Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time we’ve got Berliner Weisse, suburban pubs and jugs of Bass.
We usually start these round-ups with a single piece of beer-related news but this state of the industry read-out from Jessica Mason at The Drinks Business is all the news, effectively, synthesised and summarised:
If brewers had a crystal ball, they’d have thrown it in the mill by now: 2024 was meant to be the year when beer regained ground, not a time of closure and brand resale… But the issues have been complicated, and not only because rising costs are clearly in direct opposition to developing prosperous businesses, but also because survival has now become a bit of a game of predicting how the beer world is changing. And then doing what is necessary by leaning into it…
The phrase we heard earlier in the year was “Survive ‘til 25” summarising the attitude of many brewers. Fingers crossed.
The Crown in Nottingham. SOURCE: Dermot Kennedy/Pub Gallery.
When we see that Dermot Kennedy has published another of his heavily-illustrated pub history posts, we clap our hands in delight. The third part of his series on Art Deco pubs arrived this week with a focus on suburban pubs:
Nottingham has no fewer than 7 art deco pubs and in the Crown Hotel includes one that was possibly the first to be built in the moderne style anywhere in the UK. W.B. Starr & E.B.H. Hall had established themselves as the city’s main pub architects and had built or rebuilt twenty or so in the 1920s and early 1930s. None had been art deco, but in 1933 they designed the Crown Hotel for Home Brewery in a striking moderne style. The style was already common in cinemas, and was starting to make an impact on factories, housing and hotels but until now had not been applied to pubs.
Let the rejoicing continue! All About Beer has published an actual article, with actual text, instead of expecting us to listen to podcast episodes. Adrian Tierney-Joneswent to Berlin in search of Berliner Weisse and… didn’t find much, actually:
It was reminiscent of a travel assignment to Leipzig when I excitedly told a hotel receptionist that I wanted to try Gose. His reaction was a quizzical smile and the word ‘Why?’… “Why” is a good word to describe the predicament of Berliner Weisse. Why is it such a minority style in its home city, especially as independent brewers around the world, including the United Kingdom, United States, Italy and even Taiwan, have made one?… For Oli Lemke, who started the eponymous brewery in 1999, it is almost obligatory for a Berlin brewer to produce a Berliner Weisse. There are more than 100 breweries in the city but it seems like Lemke is only one of three producing the style. The other two are Schneeeule and Berliner Berg, who according to their website have brought in a ‘newly brewed’ version of the style.
Wigan Central, Wigan. SOURCE: Chris Dyson/Real Ale, Real Music.
Just around the corner, occupying a couple of arches in the railway bridge on which sits part of Wigan’s other railway station, North Western, is the suitably railway-themed Wigan Central. I had called in here last time before getting the train home and remembered a good bar with a good atmosphere, then run by the former Prospect Brewery who were based in the town and a number of their beers had been available alongside a few guest ales. This time, with the house beer now brewed by Bank Top, several guests on hand pump on tap were augmented by several more as this current Wigan CAMRA Pub of the Year was hosting an Autumn Beer Festival! A second bar featuring hand pumps with a wall of keg beers was set up in the far room, I ordered a pint of the 3.4% It Belongs In A Museum on hand pump, a predictably very good pale ale from Sureshot (NBSS 3.5). I surveyed the festival beer list; there were some very good beers included on both cask and keg. This was not what I needed…
The Swan, West Peckham. SOURCE: Paul Bailey/Bailey’s Beer Blog.
Our 2017 book 20th Century Pub has a chapter about community-owned pubs. We were, and are, fascinated by what motivates people to invest in, or play a part in running, their local pub. So the latest post on Paul Bailey’s blog (no relation) grabbed our attention with the title ‘We bought a pub’:
Even without the house-brewed beers the Swan [at West Peckham] is a destination pub in its own right, given its attractive location on the village green, at the crossroads of the Weald and Greensand ways… Despite this illustrious trading record, and in spite of the Swan remaining a successful pub and popular restaurant, the decision taken, just over a year ago by the current owner and licensee Gordon Milligan, to sell up and leave the trade after 24 years at the helm, sent shock waves through the tight-knit local community. Fortunately, rather than seek to convert it into housing, Mr Milligan approached the villagers and asked if they wanted to take the pub on. Their answer was a resounding “yes”, so a steering group was set up with the aim of purchasing the building collectively for the village… I’m now the proud owner of 250 shares in the Swan Community Project Ltd.
