Categories
News opinion

News, nuggets and longreads 21 December 2024: The Parallax View

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from Samuel Smith to red hot pokers.

First, some news that’s created ripples among beer geeks, even if it’s not likely to trouble civilians: RateBeer is closing down. Founded in 2000, it was acquired by AB-InBev between 2017 and 2019. Jeff Alworth has commentary: “It was an old platform with a mission that has grown obsolete. At the turn of the century, a few years after the birth of the internet, it helped beer fans locate and sort good beer, a task that became ever more hopeless with the proliferation of breweries and beer.”


An empty Samuel Smith pub in central London.

By way of contrast, a story that did break out of the bubble was Mark Blacklock’s forensic investigation into Samuel Smith’s brewery, and Humphrey Smith’s influence in particular, for The Guardian. We get an attempt at an article like this every now and then, usually recycling the very limited information that’s available, but this piece has both some new facts and, crucially, some fresh insight:

Throughout the months I have worked on this article, I have tried to gain a sense of why Humphrey Smith rules his empire as he does. Perhaps it’s as simple as a desire to turn back the clock to an earlier period, when business owners ruled their realm as they pleased, even if that meant self-destruction. Even so, one mystery has continued to dog me: his obsession with blocking development in the green belt… The Labour government had built a busy road at the bottom of Humphrey Smith’s garden on the advice of a planning expert, and there was nothing he could do about it. His childhood home was invaded by planners who claimed to be bringing progress. Ever since, Smith has militantly resisted both planners and progress. He has built an alternative world, one whose every aspect he tries to control. And if the little king cannot do as he pleases, everyone else can go hang.


Closed sign on shop.

At 8-Bits and Bobs hospitality pro Michael Deakin has written about the tension between the need for pubs to be open at Christmas and the need for hospitality staff to have time off. On the one hand, it’s a time of year when loneliness can feel especially acute, and when we’re most eager to connect with (willing to tolerate the company of) our neighbours. On the other hand…

I have spent almost my entire working life in an industry and a system where if you don’t carve out time for yourself where you can, it will be carved out of you. In most other industries there is no consideration as to whether you should work Christmas or not, but I expect this to change. As we hurtle towards ever more extreme forms of capitalism, worker rights will continue to be eradicated and more and more people will be expected to give up the last few remaining bastions of free time they have… There will be tens of thousands of well wishes sent between hospitality staff and regular pub goers this Christmas Day, in both directions, because, like a proper family Christmas, through the drinks,toil, and festive friction, lingers genuine affection. That’s the essence of the struggle we face. The possession of empathy in a system that will not credit you for it, rather use it to exploit you and wring out those last few precious pennies.


A pub at Christmas with tree and decorations.

Have you ever seen a hot poker plunged into a tankard of ale? No, us neither, but we’d like to. At British Beer Breaks Phil Mellows has written about this tradition and the concept of festive beers more generally:

In the middle of November the Hand in Hand brewpub in Brighton staged an unusual ceremony in which a red-hot poker was plunged into pints of Hand Brew Co’s old ale, Kora, to mark the dark beer style’s return to the bar after its long summer holiday… The brew bubbled, hissed, steamed and overflowed, leaving a warmer, and slightly caramelised drink. There was a time when this was common practice. My dad, who was brought up in a pub between the world wars, remembered pokers being heated in the open fire in winter so customers could heat their mild ale to taste. There were no reports of casualties… These days it seems to me that beer pokering is a great theatrical way to introduce the festive season, when plain beers are not enough and the dark depths of winter demands something special, an extra spice.


A half-drunk glass of dark beer in a taproom.
Cask ale at Suarez Family Brewery. SOURCE: Kevin Kain/Casket Beer.

