Categories
bristol pubs

Best pubs in Bristol in 2025: our guide on where to drink

Bristol has a huge number of pubs and a decent number of breweries. If you’re in town for a few days or hours, where should you go to drink?

We’re asked for advice on this all the time and in 2018 decided that, rather than keep typing up the advice in emails and DMs, we’d give it a permanent home.

We aim to update this post at least once a year and this most recent update is from 5 January 2025.

If you’re reading this later in the year, some of the pubs we recommend might have changed or closed.

We haven’t been to every pub in Bristol, although we’re not far off, having been to 310.

We’ve visited most of those in the city centre, and most several times.

In general, Bristol pubs are pretty easy to find, on main roads rather than backstreets.

They’re also fairly easy to read: chain pubs look like chain pubs, craft beer bars look like craft beer bars, and so on.

So, you won’t go too far wrong following your instincts.

There are some hidden gems in the suburbs and up side streets, though, so do explore.

And if you want to keep things loose there are some decent crawls with varied and interesting pubs:

  • St Michael’s Hill – Zero Degrees, The Open Arms, The Robin Hood, The White Bear (sometimes), Beerd, The Highbury Vaults.
  • Gloucester Road – start at The Inn on the Green at the top, drop into The Crafty Cow, The Wellington, The Drapers Arms, and then keep going until you’re done, or you arrive in town. Or vice versa.
  • Kingsdown – The Hare on the Hill, The Hillgrove Porter Stores, The Kingsdown Vaults, The Green Man, The Highbury Vaults.
  • King Street – Small Bar, The Royal Naval Volunteer, The Beer Emporium, Llandoger Trow, The Old Duke (jazz and cask ale), among others.
  • Bedminster – there are a lot of pubs in Bedminster, from very down-to-earth to super-crafty. Standouts are Lupe (formerly The Old Bookshop), Alpha Bottle Shop & Tap, and the Bristol Beer Factory taproom.
  • St Judes – The Crown (Bass, Cheddar Ales), The Swan With Two Necks (see below), The Volunteer, The Phoenix.

Before we get down to business we must once again thank Patreon supporters like Mark Landells, Andrew Drinkwater and Simon Branscombe whose ongoing support justifies us spending time putting this together, including on-the-ground reserach. If you find this post useful please do consider signing up or at least buying us a pint via Ko-Fi.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 4 January 2025: New Year’s Evil

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

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

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

Drawing: a pub bar.

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

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


A neon sign advertising Suenner Koelsch at a beer hall in Cologne.

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

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


A row of colourful houses in a Bavarian town.

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

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


The meat raffle at The Furnace Inn. SOURCE: Jane Stuart.

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

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


A vintage illustration of a beer glass and beer bottle with the text Golden Pints 2024.

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


Finally, from BlueSky, a reminder…

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

[image or embed]

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

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

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture opinion pubs

Open and they might come, close and they definitely won’t

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…

Christmas and New Year are weird times, of course, and Michael Deakin has made the case for giving bar staff some time off at this time of year.

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…”

At the time of writing, there’s gloomy news about the performance of “the high street” in December 2024.

This made us think about the delicacy of this whole ecosystem.

People go into town to spend their pocket money, have a few drinks, maybe meet friends.

If the shops aren‘’’t there, because they’ve gone online or moved out of town, pubs suffer.

And if the pubs aren’t open, shops suffer, because town loses a large part of what brings it to life.

Nothing is simple. Everything is connected. How do we make this a team effort?

Categories
opinion

Our golden pints for 2024

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.

Back in 2015, for example, Brewdog Electric India was our bottled beer of the year – a beer we’d forgotten ever existed. And in 2012 we declared the Blue Anchor in Helston our brewery of the year – a reminder of a very different time in our lives.

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 in Hackney, with outdoor seating in front of an industrial building.
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.

As we wrote on Patreon back in October:

“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.