The Star Inn, Bath. SOURCE: Martin Taylor/retiredmartin.com
Martin Taylor has been in Bath and makes a passionate case for The Star Inn as one of the wonders of the world:
Now, let it be said I always speak the truth. On first sip, this flat Bass wasn’t as softly stunning as 2 years ago, when I rated it in my Top 5 pints of all time (only 26 in that)… But the Star itself just felt otherworldly… The symphony in brown and red played out around us… Folks, there are people who profess to like pubs and beer who have never been here!
It’s interesting that one of the commenters refers to it as a “tourist trap”. It isn’t. For one thing, it’s not especially friendly towards tourists, and is quite a way from the bits of town where tourists hang out. We also insist on the distinction between tourist attraction (a thing you should see, that has a purpose and existence outside tourism, like the Hofbräuhaus) versus a tourist trap – something that only exists for the purpose of fleecing rubes, like Madame Tussaud’s.
Finally, from BlueSky, a very pretty glass of beer indeed…
Draft Stille Nacht 2019 at 't Brugs Beertje. Absolutely sensational, and far better than when fresh five years ago. Cheers! 🍻 🇧🇪
“We must go back to Poland some time soon,” we’ve been saying for about 20 years. In our late teens and early twenties we spent a lot of time there.
Jess learned Polish at university alongside her history degree – the last gasp of a Cold War scheme sponsored by the Foreign Office which nobody had yet got round to cancelling – and then taught English there for a year.
As our interest in beer grew, we got distracted by Germany, Belgium and Czechia. We also gave up flying which put Poland that little further out of reach.
This year, though, we decided the time had come and planned a trip via Berlin, whose shiny new Hauptbahnhof points conveniently eastward.
Specifically, we chose Gdańsk because Jess spent a month there in 1998, polishing her Polish in a local school. For 25 years she’d been saying “You really must see it…” Now, at last, we were returning together.
Frankfurt an der Oder.
Things spread out and thin out as the train barrels through Brandenburg and rushes through what was once Prussia. It’s a big country, a neverending plain.
Into the borderlands the atmosphere changes: please have your passports ready, security officers may board the train. The German train crew disembarks and passes the incoming Polish crew on the bridge across the platforms, ships in the night.
Trucks are backed up on the bridge across the Oder, the wide river that now marks the Polish border, but really signals that you’re entering a zone where history has created places with two identities, no identity, repressed memories.
Brovarnia Gdańsk.
We kept saying to ourselves, “It’s not about the beer.” But the problem for us is that it’s always about the beer. When we were last in Poland, we had the stamina for recreational vodka drinking, but not these days. And with all that history swirling in our heads, with the ghosts of Prussia and of Danzig ever present, we thought we’d find something worth drinking.
When Jess was last in Gdańsk it was full of Germans – old people shipped west in 1945 and 1946 making a sentimental return, and their children. Back then, local businesses pandered to them with Danziger theme brewpubs and lidded mugs of German-style beer. While that post-Iron-Curtain moment seems to have passed there are still a couple of German-style breweries in town, both attached to international hotels, so that’s where we started.
Brovarnia Gdańsk is at the Hotel Gdańsk on the waterside. It was dressed for Oktoberfest when we visited, with staff in Dirndls and Lederhosen, blue and white bunting everywhere, and oompah music on loop. It still felt like a hotel bar, though, or perhaps a chain restaurant. “This is going to be one of those places with a hazy pale beer and a sticky dark beer,” said Ray, eyeing the copper brewing kit visible beyond the counter, “like you get in Hamburg or Stuttgart or Frankfurt.” And, yes, it was pretty much that. What saved the day was a Black IPA, of all things – a classy, interesting beer that combined chocolate, biscuit and pine with aplomb.