For some reason, we’re always fascinated by stories about cask ale in the US. Perhaps it’s a latent desire to exert some kind of cultural influence over the most powerful country in the world. Or maybe it’s just that it seems odd and interesting. At Casket Beer Kevin Kain has written about the influential Suarez Family Brewery in Livingston, New York, which recently acquired a hand pump for its taproom:

Though the taproom hand pump is new, Suarez planted the seeds for their cask beer service years ago. They’ve been making a few beer styles associated with cask beer that have been well-received. This includes their English-style Dark Mild, Saunter. That’s a style that many were not familiar with here in the US, and, like the influence they’ve had on lager, Suarez’s production of Saunter has likely helped many appreciate the traditional English ale. As a result, it’s not hard to find the style now… Inspired by Theakston’s Old Ale, a beer that recently began being distributed here in the US again, they also released their take on that style late last year. The beer, Be It Known, is nitrogenated when canned to provide a texture that mimics cask beer.


We don’t usually listen to beer-related podcasts but long-time reader Oliver Holtaway particularly recommended this episode of Footprints about community pubs, with a focus on three community pubs in Bath in Somerset:


Finally, from Bluesky, a treasure trove…

I decided a while ago on my #12BeersofXmas. Every Fullers Vintage from 2023 back to 2012. While I still buy these every year, the excitement has gone since the big overlords took over the brewery, so it feels like time to drink up and close the chapter.

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— LouOnBrew (@louonbrew.bsky.social) December 20, 2024 at 4:41 PM

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

Categories
bristol pubs

Around the harbourside pubs of Bristol as the Xmas lights go up

A walk around Bristol’s waterside is a good way to take in daylight on short winter days, especially when it leads us to some lesser-visited pubs.

We started our pub-to-pub walk at The Orchard, a small backstreet pub surrounded by boat sheds and industrial units on Spike Island.

It’s one of those pubs that feels faintly magical – an apparition. How has it survived in this unpromising location for so long? And not only survived but also become one of the best and busiest pubs in the city?

We approached it from what visitors to Bristol probably think is the river but is, in fact, a man-made ‘floating harbour’, built in the 19th century to tame the tide. Or, rather, it’s what used to be the Avon before they cut a new channel for it and sent it to cause trouble in the south of the city, through Bedminster.

Turn left before the SS Great Britain, cut up an alleyway between buildings, and there The Orchard is, lording it over Hanover Place.

You can always tell from a distance whether The Orchard is busy. On a gloomy, cold day in December there were people in hats and puffa jackets sitting on the benches outside and, in the windows, a collection of heads.

This is, now that we think about it, what stops us visiting The Orchard more: it’s always busy. That means, first, that we tend to assume we won’t find a seat, or even a corner in which to stand. And, secondly, it doesn’t feel as if it needs our support as some other pubs do.

A pub with timbers on the ceiling, bottles on shelves, strings of dried hops, and warm yellow lights.

Pushing through the door, crabbing sideways through the crowd, stepping over dogs and stretched-out legs, we made it near the bar where we joined a non-linear queue. Behind the bar, two people rushed to serve what felt like two hundred customers.

Things would probably move faster if people didn’t make such large and complex orders. In a pub with a list of scrumpy ciders, several cask ales, and a counter covered in bread rolls, pasties and scotch eggs, why would you ask about cocktails?

Yes, yes, we know, offering a wider range of products is how you get people into the pub and make them feel welcome but… in this pub?

Busy as the pub was, we did find a post to lean against, and were then offered a seat by a couple as they departed. From a bench by the wall we watched parties of lads in Christmas jumpers, parties of lads in rugby shirts (home match, 5:30 kick off), families feeding crisps to toddlers, and middle-aged couples (like us) huddled together over their drinks.

Every time a seat near the fire became available, there was a shuffling round as people upgraded from leaning spot to bad table to good table to warm spot.

Our pints of St Austell Proper Job, served direct from the cask, had slight heads of loose foam. They were bursting with freshness and life and, if anything, tasted drier and more bitter than usual.

It was hard to leave but we pulled ourselves away, letting the tide of people wash into the gap we left behind us, and headed back to the waterside, in the direction of the Underfall that marks the beginning of the end of the floating harbour.