The Lost & Grounded taproom with bare tables, bunting, and an illuminated sign that reads COLD LAGER.
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.”

Honourable mentions: Torrside Franconia Rauchbier; Moor Smoked Lager; Moor Elmoor Belgian-style pale ale.

Best packaged beer

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?

The bar at the Merchants Arms in Bristol with Cheddar Ales Gorge Best on one of the pumps.

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.

The cover of the book showing women in brewing through various periods of history.

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.”

The interior of a pub with brown wood and stained glass.
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.

Categories
Blogging and writing

The best beer writing of 2024 according to us

Believe it or not, there’s been a lot of good writing about beer and pubs in 2024, with a few key themes emerging.

Why ‘believe it or not’?

Because it’s easy to get nostalgic for the supposed golden age of beer blogging 10 or 15 years ago.

And because we lost Good Beer Hunting, previously a home for much good writing, earlier this year.

That’s one reason we’ve run this exercise every year for the past few years: to remind ourselves that every week we find enough material to fill a Saturday morning round-up, and that when you tot it up, there’s almost too much good beer writing to mention.

What’s below are stand-out posts or articles.

There are many other blogs that are more about consistency and bite-sized writing than show-stopping longreads.

We’ll mention some of those in our Golden Pints post later in the week.

In chronological order, then, here we go with what, for us, were the reading highlights of the year.

What to do about beer festivals

Steve Dunkley, January 2024

This very long piece kicked the year off with some big questions and big ideas, and we’ve found ourselves referring back to it throughout the past 12 months:

“CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale recently announced that they weren’t going to be putting on their flagship Great British Beer Festival in 2024… I asked on social media what other people like and don’t like about beer festivals, so we can have a discussion about what can be done to improve them, and possibly see them rejuvenated for the modern age.”

The first drop: a ramble into the last remaining early houses in the city

Michael Lanigan, February 2024

Like several pieces we included in our weekly round-ups this one came to us via John ‘The Beer Nut’ Duffy who is kind enough to email us when he spots anything interesting. It’s about Dublin pubs licenced to open early in the morning, originally to serve dock workers:

“The sun hadn’t yet risen at half past seven as the seagulls cawed above the docklands and the quays… On Lombard Street East, the purple painted exterior of the Wind Jammer pub’s first floor faded naturally in with the dark violet morning sky… ‘Open 7am,’ read the golden letters on one of the steel overhangs above the windows of this early house pub… 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.”

Best seat in the public house

Ross Cummins, February 2024

Better known for his meme-filled social media presence and beer merchandise line, Ross is also an acute observer of the life that goes on around pubs and beer. He writes occasional blog posts that really are blog posts, with a quirky, scrappy, outsiderish quality:

“Seating hadn’t really crossed my mind as I walked up to The Castle. I was thirsty for a nice pint of cask, and knew the pub wouldn’t disappoint. Yet our first clue that we were in for some risky seated business was as we entered the doorway. We were met by two doors with frosted glass. Always a trepidatious start. Where are we going to end up? At the bar? In a small room being stared at by the locals? The toilets? The anticipation was intense…”

Berm: yeast from Upper Telemark

Lars Marius Garshol, March 2024

Though most of his writing these days is in books, magazines and his excellent newsletter, this post did make it onto his blog and is typically dense with both technical detail and atmosphere:

“Telemark is in Eastern Norway, and at that point most people associated farmhouse yeast with kveik, which comes from Western Norway. We had, however, also collected “gong”, which we presumed was farmhouse yeast from Eastern Norway. That was from Ål in Hallingdal, about 75 kilometers north of Atrå… 75 kilometers may sound like it’s close, but in this terrain it’s really not. The fastest route is over two mountain crossings on tiny side roads, making it very slow. If you want to follow the major roads from Atrå to Ål you’re going to have to make a giant detour and the trip will suddenly be 300 kilometers… But this was exciting! If they had farmhouse yeast in Ål, they might have it in Atrå, too.”