An air raid shelter from 1943 when Gdańsk was Danzig.
Gdańsk has too much history and not enough shops, that’s the problem. Trying to buy a tube of toothpaste is more of a mission than it ought to be, but you’ll stumble across fifteen national historical monuments on the way.
The local supermarket is that way, past the colossal concrete air raid shelter built in 1943, round the corner from the Polish Post Office where some of the first shots of World War II were fired, not far from the shipyard where the Cold War began to end.
The city itself is a war memorial. At the end of World War II it was 90% destroyed, an apocalyptic rubblescape. The new Soviet-controlled authorities debated what to do and, at one point, someone suggested leaving the city centre as a vast ruin, to remind the Germans of what they’d done. Except it wouldn’t be Germans who would have to live here but, rather, Poles from the east whose own cities had been absorbed in the USSR. So, instead, Gdańsk was rebuilt not as it was in 1939, but instead to recall the days before 1793 when it was part of the Kingdom of Poland.
A shot of Jopenbier.
PG4 Brewhouse, in the basement of the Central Hotel, was much more convincing as a beer hall. It is also one of the few places in Gdańsk where the shameful place name Danzig can be seen in writing. It’s set up for corporate hospitality and tourists dinners with English the default language, and the staff seemed confused that we didn’t immediately want to order pork knuckles or schnitzels. But it is suitably dark and cosy (basements are best) and we weren’t the only people there to focus on the beer.
There’s an impressive menu of house brews – eight in total, in a range of styles, including some we’ve never seen anywhere else. Starting with a Pils to calibrate, it was clear that, if not perfect, it was a cut above. It was hazy, of course, in true international brewpub style, but satisfying, and served with a decent head of foam.
Gdańsk Rubin was their take on a Dunkel and a highlight of the menu, being drier and more complex than some German examples. We picked up suggestions of rye bread and liquorice.
The wheat beer was on the dark, amber end of the spectrum, with some toffee notes to go with the banana. We found it extremely convincing and assumed it was a conscious attempt to clone Schneider Weisse.
Having tried all of the standard beers that were available, we got into the local and historical specialities.
Tafelbier was an homage to “a beer consumed every day in Gdańsk” in the mediaeval period. International brewpubs always have a yellow one and a brown one; the most enterprising will also find space for one in between. That was Tafel, which struck us as being similar to some modern takes on Vienna beer we’ve encountered, poised between light and dark. It also had some intriguing herbal notes.
Things really started to get interesting with Krollinger, a sour beer fermented with three different yeasts, including Brettanomyces. It was not boring, if not quite as intense and complex as the menu description implied. What it resembled most closely was Berliner Weisse, and there was even the option to have it with a shot of wormwood or raspberry syrup. In summer, perhaps, it would have gone down better.
Finally, there was Danziger Jopenbier – the main event. It’s a historic style associated with the city, brewed to some kind of original recipe, and selling at 16 Polish złoty (£3) for a 50ml shot. In presentation, it was treated much like a liqueur or a sherry and reminded us of both Riga Balsam and Pedro Ximinez fortified wine. It was extremely sweet and sticky, completely flat, with a funky, leathery, pipe tobacco stink. A curiosity, then, rather than something to session on. But the menu says that “it was used to aromatise and enhance others beers” and we couldn’t resist trying that, using it to turn the wheat beer into a convincing Doppelbock.
Pierogi at Mandu.
The international brewpub style is so 1990s. Nowadays, it’s all about the international beanie hat tote bag pot plant horn-rimmed hygge lo-fi ambient craft beer street food scene.
There’s a hip pierogi restaurant for which you have to queue, and the queue is full of people posting videos to TikTok and Instagram. When you get inside, you can watch expensive cars pull up outside, their chiselled owners clutching tiny dogs against their designer sportswear. They sweep in and are seated at once. Sophisticated global citizens, of course, but they still need their potato dumplings. (And what dumplings… the pinnacle of the art.)