The beaten-up wooden bar of a traditional pub with hanging pint glasses and a pump for Bass.

We’ve tended to skip The Nova Scotia, despite it being, on paper, the kind of pub we ought to like.

On previous visits, the beer was of historic interest more than it was delicious, being one of those places where you could always get Courage Best despite Courage having closed its Bristol brewery in 1999. The long, compartmented, richly dark space was also fascinating, but tended to feel more cliquey than cosy.

So, we popped in on this wander by way of a check in, expecting to knock back a half and move on. But it felt like a different pub, somehow, both in terms of atmosphere and offer.

Relax, though: it hasn’t been brutally refurbished, painted grey, or turned into a restaurant. Rather, its essential pubness has been brought out with a few small tweaks.

The beer offer seemed to have grown, based on our hazy memories, but more in depth than breadth. Those of you who grumble at the difficult of finding brown bitter these days, the country is going to the dogs, and so on, will be excited to know that The Nova Scotia has as its standard line-up:

  • Fuller’s London Pride
  • Butcombe Original
  • Bass

There’s also a rotating guest ale which, on our visits, was Wye Valley Butty Bach, which is light brown, for a bit of variety.

The service was friendly, the other customers were friendly, and there were filled rolls on the counter – a sure signal that a pub is civilized without being pretentious.

The pub is under new management, of course, and has been since the summer. Specifically, it’s yet another pub that’s come under the care of Sam Gregory. He’s been running The Bank and The Bell for a while; recently took over The Crown; and has expanded out west with The Nova Scotia and the Rose of Denmark.

The Bass was excellent. The Butcombe was excellent. The Christmas tree twinkled and was reflected in the chocolate brown paintwork. There were more lads in Christmas jumpers, more rugby boys… no, actually, the same ones from The Orchard, on the same trail as us.

Again, we found it hard to leave, but The Merchants Arms was beckoning from across the water.

The Merchants still feels like a hidden gem despite being chosen as the best pub in Bristol by local CAMRA, or a close runner up, most years in recent memory.

It’s another tiny beerhouse on a corner, only its corner faces out onto a busy road junction. That’s why, every now and then, a driver will smash into the pub, knocking it out of action for a while. You can buy an official T-shirt commemorating these incidents.

We squeezed through the door and through the crowd to a spot within shouting distance of the bar. As we peered at the pumps we heard a voice shouting “Ray! Ray!” but ignored it because, frankly, The Merchants is the kind of pub where almost everyone is called Ray.

Eventually, though, we recognised the voice. It was Garvan, landlord of our old local, The Drapers Arms, who was on his way to the stadium for the rugby. There’s a certain warm feeling that comes with bumping into people you know in the city, like you’ve cut through the default alienation and found the layer of community beneath.

We didn’t get a seat this time – no chance! – but did bag a corner of the bar when the couple who’d previously been leaning there upgraded to a table near the open fire. We drank beer from Cheddar Ales and watched pork pies with smears of psychedelically yellow English mustard on the side pass by.

When another tiny table became available, nobody wanted to look as if they wanted it, and a chivalrous game of “No, you take it, no, I insist, well, if you insist, if you’re sure…” commenced.

It must be the spirit of Christmas.

Categories
opinion

News, nuggets and longreads 14 December 2024: Box of Delights

Here’s our pick of writing about beer and pubs from the past week, including NIMBY neighbours, Czech lambic, and Keighley.

First, a couple of related pieces about a common problem facing pubs: neighbours who don’t like the noise. The famous Sekforde in Clerkenwell, London, is struggling with complaints from neighbours, and its operator says further restrictions will make the pub impossible to run. 

