of our minds when we wrote about learning to embrace change in our newsletter last weekend.


A pub clock.
Not a Dublin pub.

For Totally Dublin Michael Lanigan has written about the 6 pubs in Dublin that are allowed to open early in the morning, thanks to old licences. Accompanied by evocative photos by by Malcolm McGettigan it’s packed with small incidents, characters, and salty dialogue:

Inside the Wind Jammer, the deep babel of a few dozen male voices chattering boomed through the barroom, and the bright white lights emanating from its chandeliers sent a jolt through each punter stepping in to escape the drowsy city… “I can tell you a lie about the milkman,” said a man in his early fifties, wearing a black pork pie hat and perched on a stool at the rounded marble counter, a large bottle of Bulmers before him… “This place is a nice friendly shop,” the man in the pork pie hat said. “I’ve seen taxi drivers drop off Americans in here, off a flight. They’d be awake all night and are looking to get a beer. So, I’ve been in here, fucking nine in the morning with a singsong, drinking with cunts from New York.”

(We’re grateful to The Beer Nut for sending us the link to this story, which we’d have otherwise missed.)


Stools at the bar in a pub.

At Pints of Cask Make You Strong Ross Cummins has written just the kind of over-analysis of the pub experience that we enjoy. Working out where to sit, or where not to sit, is something that happens mostly subconsciously, so it’s interesting to see the thought process laid out in agonising detail:

Could we sit at the bar? Not really, one person maybe but not two with winter coats, and a camera bag et al. We did want to sit in the lovely cosy bar area, and there was a small table available. We hesitated though. Instead of one of us immediately sitting in the empty space, in the beautifully traditional British way, we took in the pub, stunning as it is, and got cocky. Just as our pints were being placed on the bar a definite regular walked in, taking off his coat in the process. We assumed he would take the available seats.


The garden at Wiper & True with tower blocks at Lawrence Hill in the background.

Anthony Gladman’s piece about Wiper & True for Pellicle grabbed our attention for a couple of reasons. First, it’s one of our local breweries, and the new taproom described in the article is one of our nearest licenced establishments. (Though still not very near.) Secondly, it centres on a beer-cider hybrid – a concept that seemed significant to us back in 2014 when our book Brew Britannia came out. Then, it was Wild Beer Co’s Ninkasi. Now, it’s Orchard Ale:

Technically speaking, Orchard Ale is a graf: a beer-cider hybrid that sees both wort and apple juice blended and fermented together. (The name ‘graf’ actually comes from a fictional beverage invented by author Stephen King in The Dark Tower series of novels.) Wild yeasts do their work with as little intervention as possible from the brewers. The finished drink sits somewhere between a cider and a lambic. It has the crispness of a Somerset cider but with a softening background sweetness from the malt which saves it from being too dry… It’s like drinking the brewery’s deepest roots. The apples come from an orchard Michael planted in 2010 with his wife, Francesca—he made cider long before he ever brewed beer.


Schlenkerla Cap

Here’s a post at Blog-Ums-Bier by Ralf in German (thanks, Google Translate and ChatGPT!) that provides tasting notes and background on the growing range of beers from Schlenkerla in Bamberg:

Recently, I found myself curious about [Schlenkerla’s cherry-wood smoked beer] Weichsel, and pondered the different types of wood that could be used to smoke beers. Then, out of nowhere, Schlenkerla releases their own twist: a dark beer with malt smoked over alder wood. So, what’s the verdict on the Alder? That sounds as if I want to taste the wood itself. And honestly, when it comes to Schlenkerla, that’s not far off. Their standard beer, Märzen, is famous (or infamous) for its distinct ham-like flavour. This brings us to the topic of wood: just as ham is smoked with carefully chosen wood – often juniper for raw ham, and beech for the more delicate sausage varieties – Schlenkerla Märzen also incorporates beech smoke. So, the aroma of beech smoke is something you’re likely familiar with… Alder, on the other hand, is something we don’t really know about.


The spire of Big Ben with the Millennium Wheel in the background.

Having both worked in Westminster when we were younger we were interested to read Kate Whannel’s piece for the BBC about about the history and fate of division bells in pubs around Parliament. We both recall a time when we were in the St Stephen’s Tavern and the division bell rang, prompting David Blunkett to rush past and out of the pub with his guide dog. Anyway, it turns out they’re endangered, and no longer ringing as once they did:

The bell in the Marquis of Granby, once a favourite spot for Conservatives, portentously stopped ringing just before the pandemic shut pubs across the country – and hasn’t started back up since… Pub manager at the Marquis of Granby Jo does want to get it back up and running. “I like having it, it is unique to this area, unique to Westminster, but trying to get it fixed is a nightmare.”


Finally, here’s an interesting looking book by Dr Christina Wade that we’ve ordered and look forward to reading:

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