The Montownia Food Hall could easily be in Birmingham or Berlin except, this being Gdańsk, it’s housed in the vast concrete chamber of what used to be a U-Boat factory. There’s food in the styles of Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Mexico, India, Greece, Italy, Ukraine and Craftonia (avocado toast). Blinking devices summon diners when their food is ready, their piercing beeps overlapping and constant.
The main feature of the food hall is a long looping bar where stylish bartenders sling shots and cocktails at urban professionals and couples on date night. There is beer but it’s not why anyone is here. The separate craft beer stand by the main entrance looks the part with its keg taps in the back wall and fridges full of cans, as if it was shipped complete from Bermondsey in a freight container.
The menu at Pułapka.
German-style brewpubs are one thing but we also wanted to visit some craft beer bars. Partly because we wanted to explore the full range of local beer, and partly because we knew if we didn’t someone online would ask us why not.
Pułapka calls itself the best craft beer bar in Gdańsk. On our visit, on Sunday evening, there were 13 different beers on tap and more in bottles and cans.
What excited us most, at first glance, was the presence on the menu of two different beers in the historic and revived Grodziskie style, from two different breweries. With our ongoing pondering about what a healthy beer culture looks like in mind, the presence of local or national speciality styles feels like a win.
Perhaps if we drank Grodziskie every week we could grow to love it. As it is, we found both of these examples rather challenging, with an overwhelming peaty, medicinal smokiness. Lapsus by Warsaw brewery Palatum was more balanced than Piwo w stylu Grodziskie by Trzech Kumpli, apparently a contract brewing outfit based in Tarnów.
The rest of the menu consisted of beer styles we did know, and could latch onto, which is how we know that something wasn’t quite right with, of all things, the gas. A dry Irish-style nitro stout with no head? A German-style lager with no foam?
As the bar filled up with arty, alternative youngsters we observed that what was really selling well was New England IPA and West Coast IPA. Everybody wants to drink what feels most foreign and exotic, we suppose.
A milk bar in Wrzeszcz.
“Langfuhr was now called Wrzeszcz, but who can pronounce that?” asks Oskar in The Tin Drum, Günter Grass’s great novel of Danzig-Gdańsk, referring to the suburban satellite where Grass himself grew up. A walk to Wrzeszcz is educational, taking you out of the sentimental and psychological safety of the reconstructed Old Town and into the real world of dual carriageways and retail parks.
On the schlep along Aleja Zwycięstwa (Victory Avenue) you’ll pass a Soviet-built T34 tank intended as a memorial to Polish troops who helped take Gdańsk at the end of World War II. There’s also a somewhat bleak park with a haunted feel that, yes, turns out to be the former site of a church and cemetery.
Push on, push on, and you’re in the neighbourhood – a bustling but unpretty town centre with trams and traffic, bakeries and junk shops, and a surviving example of a proper Polish milk bar.
Grab a tray, fall into line behind the students, the pensioners, the mechanic in his grubby hoody, and give your order fast and clear when the time comes. No pierogi today, love, but we’ve got a lovely chicken schnitzel. Soup? Russian salad? Chips? A big heap of bulgur wheat? Two bowls of soup and two plates of Naleśniki pancakes cost not much more than a single pint of beer in town.
There’s a plaque on the unassuming tenement block where Günter Grass grew up. The council workmen pouring tar on the road don’t seem especially interested. In the park nearby there’s a bronze statue of Oskar Matzerath, drum on his lap, hands raised to beat it with sticks that aren’t there.
The entrance to Labeerynt.Inside Labeerynt.
The other craft beer bar on our list was Labeerynt on a backstreet in the old town. Though the basement entrance looks like a test, or a trap, it was the pubbiest place we found during our visit. With low, red-tinted light, greebling on the walls, and a selection of private corners and cubbyholes, it felt like somewhere you could settle in. Bar service rather than hovering waiters completed the effect.