A survivor over four centuries – Brasserie Meteor in Hochfelden, Alsace, France

Anaïs Lecoq, March 2024

This is a good example of what we lost when Good Beer Hunting folded: an in-depth article about an easily-overlooked brewery written by someone with local knowledge. Read it while you still can, because we don’t know how long the GBH archive will remain available:

“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.”

The rest Is noise – Arizona Wilderness’s quiet revolution to drink like you care

Ruvani de Silva, April 2024

We haven’t included too many brewery profiles on this list because they rarely have a hook. What is the story that is really being told? The hook here is the acknowledgement of mistakes made in the past:

“Once upon a time, not so long ago, two somewhat twinny-looking chaps with beards opened a brewpub in a former QQ Asian Restaurant in the sleepy Phoenix suburb of Gilbert, Arizona. Within eight months, RateBeer awarded them Brewery of the Year, they were interviewed by Esquire Magazine, and they started collaborating with pretty much every craft beer superstar brewer around the world… Following the rush of attention and demand, there was a period where, while they didn’t lose sight of their goals pertaining to either brewing quality or sustainability, they struggled to balance the pressures of leadership and creativity.”

A drinking life: lessons of my two fathers

Jeff Alworth, April 2024

As one of the most active beer blogs in the world, and a constant source of insight and opinion, we frequently link to Beervana. But it was this more personal post that really grabbed us in 2024:

“I know almost nothing about my birth father, yet he looks back at me from the mirror. My thin body, over six feet of it, is Gorostiza rather than stocky Metcalf… He left me one more inheritance – an affection for booze… The Gorostizas were drinkers. At large Gorostiza family gatherings, the wine and liquor flowed. Mom recalled them more with wonder than affection. The Metcalfs also had big family gatherings, even loud ones. But they were sedate, whereas the Gorostiza get-togethers were tinged with the chaos of drink.”

Let’s make craft beer great again

Pete Brown, May 2024

When this first came out we referred to it as “a pep talk from Coach”. What it is is a dab on the brakes – what are we doing here, folks? And a call for beer enthusiasts to think about what made them enthusiastic in the first place:

“We seem to talk so much about the issues and problems in the industry, the gossip and scandal, the bad practice and culture, who’s gone under and who’s been bought out, that there isn’t much time for talking about the joy of beer and brewing and drinking… Things are still way better now then they were back in the day. I still believe that craft beer has the potential to grow further if it remains interesting and fun. So if you are feeling jaded and wondering where to go, I’d like to offer some prompts to rediscovering creativity and joy.”

The bitter truth? Some craft brewers just aren’t built for this market

Dave Infante, May 2024

Once again, our attention was grabbed by an attempt to get beneath the surface and ask how the beer industry really works. In this case, it’s about the tightrope walk between inspiring, freewheeling creativity, and boring good business:

“Unfortunately, operating in good faith isn’t the same as operating a good business, and as the American thirst for craft beer has plateaued in recent years, that distinction has become painfully clear… There’s still plenty of Field of Dreams-style wishcasting underpinning the business – if you brew it, they will come. It’s a hopeful sentiment, and it might work for some breweries. But this is not a particularly hopeful moment for the U.S. beer business, and besides, hope is not a strategy.”

Where to find the best pints of John Smith’s in London

Jimmy McIntosh, June 2024

This snarky, witty piece for food newsletter Vittles is a brilliant commentary on the obsession with Guinness among supposedly discerning drinkers:

“Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you won’t have failed to notice that one beer is having more than a bit of a moment right now: John Smith’s. The beloved creamy bitter from Tadcaster has gone from fusty old-man’s drink to fad beer almost overnight, thanks in no small part to northerners in London, perfectionist landlords and an army of online influencers who can be seen rating pints in the capital’s best pubs. The hype is inescapable.”