Meanwhile, the landlord of a pub in Hertfordshire has spoken to Louis Thomas at The Drinks Business about the threat to his pub caused by ‘NIMBYism’:

The Rising Sun in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire was built alongside the Grand Union Canal in the latter half of the 19th century. But, despite being a fixture of the area for well over a century, its future has been potentially jeopardised by a new arrival to the neighbourhood… According to Granger, the new neighbours, who have not been named, have lodged numerous complaints over the last three years to Dacorum Borough Council, the authority covering Berkhamsted, Tring, Hemel Hempstead, and nearby villages.

Chaser: ‘Homebuyers want a pub nearby – preferably within a mile’.


A woman in a black dress holding a wine-type bottle of beer surrounded by what look like grape vines.
itka Ilčíková. SOURCE: Claire Bullen/Pellicle.

For Pellicle Claire Bullen has written about an unusual brewery in the Czech wine country run by Jitka Ilčíková:

There is a joke told repeatedly here, that even while South Moravia is the heart of the Czech Republic’s winemaking industry, lager is still its most popular drink. And yet, Mikulov did not have its own contemporary lager brewery until 2011, when Jitka and her husband, Libor Ilčík, founded Pivovar Mamut, or Mammoth Brewery. Its name is a tribute to the region, whose soils continue to yield whole mammoth skeletons today… Since its inception, Pivovar Mamut has brewed what it calls “honest, unfiltered, and unpasteurised lager”—ordinary beer made with care and quality ingredients. That ethos would resonate with many in the beer world, but Jitka was interested in a different kind of brewing. She had made repeat visits to Belgium for work, and while there, encountered lambic: a tradition and set of practices that she instinctively understood from her winemaking upbringing.


An old Victorian pub in grey stone with a sign that reads The Albert.
The Albert, Keighley. SOURCE: Chris Dyson/Real Ale, Real Music.

At Real Ale, Real Music Chris Dyson has an interesting companion piece to the recent Pellicle article about Timothy Taylor – that is, a pub crawl of Keighley. Where, of course, Taylor’s rules:

It had been years since I’d last had a beer in Keighley. Back in the 1970s and 1980s.. Keighley town centre back in those days had plenty of Taylors pubs to go at, with the brewery having a virtual monopoly. However, over the years, places such as the Cricketers, the Burlington, Globe, Vine, Eastwood Tavern, and Burlington have all gone. Others such as the Friendly, Brown Cow, and Volunteers still operate, but are no longer run by Taylors. Of the original town centre pubs, only the Boltmakers, Royal, and Albert continue to be operated by the brewery, along with another pub they acquired a few years ago, the Lord Rodney, which now operates as Taylors On The Green… I broke my journey at the Albert. A large pub situated beside a busy roundabout, it is one of the longest-standing of Taylor’s current portfolio of 19 pubs.


A bland looking brewpub in a City of London office block. Its sign reads Long Arm Pub and Brewery.
Long Arm. SOURCE: Will Hawkes.

Will Hawkes’s newsletter London  Beer City is always essential reading. If you’re not a subscriber you can now read last month’s edition online. The format’s not ideal (a PDF in a window) but the content is good enough that we’re happy to put up with it. The most interesting bit in November’s edition is about a brewpub in London we’ve never heard of, created at the height of the craft beer boom, then neglected, until the recent arrival of a brewer from America:

Founded at the Ealing Park Tavern in 2015, Long Arm moved into The City two years’ later and was, to all intents and purposes, then largely forgotten… Until recently the bar was bedecked with various bits of naff American sports paraphernalia, but a new broom at the company – Danish COO Michael Farquhar, once of Ottolenghi and D&D – has done away with that. The intention now is to focus on beer… Which brings us, finally, to the important bit. Head brewer Jason Leeman arrived in London from the USA about five years ago  when his wife got a job here; by then, crucially, he had acquired 15 years of experience at small breweries in Colorado… Perhaps because he’s been away from the US for a while, perhaps because he clearly knows his own mind, Leeman’s beer evokes an earlier era in American craft-brewing, before a shrinking market and hopmania combined to make everything less balanced.


David Jesudason pulling a pint.
SOURCE: David Jesudason.