A huge hanging sign advertising Czech brewery Svijany boded well for the quality of the beer, if not its localness. As the cheapest and apparently biggest selling item among the 14 beers on the tap list, we figured this would be a good place to start. Watching the bartender carefully manipulate the multiple taps and levers on the font to create the right amount of foam, with the right texture, increased our confidence further. And it did, indeed, taste great.
After that, as we dotted through the menu at random, we didn’t have a bad beer. Some were more to our taste than others, but all seemed well made and well kept, and were served with appropriate care.
The standout beer of the visit – of the entire week in Gdańsk, in fact – was Coffeelicous Special by Piwo Podziemie, a 6.3% chocolate coffee vanilla milk stout. It might sound like a bit of a novelty beer but it was surprisingly easy drinking with all of those flavours in perfect balance. What might have helped, of course, was that it was served from a “pumpa” – that is, an English style beer engine. If it wasn’t cask conditioned, it was a good imitation.
Ulica Stefana Jaracza.
Lost under the flyover, trapped between railway lines, penned in by redevelopment work in progress, you turn a corner and find a ghost town. A block, a few cobbled streets, of old Gdańsk, of old Danzig, how it must have looked before the war. Not reconstructed, the real thing, with soot staining the brickwork and bullet holes in the apartment block walls.
An elderly woman in a red coat passes, battling a lazy dog, and for a moment you wonder if she’s slipped through from another time.
The old Imperial Shipyard grew up in the 19th century and is now mostly deserted, its colossal brick and concrete sheds derelict. In Britain, there would be barriers and keep out signs. In Poland, where the Wild East begins, you’re invited to wander among the ruins, with a gentle warning that if you fall over and hurt yourself, you’re not to go running to them.
Broken windows, spilled oil, chunks of metal and stone embedded in the ground… It feels like the set of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker.
Who’s that, over there, that shadow? Someone other ruinophile with a camera and hiking boots admiring a rusting fire escape. Well, what about that shadow? The tall one, with the skeletal shape? That’s an art installation, made from rusting cogs and pipes – a battle droid frozen in place.
The water that runs beside it is the Martwa Wisła – literally the Dead Vistula.
After a day or two, the marketing began to get to us: maybe we did want a Żywiec (Heineken) after all. It had never struck us a great beer in the past but everyone else was drinking it. And the craft beer revolution has changed Żywiec, too: as well as the standard pale lager there’s also a dark lager, a wheat beer, a pale ale, and an IPA.
Getting a glass of Żywiec was easier said than done, however. The first place we tried to order one had run out. The second place we found it was in a seaside bar in Gdynia at 9:30am when, even applying holiday rules, we didn’t quite feel up to it. We finally got our Żywiec at the other end of a coastal walk, in Sopot, to go with a seafood lunch.
It was exactly as we remembered it – sweet, bland, a little fizzy, like a less impressive version of Carling. That was that itch scratched.
Joseph Conrad in Gdynia.
We do like to be beside the seaside, tiddly-om-pom-pom, even when the sea in question is the Baltic, littered with cargo ships and tankers, with colossal Gdańsk shipyard cranes on the horizon.
Gdynia feels quite familiar if you’re British: fish and chips, ice cream parlours, amusement arcades, novelty knickers for a pound from a vending machine near the prom.
At first glance, given the context, there’s what appears to be a typical Eastern Block statue of Lenin guarding the entrance to the harbour. Except it’s not Lenin – it’s Joseph Conrad, the seafaring Polish lad who became one of the greatest writers in the English language. Suffering no loss of dignity from the seagull standing and shitting on his head, he stares sternly towards Sopot, the next resort along.
Promenading towards Sopot you pass a vast concrete, chrome and plate glass box stuffed with shiny brewing equipment – the Gdynia Port Brewery. It looks out over the beach like a bunker or fortification.
Sopot itself is quainter and cuter and a little snootier than Gdynia: think Lytham St Annes or St Ives. You have to pay to use the bog in Sopot and there are patissiers selling dainty Parisian tarts instead of the typical hefty wedges of pale yellow cheesecake. There’s a craft brewery on the high street, of course.
