Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

It’s Saturday morning and time for us to round-up the best writing about beer from the past week, including pints, Pilsner and pubs.

The Irish journalist Nell McCafferty has died at the age of 80 resurfacing the story of a protest she led in the 1970s, as described by Dr Christina Wade in this 2018 blog post:

McCafferty led a group of women to a Dublin pub. Here, they ordered the socially acceptable drink of brandy, and after it was served, proceeded to order a pint of Guinness… Which they were flatly refused.  Refused on the account of them being women, and most especially because it was a pint. They drank their brandy, refused to pay and walked out… It was acts like this that drew attention to this horrendous practice and helped pave the way for women to happily consume their pints in pubs across the nation. However, it wasn’t until 2000 (!!!) that the Equal Status Act barred this sort of sexist discrimination.

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At Daft Eejit Brewing Andreas Krennmair offers a snapshot of the competition for dominance between Vienna Lager and Pilsner at around the turn of the 20th century:

In terms of production, the largest brewery was of course Dreher Kleinschwechat, with about 610,000 hl for the brewing season 1892/1893. Pilsen on the other hand brewed 522,270 hl in the same time period. Dreher’s Hungary-based brewery in Steinbruch brewed another 400,000 hl, while for the other two Dreher breweries, no volumes are listed. It shows to what a large operation the Pilsner brewery had grown, while Dreher’s advantage was having multiple large breweries across Austria-Hungary that were all serving different markets… One thing though where Pilsen absolutely excelled the Dreher breweries was the number of beer wagons: while Kleinschwechat owned and operated 60 of them, and Steinbruch 20, Pilsen had much more capacity for export with a whopping 132 beer wagons.

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Every now and then The Beer Nut comes over to England from Ireland and conducts one of his inspections. This time, it’s Sheffield that’s come under his stern gaze:

I wasn’t a fan of the Kelham Island Tavern the first time I visited. The beer selection is excellent, but it has always been uncomfortably loud and crowded, and so it was again. I took my pint of Left Handed Giant’s Dark Mild out to the alley that passes as a beer garden and sulked through it there. It added an extra layer of disappointment to the experience, looking good — a clear dark garnet — but tasting quite plain. Sweet cereal is the bulk of it, like honeyed porridge, and then an off-kilter tang of cork oak. Though only 3.4% ABV, it’s quite heavy and took me a while to get through. There was no sign of the coffee roast I look for in mild, nor any dark fruit. A little chocolate arrived towards the end, but not enough to redeem the beer for me. I wasn’t staying for another.

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Scott Spencer has been pub crawling again, this time around Stalybridge, Ashton-under-Lyne and Droylsden:

My day commenced in Stalybridge, a town renowned for its historical significance as one of the pioneering centres of textile production during the Industrial Revolution, notably with the establishment of a water-powered cotton mill in 1776. In 1995, it earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records for hosting both the longest pub name, ‘The Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn,’ and the shortest, ‘Q Inn’… [Stalybridge Buffet Bar] is among the few remaining original Victorian Station Buffet bars in England, with its structure dating back to the station’s reconstruction in 1885.

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At her Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs Lisa Grimm has a sort of combined pub and book review, using Maurice Gorham’s 1949 Back to the Local as a lens through which to view Mooney’s of Abbey Street:

An Irish journalist and, later, broadcaster with the BBC, Gorham had been educated in the UK and lived in London until the late 1940s, when he returned to Dublin and served as the Director of RTÉ Radio… While the historic Mooney’s of Abbey Street was at 1 Abbey Street (indeed, the signage is still visible on the façade), we’re now just a few doors down at 4 Abbey Street, and there’s been a very recent glow-up to the interior. We’re leaning in to ‘traditional pub’ here, but it’s well-executed, with dark wood, deep colours and a bit of slightly-spurious history here and there, but it’s all quite pleasant, with a number of snugs and booths… The stained glass toward the back remains from its previous incarnation as Madigan’s, with the name-change happening in 2020. 