Award-winning beer writer David Jesudason has taken a bar job, doing one shift a month at The Shirker’s Rest, New Cross, South London. His first shift was prompted by a desire to help sell a beer he brewed with St Austell but he found the experience eye-opening:

[Working] in a pub gives you a rare gift of seeing the space for what it truly is even if that is amorphous – at first it went from being a slew of self-contained tables and then a communal mass with multiple conversations tied together with the love of beer. And, at times when I wasn’t part of the fun or the work, I had a vision of it being a high-street shop – the marvel of the micropub unwrapped… The most shameful confession is that for a few seconds when facing random customers I felt like I over-explained to somehow overcompensate that I was more than a bartender – maybe James’s intervention was warranted. That I had somehow failed in my career as a writer and become perma-frosted since 1999, which reveals how I may subconsciously view service industry jobs as somehow inferior to other pursuits.


As we wind up, let’s visit a couple more pubs. First, Martin Taylor has notes on one of his absolute favourite top ten pubs, The Sutton Arms in London:

Not many loo stops pubs at all, full of Santas or not, on the walk up from St Pauls through the Barbican to Angel… But I’d found my target, a pub which 3 years ago I immediately warmed to, as much as for the wonderful Old School landlord as the crafty keg, which in all fairness should have invalidated my completion of the GBG… Then the Sutton Arms was almost empty. Now it is heaving on a Thursday evening, almost entirely youthful post-work trade, and my photos are restricted to wall art,

Meanwhile, in Dublin, Lisa Grimm has been to a totally new pub, Molly’s Bar, which sounds as if it might make an interesting case study in years to come:

While much of The Liberties is blessed with Georgian and Victorian architecture, the building housing Molly’s Bar is relatively new, and not as characterful as many of its neighbours. The exterior is giving ‘breezeblock TARDIS’ in its current deep blue – quite a change from the bright pink everywhere when this was drag bar Doll Society, now decamped (well, ‘relocated’ is more apt here) to a spot inside Hyde, nearer Grafton Street.


Finally, one of the things we missed most after leaving Twitter was Martin’s posts about his pub crawls…

Stop 3 in Gent. Trappistenhuis (Orval ambassadeur) Draught beers include Three Rules Trappist collaboration and Chimay Grand Réserve.

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— 6TownsMart (@6townsmart.bsky.social) December 12, 2024 at 7:04 PM

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

Categories
pubs

All the pubs we didn’t go to

I’ll always think of 2024 as the year Dad died. Four months on, it hurts less – but it’s often in the pub I find myself dwelling on the loss.

In the immediate, horrible aftermath of Dad’s death, I wrote something like a formal obituary. Then, a little later, I wrote about how we bonded over pubs and beer.

But of course I’m never going to stop thinking about Dad, or run out of things to say about him.

Last month, the day after what would have been his 76th birthday, what remains of the family gathered in Bristol for lunch. Afterwards, we drifted to The Strawberry Thief, a Belgian-style cafe-bar.

It felt like the right place to go for a couple of reasons.

First, they served Brugse Zot – a fairly unremarkable Belgian blonde beer that was Dad’s favourite. He discovered it on a trip to Bruges more than a decade ago and got a case from my brother for Christmas every year since.

Mum and I toasted him, raised our glasses, and enjoyed every drop of what Dad always called ‘That Zot’.

Secondly, The Strawberry Thief is a reminder that you can’t make assumptions about what people will or won’t like based on their social class. Dad was working class and never became, or aspired to be, anything else. That didn’t stop him deciding he liked citrusy, piney craft beers, or taprooms, or vaguely pretentious bars like The Strawberry Thief.

Equally, he might decide he hated them. That was half the fun of a session with Dad.

This weekend, I braved Storm Darragh to visit Mum in Somerset. “Maybe we can pop round to the pub?” I said and, somewhat to my surprise, she said yes. I was even more surprised when she ordered a pint of Bath Ales (St Austell) Gem, having not seen her drink a pint in years.