What we failed to find in Gdańsk was a proper boozer. In Berlin, now, under the guidance of the Krennmairs, we know our way around some Eckkneipen. In Brussels, we know how to sniff out neighbourhood cafes. And in Cologne, we’re enjoying exploring the Veedels.
But in Gdańsk we simply didn’t see any ‘normal’ bars or pubs. It might be that they’re hidden on backstreets away from respectable eyes. But based on Jess’s experience 20+ years ago, it’s more likely that they simply never existed.
Next time, finding one or two, if they are there, will be our mission. If you have any tips, comment below.
Here’s our selection of the best reading about beer and pubs from the past week, including budgets, brewery life and music boxes.
The big story of the week in the UK was the new government’s first budget, delivered by Chancellor Rachel Reeves on Wednesday. The response from the beer and pub industry seems mixed… as it always is, actually.
It’s been some time since a Chancellor made a decisive move in favour of brewing and hospitality. It tends to be tweaks to rates (a 1.7% cut in tax on draught drinks in this case) alongside a bunch of broader changes that affect pubs and breweries in their roles as employers. Specifically, in this case, an increase in employers’ national insurance contributions and an increase in the national minimum wage. On that, The British Institute of Innkeeping (BII) says it “will have a huge impact on [pubs’] profitability and threaten their existence”.
As we’ve said before, until it becomes politically acceptable, or profitable, for governing parties to give the sector special treatment – until “Save our pubs!” becomes a bigger priority for the public than “Save our NHS!” – this is not likely to change.
“It was a good brand and had legs to be something different. And they just cooked it.”… That’s how Cassie… felt after the brewery she worked at closed down. After all, there had been plenty of high marks: great beer; growing popularity; expansions; fun beer launches and collabs; her colleagues’ phenomenal passion and all they’d achieved… Yet it all went wrong, and 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?
SOURCE: David Jesudason.
How do you read this piece about The Lamb by David Jesudason and not want to go there at once to admire the snob screens, drink a pint of ale, and listen to the Polyphon?
I’m here to see the Polyphon, a Victorian music box, which fills the air with a tinkling tune which feels to me contradictorily both innocent and sinister when Ralph winds it up. It used to be operated by coin – a token – which was given to you if you made a donation, but now it only works this way… “If it’s a busy Friday night it doesn’t go down [well],” says [general manager] Ralph [Parham], “but Saturday afternoon if people are interested we give it a little go when it comes up in conversations.”… Ralph shows me about 20 or 30 different tracks in a cupboard. These are giant metal discs with punched holes… But it’s the snob screens in the Lamb that are the biggest hint to its prejudiced past when middle class drinkers wanted to shut out others from their view… Ralph finds it amusing that as a gay person he’s living and working among all this archaic segregationana.
The Black Horse, Preston. SOURCE: Jane Stuart.
We enjoyed Jane Stuart’sramble around the pubs of Preston. It’s not a town we know but it’s clear there’s plenty of interest there for a beer drinker, from old pubs to craft beer bars:
I was here today to meet up with pals from the Friends of Highgate Brewery… I used to live within sniffing distance of Highgate Brewery in Walsall back in the day. The brewery once had several pubs dotted around the area. And of course it was famed for its lush Dark Mild. The Friends of Highgate Brewery meet up every month and, when I joined them back in 2008, we’d meet every other month in the brewery itself, where we’d pay a nominal fee on the way in for some raffle tickets and basically drink as much beer as we liked for a couple of hours. Those were the halcyon days! The raffles are famous for having some, erm, interesting prizes. My favourite was a unicorn horn for cats. Nowadays, FOHB still meet up monthly in the pubs of Walsall and continue to run social trips to breweries and beer towns.
Well, the funny thing is that in all the market research those big brewers do, when they ask people what source of information they trust most, the top answer is always “word of mouth.” They spend millions trying to replicate the kinds of conversations that happen in pubs up and down the country every day.