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Here’s some good pondering from Jeff Alworth at Beervana on the potential different meanings of ‘local’:

What’s curious is how contingent that concept of local is. In Oregon, there’s the very local—the brewery in your neighborhood or town—and then the “local,” which means made in the state. Portlanders don’t distinguish between Breakside (Portland), pFriem (Hood River), or Deschutes (Bend) when they’re reaching for a sixer; they’re all local. You might give your local brewery more of your business than driving to the one a little further away, but really, anything in the state will scratch our parochial itch. And it is parochial, because here’s the thing: you won’t see many (or any) cans on that grocery shelf that come from Vancouver, WA. Vancouver is, even by Belgian standards, very close—just a river’s width away—while Bend, even by Oregonian standards, is a bit of a drive (three hours). Yet in our beer-buying decisions, the latter is the “local.”

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Finally, from BlueSky…

More South Bohemia: an undated photograph in the Prácheňské muzeum, Písek. Farm workers drinking what appears to be dark lager (see the man with a mug, center left), possibly 1920s or 1930s, sitting atop sheafs of just-cut wheat. 🍺

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— Evan Rail (@evanrail.bsky.social) Aug 19, 2024 at 10:22

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

Against all odds (bereavement, Covid) here’s our regular round-up of the best writing about beer and pubs from the past week.

First, some news that interested us because it made us think about where we might be in the cycle: Birra Moretti has overtaken Carling as Britain’s best-selling draught lager, according to new stats from CGA. This, along with the ongoing fascination with the success of Madrí, reminded us that the craft beer boom was preceded by a ‘world lager’ craze back in the 1990s and noughties. Consumers are clearly expressing discernment – Carling simply won’t do! – but not straying too far from base in terms of style or flavour. Moretti is also stronger than Carling and marketed as a ‘premium’ product. Perhaps there are hints here, too, of a little more spending power among drinkers? Anyway, it struck us as a ‘signal’ of some kind.

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Perhaps it’s because we haven’t been able to get away to Germany this year that we’ve been particularly drawn to the beer garden travelogues from Franz Hofer. This week’s is a report from the idyllic Waldwirtschaft:

That sweeping vista across the valley below! It’s the first thing you notice when you find a seat in the Waldwirtschaft’s expansive beer garden. Known locally as the “WaWi,” the Waldwirtschaft in southwestern Munich is nestled in the woods just beyond a residential neighbourhood lined with villas. Perched atop a beer cellar cut into an embankment high above the Isar River, the WaWi conveys a topographical sense of what it meant to cut fermentation and lagering cellars into riverbanks in the days before modern refrigeration. Indeed, this entire area was once a bastion of beer cellars… As with any top-notch beer garden worth its malt, local lore has woven a certain mystique around the WaWi, which found itself at the center of the “Beer Garden Revolution” of 1995. So significant was this local upheaval that it helped usher in the Beer Garden Ordinance of 1999.

Wait, what? Tell us more! (He does.)

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At Good Beer Hunting, which is still with us for now, Maggie Gigandet has written about the practicalities of capturing wild yeast for commercial use. It sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? And very romantic. But there’s a reason most breweries just buy off-the-shelf yeast:

Three Nashville brewers sipped beer from small plastic cups in the backroom of Bootleg Biology, Tennessee’s only yeast lab. The lab’s garage door, framed by an old red, white, and blue brewers’ conference banner, was open despite the early February cold. The beer they were sampling was brewed with a wild yeast collected from a sunflower. Surrounded by brewing and lab equipment, they compared tasting notes. They pronounced it “Belgian saison-y,” with flavors of bubblegum and banana… Chad Mueller, head brewer at TennFold—who, with his colleagues, had begun their hunt for this yeast six months earlier—was surprised by the banana flavor. “I’m pretty interested,” he said. But he wasn’t sold. Did the yeast have a gene that could lead to exploding cans and ruin the taste of his beers? They’d need to test it.

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At Substack David Jesudason shares the story of Albert Gordon, Cambridge’s first black landlord, via interviews recorded for a local oral history project:

“We brought an atmosphere to the pub,” says Albert. “It became known as a friendly pub in Cambridge – you could come in there and chat with either me or Lorna. We had a good relationship with our customers. We help them, sometimes [they] ask us a favour – we would jump in a car and take them wherever they want to go… “People loved us – even now people talk about ‘Albert from the Midland Tavern’. Everyone after tried to build on what we started. A lot of people came and saw how Jamaican people lived and the Jamaican way of life – the happy part of our life. One of the things we gave to them is the music.”… There was no food served but there was music. And, boy, was there music – reggae and soul – and every so often a steel band. There was also Northern Soul and once a month rock n roll with Teddy Boys (often associated with racism) turning up. “I tried to get everything for everybody in there,” Albert said.

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As converts to the way of Wegbier we were intrigued by a piece at VinePair by Will Hawkes about the European habit of drinking on the move:

The German passion for Wegbier doesn’t extend to all drinking on the go. Beer bikes — a human-propelled vehicle, seating up to 16 customers, who drink as they pedal — have been restricted in Germany for many years over concerns about rudeness and, most unforgivable in Deutschland, holding up traffic. Other countries have taken a similar approach, including the Netherlands, where the phenomenon first reared its head in the late 1990s… Nonetheless, they are still popular, with Britain in particular currently a growing market — although even here concerns remain, perhaps because they’re associated with rowdy stag parties.

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Off the back of our recent trip to Essex, which is littered with Roman archaeology, an article by Katy Prickett for the BBC caught our eye. It summarises, in pleasingly plain language, the evidence for industrial-scale brewing in Roman Britain:

Imagining Roman Britain conjures up images of emperors, gladiators, posh villas – and the army that held the empire together… But a much more varied story is emerging, thanks to evidence uncovered by excavations in recent years… Beer brewing was just one of the industries that grew rapidly to supply the military, and small towns and cities like Camulodunum (Colchester) and Verulamium (St Albans) in the three-and-a-half centuries of Roman rule… Evidence of brewing on an industrial level was discovered at a Roman villa at North Fleet in Kent, and using the features found there – such as malting ovens and lined tanks for steeping the grain – archaeologists knew what to look for at smaller sites.

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Finally, from BlueSky…

Tonight I'm drinking keg-conditioned Best Bitter in an industrial estate in the former capital of West Germany.

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— Ben Palmer (@johnzee7.bsky.social) Aug 16, 2024 at 17:54

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

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer and pubs. This week we’ve got notes from Tiger Bay, Lincoln and Rotherhithe.

There’s only really been one news story in this week and that’s the effect far right protests, riots and public disorder have had in communities across England. One thing that’s struck us is the part drunkenness (and intoxication of other kinds) seems to have played in events.

Booze removes inhibitions; it makes us feel closer to those in our gang; and it makes it more difficult for us to judge risk. We’ve heard one person after another cite drunkenness as an excuse for their aggressive, reckless, potentially murderous behaviour. The same defence is often used to justify abusive or racist comments on social media.

You might think it’s an attempt at an easy get-out. And you might think, so, what – we ban booze and this problem goes away? All we know is that beer did not act as softener or social glue in the past week, which is worth remembering if we’re tempted to trot out that smug line in future. 

And the occasional story of solidarity between pub-goers and counter protestors offers only a little comfort.

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In his Substack newsletter David Jesudason has written, with input from historian Kieran Connell, about the complex multicultural history of Tiger Bay in Cardiff:

As well as the large mixed-race population, in 1947 Tiger Bay, there were more than 2,000 Muslims including a 700-strong Yemeni Sufi community, which led to many cafes-cum-bars being opened, which are vividly described by Kieran… These were large, semi-clean rooms with a strong smell of food in the air. “A counter selling groceries alongside hot food, cups of tea, lemonade, and anything from Australian wine, meths and ‘near beer’ to diluted whiskey sold at seven shillings a cup.” They could legally sell alcohol until 11pm – one hour later than the pubs in the area.

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At Brussels Notes on Substack Eoghan Walsh asks why the Belgian capital has no station bars, and argues that it needs them:

Across the city’s three main stations there’s no shortage of coffee shops and fast food places, chocolate boutiques and jewellery stores. But no honest to goodness pub, a civilised refuge from the station’s travelling circus where an anxious traveller can sit and wait with a book, one eye on their beer and another on the departures board, in anticipation of the start of their journey. How is it that the once-ubiquitous stationsbuffet – the local euphemism for a railway bar, and nodding to the fact that, if you were lucky, they might have a sandwich or some hot pastries on sale – has not just become an endangered species in the Belgian capital, but fully extinct. Didn’t we used to be a country? Aren’t we allowed to have nice things?

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Matthew Curtis has written an endearingly honest piece about returning to his home city of Lincoln for a pub crawl. It’s full of details that anyone who has ever written about beer, for fun or for money, will recognise:

Pausing after a sip, I realise that not only are the only people in the pub me and the bartender, but I am furiously writing notes and taking photos of my pint with a large and noisy camera. “Sorry, I like taking photos of pubs.” I say, nervously, before getting a warm reply and starting a brief conversation with the bartender. I notice how I’ve slipped back into my barely apparent Lincolnshire accent. This is comforting to me, and I start to relax and enjoy my surroundings. I think to myself how I bet this pub is great when it’s filled with those regulars, and the soft percussion of chatter.

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Ed Wray has undertaken exactly the kind of vaguely psychogeographical pub crawl that appeals to us: a circular route in East London which involves crossing the Thames twice. The quality of inebriated pub debate seems to have been rather elevated, too:

Luca studied philosophy so I was able to ask him about Platonism, something I’ve become curious about thanks to listening to the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast. I’d previously thought of pagans as primitives that believed any old bollocks but in fact they believed in extremely sophisticated bollocks… But more importantly the pub served Landlord so we stayed for two (2) pints. Not the sort of thing you normally do on a pub crawl but hey, I love Landlord. Our extended stay meant the conversation had time to get round to fact the actor Ian McKellen owns the pub. Which explained why there was a statue of a wizard in a corner and a staff behind the bar.

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How many breweries are there in America? Jeff Alworth at Beervana thinks it might be far fewer than the 10,000 often cited, having picked a square (Oregon) and done his own count:

Until you’ve gone through the exercise, it’s really challenging to count breweries. I’m not surprised the Brewers Association had trouble getting an accurate count. But just glancing through the list, I see that they include not just beer companies, but all the breweries operated by a beer company. So Deschutes has three listings—one for their original Bend brewpub, one for their Portland brewpub, and one for their production brewery. McMenamins has eighteen listings (and it’s pretty accurate). But other places they include a taproom that’s not a brewery (10 Barrel, Chuckanut)… They miss breweries as well. Sometimes a restaurant will start making beer on a one-barrel kit. I’m not sure how well these are tracked by taxing authorities—which is, I assume, one of the ways to identify a brewery.

We’ve had to grapple with this for UK brewery numbers in the past and our approach has been to aim to pick one source when we’re talking about change over time. At least that way, if it’s wrong, it’s more likely to be consistently wrong and based on the same counting methodology.

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Finally, from BlueSky, reporting from the ground that challenges the prevailing narrative…

Interesting day at the London craft beer festival. A lot of excitable young people, mostly belying the idea that their generation didn’t like booze. Anyway, please enjoy these images

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— Will Hawkes (@willhawkes.bsky.social) Aug 9, 2024 at 21:59

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

Here’s our regular round-up of the best writing about beer and pubs from the past week, from Goth pubs to questions of authenticity.

First, an update from Germany. Berlin-based journalist Nicholas Potter has rounded up various items of evidence pointing to a diminishing interest in beer, and drinking more generally, among younger Germans:

[In] modern Germany… abstinence is on the up – and boozing is in decline. One example is Die Null (The Zero). Before the world-famous beer festival kicks off this year on 21 September, a new alcohol-free beer garden has opened in the heart of the city, inaugurated by the mayor of Munich himself. The venue serves a variety of non-alcoholic beverages, from mocktails to alcohol-free lager… It’s the latest in a string of sober ventures across the country, reflecting a wider trend in German society: beer consumption has been steadily declining since the 1990s, standing now at an average of just 88 litres per capita a year, compared with almost 143 litres after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The decline is also noticeable at Oktoberfest itself: in 2019, 6.3 million visitors drank some 7.3m litres. Last year, a record-breaking 7.2 million people attended, but consumed a comparatively meagre 6.5m litres.

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It’s always interesting to be made aware of an entirely different type of pub. We knew about the Gothenburg System, and mentioned it in our book 20th Century Pub. What we didn’t know (because Scotland is not our beat) is that ‘Goth pubs’, as they are known, live on:

The Scottish Goth pubs were found in pit towns and their aim was to discourage heavy drinking and funnel 95% of their profits back into their local community… At one stage, there were as many as 50 Goth pubs in Scotland but now there are only four left that stick to the Gothenburg system… Fiona Holborn, treasurer at the Goth in Armadale, West Lothian, says they see themselves very much as a charity first, ahead of being a business… “All the profit we make we tend to give out to the food banks,” she says… They also sponsor things like local football teams and sports events but reaching older and vulnerable people remains a key driver for the committee.

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For Pellicle David Jesudason profiles brewer Danny McColl with a particular focus on the rocky early days of his brewery (“I brewed shit [cask] beer. I brewed it on the new kit … because I’m an idiot.”), his struggles with his mental health, and the strategic choice he made to turn the business around:

Danny’s mental health suffered because there was no long-term strategy, just day-to-day drudgery. Graft instead of focus. “I couldn’t make good decisions,” he tells me… He was running the entire operation by himself: brewing, selling and even delivering the beer to customers. It was far too much to take on, his mental health suffered and Gemma, his wife, became worried about him having suffered from depression herself… “Covid came along and it was a line in the sand. It was blessed,” he says. “This was the time to make the right decisions. If you’re going to come through Covid and make a go of it I thought ‘don’t fuck up again’.”

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When we wrote Brew Britannia we researched and profiled quite a few microbrewing pioneers but didn’t have the time or space to write about everyone. And, in all honesty, Geoff Mumford wasn’t someone about whom we were at all aware. Roger Protz has an obituary of the co-founder of Burton Bridge Brewery, who sounds like an interesting character:

Geoff was the chief engineer at Ind Coope’s brewery in Romford, Essex. He met and became close friends with another engineer, Bruce Wilkinson, and the two played rugby together… “Bruce and I were heads of our departments at Romford and we could see the writing on the wall,” Geoff recalled. “Allied had closed Ansells in Birmingham and Romford was treated as the Siberia of brewing, so we decided to jump ship.”… They went on a small business course in London and planned their own brewery. Geoff was visiting the Ind Coope plant in Burton one day, drove over the historic Burton Bridge across the Trent and saw a For Sale sign on the Fox & Goose pub… They bought the pub, renamed it the Bridge Inn and installed brewing kit where they produced their first beer, Bridge Bitter, in 1982… “We’d seen the cheap ingredients used at Romford and we wanted none of that,” Geoff said.

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There’s been a lot of chat recently about the preference among younger drinkers for ‘normal’ beers like John Smith’s and Guinness. Now, Jeff Alworth at Beervana has written about the concept of authenticity and how it shifts over time:

For Baby Boomers and Gen Xers raised on dismal factory products like Wonder Bread and Velveeta, whole grain bread and artisanal cheese seemed more authentic. But late Millennials and Zoomers were raised in the world the Boomers begat, with lots of stodgy organic foods and twee “artisanal” offerings… So to them, a return to something simple and straightforward, with a long history of continuity looks authentic. The little breweries that teem in their neighborhoods and peddle a psychedelic array of inscrutable products are the inauthentic ones as they vie with each other for consumer attention, willing to offer literally any product that will get customers through the door.

And you should chase it with this from Katie Mather on the subject of ‘underconsumption core’ which “exists because even the most exuberant of haulfluencers are starting to feel the constrictions of what is basically a national money shortage… Beer turns into slabs of whatever tinnies are on offer at Tesco…”

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A good creative exercise is to study the same subject from different angles, to keep sketching it, over and over, until something new emerges. Adrian Tierney-Jones has spent the past while writing about pubs, ahead of an upcoming book on the subject, and the longer he stares at them, the more he finds to say:

Then there is another kind of wayside drinking, the act of surprise and choosing spontaneity and spinning the wheel and taking a chance and coming upon a pub you have never seen before and going inside without much hope that you will find something to drink that makes you wish upon a star. However, you choose well for this wayside pub is gorgeous in its reality and earthiness; the locals growl with friendliness rather than aggression and the staff help themselves to your custom with pleasant ease. There is a beer that you adore being served and so you settle down for an hour or two, occasionally joining in the conversations and laughing with the rest of them or you are left alone to take your book into the corner and now and again lift up thine eyes and hear a selection of joined up words that speak of the assurance of the pub.

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Finally, from BlueSky…

The Old Ground, Ballyglass, County Mayo. From a couple of years ago, it doesn't appear to have ever reopened.

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— Blurred_Lens (@lensblurred.bsky.social) Jul 25, 2024 at 11:04

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