Opinion: a closer look at Ireland’s oldest pubs

Liam K, June 2024

The IrishBeerHistory blog is always worth reading but this particular subject brings out the best in Liam, who has little tolerance for fake history or PR nonsense:

“Fiction and fantasy have their place in our lives as a source of entertainment and diversion… The issue is with narratives that purport to be true… These are the stories which began as a misunderstanding or a little marketing-driven truth-stretching, and which are then repeated so often that they become fact to most people, or to a point where people don’t really question them or care if they are true or not… Add to this the fact that we Irish have a wealth of old stories and ancient sagas both in print and in the oral tradition of storytelling, and we love to repeat and revel in them, as we really, really love a good mythical tale.”

RIP IPA: who killed craft beer?

Ella Doyle, June 2024

This piece for Time Out grabbed us because it was written from the perspective of someone outside the bubble, and because it introduced us to a concept that helped make sense of where we are today – ‘the normal bloke’:

Big corporations buying out craft breweries isn’t the only thing small brewers have had to contend with. Somewhere along the line, a new trend started to sweep through London. Squaring up to the bearded, beanie-wearing men in shorts was a new kind of counterculture: the normal bloke… The normal bloke was not interested in skinny jeans, nor plum sours. He’d go for a packet of scampi fries over the chorizo bar snacks. He ordered a round of lagers, filmed himself outside the Blue Posts, and fancied a fry up on the weekend (although the greasy spoon was actually Normans, and the waiters were wearing Burberry). Having alternative tastes was no longer cool; instead, trendy Londoners were being obsessively, aggressively mainstream (rich young TikTokers have even been accused of ‘romanticising working class culture’).

The pocket – examining the hole left by London’s lost pool tables

Fred Garratt-Stanley, July 2024

We could easily have just listed almost everything published at Pellicle in this round-up but have attempted to ration ourselves a little, focusing on the real standouts. This article looks at pubs from a fresh angle and reveals a business model we’d never even considered:

“When pubs reopened after Covid-19 people were so relieved they didn’t think twice about the absence of the bulky, carpet-topped object in the corner. A casual exchange with a masked, disinfectant-wielding bartender would confirm that yes, the pool table had been pushed out thanks to the introduction of table service… Typically, pubs will hire tables from a specialist pub equipment supplier like Ivor Thomas, paying a regular fee that includes maintenance… Costs vary depending on whether pubs opt for bog-standard tables or high-end ones more suited to league competitions.”

German beer vignettes: memories of Franconia, Mönchsambach edition

Franz D. Hofer, July 2024

It’s no exaggeration to say that Franz’s writing brightened a tough year for us. Whatever was going on in the real world, dipping into one of the sunny beer gardens, or cosy beer halls, he so skillfully evokes was always a tonic:

“Mönchsambacher Lagerbier’s reputation precedes it. Aficionados of Franconian beer speak about it in reverential tones. The beer has even found a following among Berlin’s craft beer devotees, with Mönchsambacher Lagerbier a fixture at Muted Horn in Neukölln and Biererei in Kreuzberg… Not only is the entire family running the show some of the friendliest folks you’ll meet (Oma Zehendner even pulled me my mug of beer, then recommended what food I should order to go with it), but the Lagerbier was divine. Rich, round, and creamy, with white nougat, milk caramel, honey, freshly mowed meadows drying in the sun.”

Water to daffodils – The Swan With Two Necks in Pendleton, Lancashire

Katie Mather, July 2024

We’re suckers for a piece about the ‘perfect pub’ and we’re also very fond of Katie’s writing. This piece is about a pub, a place, and the particular publicans who make it work:

“[Pubs] don’t just become perfect on their own. The Dilworths know this more than most. They’ve been running The Swan With Two Necks for 37 years… ‘We opened at 10.30am on Tuesday the 25th of August, 1987,’ Steve says, his sharp memory for exactitudes leaving no room for doubt. ‘I remember it like it was yesterday. It was yesterday, as far as I’m concerned.’… What made Steve and Christine’s appearance in Pendleton even more controversial was their chosen roles within the pub. Christine stood pride of place behind the bar, chatting with locals and pouring pints, while Steve worked in the kitchen preparing pub classics.”