There’s a lot to be said for transparency, but the question has to be asked to what extent this is something that drinkers class as important. They may say in opinion surveys that they prefer beer from small independent breweries to that made by giant corporations, but their revealed preference often indicates otherwise. All they want at the end of the day is a decent pint.
I saw time and time again that people were frustrated about the subject, because they, in their own words, didn’t care about it. In one instance, a reader commented four times to lament that time was being spent contemplating a subject “only manbuns care about”… But this is something I think we, as drinkers, have gotten wrong. It does matter. If it didn’t, why would big breweries be clinging to the term [craft beer] long after acquiring the branding rights?
Finally, from BlueSky, another little nugget of news…
I'm thrilled to discover that Prize Old Ale has been brewed again, and the 2024 version is being launched in the coming weeks www.darkstarbrewing.co.uk/products/pri…
“This week I’ve been thinking about the lack of criticism in beer writing. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the years, because beer and pub reviewing doesn’t really exist in any meaningful way compared to how it does in wine or food writing.”
This isn’t quite the same issue as one we’ve addressed various times over the years: why is beer writing so uncritical?
The answer to that question is mostly that there’s a collective sense that small, independent breweries need to be supported, not kicked at.
It’s a choice each beer writer (pro or hobbyist) has to make for themselves. As Katie Mather observes…
I generally don't write negative reviews because I can't be arsed with the backlash. People online are rude, and brewery owners get personally offended and DM-y. For the sake of my sanity, I just say nothing.
But Matt’s question is about why more publications don’t have a beer critic on their books.
Apart from the odd exception, we cannot generally pick up a newspaper at the weekend and get intel on which beers to seek out or buy.
But the thing is, we do not need that intel.
If we see a beer for sale that looks interesting, we’re willing to invest a fiver in a pint, or a couple of quid in a half. If it’s bad, we haven’t lost much in terms of cash or time.
Compare that to a film, for example, where a critical review could save you £15 and two and a half hours of your life.
From our own small experience writing a small column for the Guardian Guide for a small amount of time a decade or so ago, we also know that beer criticism is limited by the availability of the beers in question.
There is no point in recommending a beer that is only produced in limited volumes, or only available regionally.
So, you end up writing about national brands from larger producers, available in supermarkets or mainstream pubs.
That can be interesting – especially if you’re able to highlight hidden gems that might otherwise be overlooked. For example, we discovered McEwan’s Champion because Martyn Cornell took the trouble to explain why it was a more interesting beer than we’d realised.
There’s also the problem that our review of a pint of a cask ale from, say, Ashley Down Brewery at a pub here in Bristol might reflect a totally different experience to yours at a festival in Leeds in six months’ time.
When a wine reviewer says “Grab the 2021 Riesling from Château Bloggs” yes, there are variables, but far fewer than for a pint of ale.
Batch, storage, age, condition, presentation… There are so many ways a beer can be screwed up in the supply chain – or enhanced.
Talking this over between ourselves, though, we can think of some instances where beer criticism might be useful.
First, for hyped-up, expensive, limited edition beers. Should you blow £30 on a 750ml bottle of a sour beer from a brewery with a mixed reputation? Or save your money?
Secondly, where the styles or production methods are strange or unfamiliar. Last week, we drank two Grodziskie beers in Poland, but did not have the critical framework to know if they were good examples of the style.
Even in these cases, though, as beer geeks, we like taking a punt. Being lost and trying to find our own way is where the enjoyment comes from.
Here’s all the writing about beer that grabbed our attention in the past week, from independence to bench seating.
First, some news: Walthamstow’s Wild Card Brewing has ceased trading and the council has repossessed its brewery. This news actually dropped last week but we missed it. Wild Card was never a brewery whose beer we heard anyone rave about – though there was certainly plenty of goodwill towards them, as pioneers in a once brewery-less part of London. We’re beginning to think, too, that 12 years is a good run for a brewery, unless it has what it takes to become a beloved institution.