The village isn’t cute – it’s one of those collections of former council houses, farm buildings and industrial units along a main road. The pub isn’t cute either, with a public bar dominated by working men in hi-viz jackets and muddy boots who spend most of their time smoking outside the front door.

I’d always got the impression Dad didn’t like the pub much but Mum told me that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, after their first visit, he said he was worried that, in retirement, it might be a bit too easy to end up there every lunchtime spending money they didn’t have on booze that wouldn’t do them any good. So he avoided it altogether.

Mum and I had been there a while, one round in, before we noticed that both of us were bopping along to the jukebox. It was non-stop blues music – not exactly the kind of songs Dad would have chosen himself, but not far off. We shivered. It felt spooky.

The landlord popped in to ask Mum how she was, glancing around to look for Dad. He obviously hadn’t heard the news. Mum told him and, in his gruff, unpretentious way, he expressed his sympathy. He seemed quite moved.

After a couple of pints, Mum began to reminisce about the drinking she and Dad did in their twenties, crawling through Bridgwater, playing euchre in The Cobblestones, Dad being presented with his own glass by the landlord and landlady…

The booze eventually made us maudlin, especially when we returned to a house where Dad wasn’t, but where his bass guitar still leans against the wall.

Another small problem is that every pub I go to in Bristol has either some memory of Dad, or is somewhere we hoped to take him “when he gets a bit better”.

For the past couple of years we’d talked about a taproom tour, even if we had to get cabs between them.

That now puts me in the ridiculous position of feeling faintly melancholy every time I go to Lost & Grounded, surrounded by plastic tubing, stainless steel, and people with beanie hats very high on their heads.

We never took him to The Star in Fishponds, which I’m sure he’d have loved, or to the Board Mill Social Club, with which he was fascinated.

My brother has spoken about feeling ambushed by things that make him think about Dad.

Personally, I’m constantly being emotionally tripwired by posters advertising upcoming gigs by pub blues bands: “Ooh, blues night at The Stillage, I really must tell Dad about tha– oh, fuck.”

Christmas is going to be weird because there won’t be a Christmas Day pint with Dad. There hasn’t been the past few years, to be honest, because he wasn’t well enough to make the short walk.

There was always the promise of it happening, though, even if we ended up drinking bottled beer on the sofa.

Maybe I’ll take Mum to the pub instead, while my brother cooks. Or perhaps I won’t. It might just be another way of pricking my heart and I don’t know if that’s helpful.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 7 December 2024: Ceremony of Carols

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from Guinness to barley wine, via dark mild.

First, news of the ongoing hype – hype! – around Guinness.

Will Hawkes spotted this story in The New York Times about the rising popularity of Guinness in the US: “Oran McGonagle, an owner of the Dubliner, a two-year-old pub in Boston. In 2023, his bar sold more Guinness than any other bar or restaurant in the city. And this year, the Dubliner’s purchasing volume of the stout is up 63 percent to meet rocketing demand.” (Paywalled, but the link worked for us the first time.)

And on this side of the Atlantic Diageo is reportedly limiting supplies of Guinness because of rising demand in the run up to Christmas: “While overall beer drinking was slightly down between July and October, the volume of Guinness consumed from kegs was up more than fifth.” The last thing Diageo would want you to do, of course, is panic buy.


A red brick pub with a sign that reads The Royal Oak.
The Royal Oak, Chapel Ash, Wolverhampton. SOURCE: British Beer Breaks.

For British Beer Breaks Phil Mellows has been considering what the discontinuation of Banks’s Mild on cask means for pubs which have made a name supplying it:

At the Royal Oak, Chapel Ash, however, the matter is more than an academic debate. Run by Emma and Terry Cole, the Royal Oak is a brilliant community pub that cares about local people and understands the role a pub plays in their lives. It’s also proud that it keeps a great pint of Banks’s Mild only a few hundred yards from where it’s made at CMBC’s Wolverhampton brewery, serving up to 200 pints a week… In fact, since we learned the brand was in its final days, the pub has been especially busy, Terry reports, with people coming in for what might be their last ever cask Banks’s Mild.


The City Arms, a Victorian pub in central Manchester.

For the blog of a homebrewing supplier Matthew Curtis has written his list of the best beer cities in the UK. If he was expecting furious disagreement, he might have been disappointed, because the chat online was unusually constructive and harmonious, with most people broadly agreeing with his judgement – or at least understanding his rationale. We didn’t find much with which to argue, either, including this bit on Bristol (at number 5):

What makes the scene great here is each of its many different layers. You’ve got genuinely world class breweries – the aforementioned Left Handed Giant for starters – but also Lost and Grounded, Wiper and True, and several more besides… The only funny thing about Bristol is that its scene is quite insular. It can be difficult to find a variety of interesting beer that isn’t made in Bristol sometimes, because here is a city that prefers to look after its own. When the offer is as good as that of the breweries I mentioned earlier, however, you can see why it’s one of the best cities for beer in the country.


A bottle of Gordon Xmas beer in a Christmassy bar.
SOURCE: Eoghan Walsh.

Eoghan Walsh has been to “the most Christmassy pub in Brussels” and now, of course, we want to go there too:

I must have walked past Le Saint Nicolas, on the narrow Little Butter Street just downhill from Brussels’ Grand Place, innumerable times and never noticed it. The café is opposite the compact St Nicolas church, and its entrance is overshadowed by the large rainbow flag hanging outside a neighbouring LGBT bar. Whether it was named for the church or the Greek saint who delivers pepernoten and mandarins to good Low Countries children in early December is immaterial, because the owners have leaned fully into the latter as Le Saint Nicolas’ overriding leitmotif. A sign hanging over the entrance has Sinterklaas in white beard and red mitre painted on it, and the rest of the bar takes its cue from there.


A smiling person with white-grey hair and a hi-viz jacket working in a brewery.
Derek Prentice brewing Thomas Hardy Ale. SOURCE: Ed Wray.

It’s easy to think that Thomas Hardy Ale just materialises under one owner or another every year, or every few years. But Ed Wray has shared some insider info on when he was involved in producing a batch a few years ago:

The last is of particular interest to me as I worked at Hepworths when production moved there. For this legendary beer another beer legend, Derek Prentice, is the brewing consultant employed by the brand owner and we worked with him to bring the beer back again… I wasn’t doing much actual brewing by that stage of my work at Hepworths but I made sure I brewed one of the batches of Thomas Hardy. Oh yes, I wasn’t going to miss that opportunity. Unlike at Eldridge Pope it’s brewed as a single gyle and it proved to be surprisingly problematic… We had to throw everything we could at it to get the beer down to target gravity and the ABV up to the strength we wanted. It spent a long, long time in tank.


A pair of Tennents Lager branded socks.
SOURCE: Tennent’s.

Katie Mather has some helpful suggestions for your relatives on what to buy you for Christmas, instead of the gift set of world lagers they’ve currently got their eye on. You might want to print it out and leave it lying around. This is a particularly good idea:

Put Money Behind Their Favourite Bar… Genuinely, genuinely do this if you’re feeling generous. Instead of getting a gift card for an online beer company or buying them a crate of something they might not like, go to their favourite pub or bar and put some money on tick for them… Not only will the bar absolutely love you for giving them a little cash boost at an important time of year, your mate will love you because they can go in and get pints whenever they want for free until the money runs out… From personal experience as a bar owner, this also encourages people to try things they wouldn’t normally buy, which is also a brilliant thing.


Finally, from BlueSky, a snapshot of a brilliant pub…

Great night at the Dog and Bell. One of London’s most unique pubs.

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— Will Hawkes (@willhawkes.bsky.social) November 30, 2024 at 8:44 AM

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