The Midland Tavern – the joyful world of Cambridge’s first black landlord

David Jesudason, August 2024

This piece had particular resonance landing as it did shortly after the social unrest across England which marred the summer of 2024, and is pointedly optimistic:

“‘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.’”

The story of Dora Kulka, and how one woman changed British beer forever

Will Hawkes, August 2024

There were a few pieces by Will that could have made this list but looking back, this was the one that impressed us most, with its historic sweep and sense of narrative archaeology:

“In 1942, Dr. Dora Kulka had a lot on her mind… She was struggling to establish herself in Britain having been forced to flee Nazi-controlled Vienna because she was Jewish. She was caring for her mother, Martha, whilst mourning her father Viktor. And she was desperately trying to help her sister Helen escape occupied Prague, knowing that every day brought disaster a step closer… This would be enough to crush most people, you might think, but Dora, a biochemist who turned 43 that year, couldn’t afford to dwell on her problems. She had an important wartime job that required all of her considerable mental capacity… Dora was in charge of VI-Products, a company set up to create vitamin-enriched food from brewers’ yeast, based at the Hope Brewery in Sheffield…”

Between angels and imp sects – a search for identity within Lincoln’s pubs

Matthew Curtis, August 2024

In this piece the editor of Pellicle indulges himself to reflect on his sense of self, his family history, and how pubs fit in:

“I made plans to visit my mum, leaving enough time to spend a full day within Lincoln itself. The goal was simple: to visit a few pubs, while contemplating my misspent youth, and why, despite it all, I feel so strongly about this city as part of my identity… There were to be ground rules, of course: first I decided I could only visit pubs which I had never set foot in before. If I once found some of these places intimidating, then I considered that exercising the confidence I now have as a regular pub goer would help me define the raw framework that would help me put my feelings together.”

No, the ‘Hymn to Ninkasi’ is not a recipe for making Sumerian beer

Martyn Cornell, September 2024

As we said when we included this in a weekly round-up, it’s always thrilling when Martyn drops one of his ‘Everything you thought you knew about X was wrong’ pieces. This one is especially worth bookmarking:

“It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called ‘Hymn to Ninkasi’, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is ‘effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer’, ‘the oldest beer recipe in history’, with a description of ‘the detailed brewing process’ that ‘modern researchers have used to recreate Sumerian beer.’ The Hymn to Ninkasi, according to one American publication, ‘served not only as spiritual homage but also as detailed brewing instructions for the beverage that came to be known as beer.’… Unfortunately, that is all total steaming nonsense.”

The Zinnebir Index

Eoghan Walsh, September 2024

Is there a particular beer that signals that gentrification is underway? For Eoghan Walsh, in Brussels, Belgium, Brasserie de la Senne’s Zinnebir might be it:

“[Until] this new bar opened, Koekelberg was a Zinnebir-free zone… This was a fact I discovered in passing over the summer, when a friend expressed their intention to drink a Zinnebir in each of Brussels’ 19 communes and asked me if I could identify any suitable locations in north-west Brussels. Which wasn’t a problem in Jette, Ganshoren or even St-Agatha Berchem, but was, it turned out, in Koekelberg. There was, as best as we could make out, no bar within the commune’s borders, which sold Brasserie de la Senne’s flagship beer (or any of its beers for that matter) – and I am for the purposes of this argument excluding the ice cream shop that does stock their beers, because it’s an ice cream shop and not a pub.”

Can you ‘split the G’? How gulping Guinness became an online phenomenon

Evan Rail, October 2024

This article for VinePair was the first time we’d heard about ‘splitting the G’, a social media trend that is at once extremely annoying and… kind of fun? It’s also yet another way in which Guinness has dominated beer chat this year:

“[Drinkers] try to swallow enough beer on their first drink that the line between liquid and foam ends up halfway through the ‘G’ of the Guinness brand on the glass… It sometimes shows up in the form of a bar bet, in which a bartender might offer to pay for the pint if a drinker can split the G perfectly on the first try, or as a competition between friends to see who pays for the round, or just as a bit of fun… And that fun seems to be building steam globally this year after a quiet, unclear origin. A dedicated web app launched early this summer. In June, a play called Splitting The G: A Controversy debuted at an arts festival in Ireland.”

Working inside beer’s sinking ships

Will Ziebell, October 2024

This piece at The Crafty Pint went slightly viral, probably because it has people talking about things you’re not supposed to talk about if you want to keep working in the beer industry. Bad bosses, for example:

“Cassie finds it hard to see anyone to blame beyond the owners… They’d overseen an expensive expansion that didn’t make sense. They’d allowed debts to mount. They refused to pay some suppliers and placed mates in roles for which they weren’t qualified. They’d never bothered with HR, feeling they were best placed to look after staff, and rarely filled roles managers told them time and time again were needed. Whenever staff left, they’d treat it like a betrayal; how dare they look for greener pastures?… Ultimately, they knew they were in real trouble for some time but they just kept going as debts mounted, never telling those that remained how bad the outlook had become.”

Timothy Taylor’s Landlord – a polyptych of a pint

Rachel Hendry, October 2024

We’re suckers for deep dives into the stories of single significant beers. Landlord has had its fair share of attention over the years (thanks, Madonna) but this piece goes deeper again:

“Golden Promise is a wise and welcoming barley, first introduced to the UK in the 1960s, it is beloved for its ability to harmoniously blend with the water characteristics preserved and manipulated in brewing. Not all that glitters is golden, however, and the maturity of Golden Promise makes the barley more susceptible to disease in comparison to younger strains. The shallow nature of its roots also means it requires a solid, reliable foundation—nothing too sandy or loose. Over the course of its growth Golden Promise proves costly to care for and, for those who manage to do so successfully, it provides smaller yields than had they prioritised more modern varieties. Yet it is the only barley used in Timothy Taylor’s Landlord. Only Golden Promise will do.”

West Is best – how Westvleteren 12 accidentally became “The Best Beer In The World”

Jonny Garrett, November 2024

Again, we do love an article that focuses on the story of a single beer, especially one as puzzling as Westvleteren 12. Like many beer geeks, we struggled to get hold of a bottle, paid through the nose, and then thought… is that it? Jonny explains why:

“While the monastery was selling the beers for roughly €1.50 a bottle, it was reaching the consumer in places like the Netherlands for as much as €20 per bottle. Even as the hotline cooled down, the hype around the Westvleteren 12 in beer circles persisted. It held on to top spot on RateBeer until 2008, when Three Floyds’ Dark Lord overtook it – a beer often considered the first to create hysteria and queues at a brewery. Really though, Westvleteren was the first ‘hype’ release in beer’s history, and certainly the first time that hype reached the mainstream media.”

Humphrey’s world: how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain’s strangest pub chain

Mark Blacklock, December 2024

Talk about ending the year on a high. Everyone seems to agree on the excellence of this long investigative piece about the Tadcaster brewery and its pub chain:

“Smith, a small man in his late 70s, dressed in a dark business suit, showed up at the couple’s caravan in the East Yorkshire countryside. Bienko recalled his rheumy eyes. Smith would be conducting their job interview personally, he told them. The meeting was strange. ‘It was like he was warning us,’ Bienko said. ‘He was asking: “Are you sure it’s right for you?”.’ The following day, Smith met them at the pub, the New Inn, and handed over the keys. Inside, the couple discovered the scale of the job ahead of them. ‘It was an absolute shambles. Two years’ worth of dust,’ Bienko said.”


If you want more, do check out the best of our own output from the year as listed over on Substack.