For The Guardian Katie Mather has written about the corporate takeover of UK breweries and the persistent impression of their independence and ‘craft’ status:
In a recent survey commissioned by the Society of Independent Brewers and Associates (Siba), drinkers were asked whether certain beer brands were “independent”, and 40% thought that Neck Oil was, unaware it was now, for all intents and purposes, a Heineken-brewed beer. Three-quarters of drinkers surveyed said they felt they were being misled when formerly independent brands were in fact owned by multinationals. Does it really matter if a business sells out to a larger one? By the looks of it, yes… The reason breweries sell is because of the money. It’s obvious why a multinational such as Heineken would want a brewery such as Beavertown on its books. Drinkers were choosing craft beer over their portfolio of lagers and one cider (Strongbow, if you’re interested) and this was impacting on their sales.
Josh Weikert’s piece about how to brew a great Grodziskie for Craft Beer & Brewing caught our eye because, when we saw it, we’d just tried two Grodziskie’s in a row, at a bar in Gdańsk. We don’t know if they were good examples of the style because we lack benchmarks against which to judge. As Weikert explains:
A style that had disappeared before homebrewers and then craft brewers resurrected it, grodziskie (or grätzer, in German) was one of the first beers that really fired my imagination… Grodziskie is a low-ABV beer made from oak-smoked wheat. It has a lot of character for such a light beer, including noticeable wheat and hop flavors, ample smoke, and an elevated carbonation level that adds a nice, crisp bite. Given the wheat and carbonation, it should have a dense, long-lasting, bright white head atop a pale body. It should also be quite clear, despite the wheat. The IBUs are modest in absolute terms, yet the bitterness should be firm given the low gravity.
The phrase ‘beer-flavoured beer’ has generated some interesting discussion in the past week or so. It started with Dave Infantefor VinePair:
Known as “core beer” or “traditional beer” in industry circles, “beer-flavored beer” is what it sounds like — a fermented beverage that hews closely to a familiar, traditional style. Lager, for example, is beer-flavored beer, and a wonderful example at that. But the phrase has also become something approaching a rallying cry for the many craft brewers who yearn for the days when drinkers came to them thirsting for the stuff they wanted to brew.
It can be used to exclude, wielded as a weapon by drinkers who imply they know something others do not. “I can appreciate beer-flavored beer, the complex flavors that result from the interaction of malt and yeast in a simple helles. You are not worthy.”
The first time I heard the term used, it was wielded against beer nerds by tin-can beer drinkers who didn’t like things like IPAs or stouts—or helleses and schwarzbiers. They thought “craft beer” was something only hipsters liked, and they weren’t interested… This is one of those situations where context is everything, and meaning a slippery, mutable substance. We might imagine cases where the phrase becomes a barb to puncture either beer nerds or light beer drinkers, or just a phrase meant to add some color to a conversation without a critique. Language is like that—it is rarely fixed, and we often have to code-switch as we use it.
The public bar at The Fellowship, Bellingham, in 2016.
As we approach the finish, we’re going to pair two posts about, or touching on, pub seating. First, Tandleman has written about traditional bench seating in pubs and how, in his his opinion, the art of sharing tablespace has been lost:
Now thinking on, you often see in busy pubs, (like busy trains), coats and bags covering free seats. And these days, unlike the habit in Germany, it is unusual to see strangers sharing a table. I recall last winter, in the Commercial in London, asking a couple if we could sit at a bench, where six could be accommodated. They thought I was asking them to move elsewhere, until I explained that I just wanted them to shift their arses along to make room, a notion that seemed alien to them.
The lounge retains its wood panelling, bench seating and original stained glass windows, but has acquired some overlarge rectangular tables, although I suppose that is seen as necessary for the food trade… the pub also to my mind suffers from the presence of a large screen for TV sport in every room. I recognise that sport does bring customers in, but surely in a pub with three large rooms there should be scope for one of them not to have a screen, or for it not to be generally used… It also seems incongruous in the context of the historic interior.
Finally, from Instagram, a topical ‘countdown to Halloween’ post from Lisa Grimm:
