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News

News, nuggets and longreads 20 January 2024: Wintermute

Here are all the blog posts and articles we bookmarked in the past week, from cosy pubs in Dublin to chilly ones in Manchester.

First, some news. North Brewing of Leeds has appointed administrators and is looking for “additional investment” to stay afloat. This is significant because North Bar, from which North Brewing is a spin-off, was arguably the UK’s first craft beer bar (see Brew Britannia for more on that). Its expansion into brewing and multiple bars was very much a sign of the craft beer boom of the 2000s and 2010s. And that it is struggling in 2024 perhaps confirms that boom is well and truly over.


The exterior of the Ivy House, a grand-looking pub advertising food and brunches.
SOURCE: Lisa Grimm/weirdodublinpubs.com

It’s exciting to see that Lisa Grimm’s Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs has broken free from her blog onto its own website at weirdodublinpubs.com. The first post on the new site is about The Ivy House in Drumcondra:

The Ivy House is in a lovely three-storey building (with the date ‘1809’ above the pediment…we’ll get back to that), so it’s quite a substantial place, but it could easily be argued that it’s two pubs in one. Although most visual interest is drawn by the frontage, the smaller, one-storey structure to the side could almost be overlooked, were it not for the arresting image of an older man – one Patrick Carthy, formerly of Carthy’s Bar, painted on the wall, and this part of the business is still known by his name… the Carthy’s Bar side of The Ivy House… has an entirely separate entrance around the corner, complete with its own frontage. And, once inside, it’s quite the contrast from the other side of The Ivy House – it’s every bit the old-man-pub…


Lager illustration.

How long is long enough when it comes to lagering? For Craft Beer & Brewing Michael Stein explores the myths, the rules-of-thumb and the facts of the matter:

While four to six months was proudly advertised as a great deal of time in 1904, two to three months seems like a long time today. It might even feel like forever… In recent years, as more small breweries have dabbled in lager, many have been mentioning the lagering times on their packaging or social media. After all, if it’s expensive to keep beer in tanks for that long, you might as well get some marketing benefit out of it… Back in 1907, Christian Heurich Brewing in Washington, D.C., was advertising two beers, Maerzen and Senate, as being six to 10 months old. Heurich, however, was a large brewery with a massive footprint, able to produce 200,000 barrels a year.


A bottle of Corona Mega with a wrinkled brown label next to two jars of golden beer, a wedge of lime and a bottle of hot sauce.

Like Jeff Alworth we’re always fascinated by the strange beers you sometimes find in unexpected places. For us, it’s things like Bass Mild in a social club in Penzance. For Jeff it’s an off-brand bottle of Corona lager in a Mexican restaurant:

En Route to Oceanside, an unincorporated town of 361, we stopped in Tillamook for dinner, selecting a Mexican restaurant I will not name in case it is on the fringes of an international beer-smuggling ring. Our server, who also seemed to be the owner, offered us a choice of one beer: Corona. He gestured at a cooler, but instead of seeing the familiar blue and white, it was filled with 1.2 liter bombers with labels the color of a paper bag. I write about beer for a living, and I spend a fair amount of time in Mexican restaurants, and I have never seen a bottle like that. Mystified, I asked about it, and he told us (paraphrasing here), “That’s the kind we get in Mexico.” He said it encouragingly, as if inviting me to sample a local delicacy.


Black Sheep pump clips on the bar of a Yorkshire pub.

What is Breal Capital’s gameplan as it snaps up one troubled UK brewery after another? At Beer Insider Glynn Davis offers some insight with his business journalist hat on:

Beyond the tap rooms of the breweries it has bought there appears to be only modest tied profitable sales for Breal. It closed three of the four Black Sheep pubs having deemed them unviable. It has suggested that its brewing sales team across the UK can expand the market for the breweries in its ever-expanding portfolio. This is fair enough but it’s a tough market out there as the acquired breweries know all too well… What Breal can also tap into is its growing presence in the restaurant and bars sector as it is also on a mission to hoover up distressed assets in this area. It has so far bought Vinoteca, D&D London and a couple of bars that it has brought into its growing Andrea chain.


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

Visiting one outer Bristol pub before Christmas we took note of a chill in the air and damp on the seats. Now Tandleman has similar observations from Manchester:

Yesterday in Manchester, two out of the three pubs I was in… were actually cold.  So cold in one that my wife refused to allow a further drink, as she was perishing. In this case, it was not helped by a door at the rear to the courtyard that was left open by smokers as they nipped in and out. With a door at the other end admitting customers, it made for an icy through draught from the sub-zero temperatures outside. While the radiators were feebly doing their best, it was a losing battle, and in any case they didn’t seem to be that hot anyway. Our earlier experience in a very large venue wasn’t much better, though they did have a huge space to heat, nor was the small restaurant where we tried to enjoy a meal. I’d call that a trend.

There’s a sharp observation from the Pub Curmudgeon in the comments, too, that “the tendency to remove small rooms and convert pubs into one large single space has stored up a problem for the future”. See also: private houses.


Finally, from Mastodon

User Veedems posts:

While I don’t love that Pabst beer is owned by a Russian company now, I do love that they’ve stuck to their key selling points.

What kind of beer is it? 

Pabst: Who cares? It’s 90 cents a can. 

Yeah but how many carbs does it have?

Pabst: enough to charge 90 cents a can. 

What kind of flavor notes should I expect? 

Pabst: You should expect to give us a dollar and we’ll give you 10 cents back.

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

Categories
bristol pubs

A pair of rebooted Bristol pubs

On a recent crawl we visited a couple of Bristol pubs that have transferred ownership and whose personalities have changed considerably.

The Dame (Dean Lane, BS3) is the new name for The Tap & Barrel, which we never got round to visiting before it closed suddenly in March 2023.

We’re sufficiently savvy at interpreting Google Reviews that we think we have a reasonable idea of what it was like before, and can safely say the new incarnation is quite different.

The owners have cleverly hit on a niche that works in that location: it’s a skateboarding and street-art themed pub, opposite a skateboarding park, surrounded by street art.

A Victorian pub with a mural of a person climbing over a brick wall in stark black and white.

Even on a January Sunday afternoon it was fairly busy, and although the balance was towards student-aged youngsters in hoodies, there were actually people of all ages.

Skateboarding has, after all, been around a long time (Fred Astaire was a fan) and there were a couple of grey-bearded skatey dads with pushchairs.

There was no cask ale but there were good keg options from local breweries, including Bristol Beer Factory and Lost & Grounded, and a couple of interesting bottles, such as Duvel.

This is a classic example of a pub that has not got much for us personally but we’re glad it exists, serving a distinct crowd, and appears to be thriving.

Not a million miles away is The Junction at Wapping Wharf, which Bristol Beer Factory took on in spring 2023 after the Wild Beer Company collapsed.

We didn’t much like it in its previous incarnation. The space was cold but also noisy, like a canteen rather than a bar, and it was often hard to find anywhere to sit. So we only visited a couple of times despite the interesting beer.

Rather unreasonably, we also took against the new version becasue when we took a detour shortly after it opened to check it out it was closed for a staff party. And because we decided it didn’t count as a new tick for our Every Pub in Bristol project we didn’t prioritise going back.

With hindsight, that was daft of us, as it’s actually a vastly different, much improved space.

The lighting is more subdued and the interior is darker and more pub-like. So, although it looks like a glass box from the outside, it’s pretty cosy inside, the way Wetherspoon pubs or micropubs in unlikely buildings can sometimes be.

We were in from the tail-end of the Sunday roast crowd through to the much quieter just-one-more school night stretch.

A very on-it, cheerful bar manager made us feel welcome as we pondered which of the several Bristol Beer Factory cask ales to choose. In the end, we tried most of them, with Milk Stout and Our House session pale the standouts.

We wrote about this last beer in more detail on Patreon but the gist is that, despite its modern branding and use of experimental hops, the beer of which it most reminded us was Hopback Summer Lightning. And we were very happy with that.

All of this was a reminder that the pub scene doesn’t stand still. What was good can go bad, and what was dead can spring back to life. We must be ever vigilant, and always on patrol.

For more on Bristol pubs check out our guide to local pubs updated for 2024.

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bristol pubs

New openings: Bruhaha, Totterdown, Bristol

The new Bruhaha brewery tap in Totterdown, Bristol, is a remarkably successful melding of pub and taproom.

As the crow flies, it’s not far from us, but there are railway lines, a river, and a bloody great big hill in the way.

We schlepped there in the gloom of a late afternoon, in need of something to see off the January blues.

From the approach, the bar looked inviting, with golden light behind big windows bearing the brewery logo, and a crowd visible inside.

The pub (we checked on our spreadsheet) is plain and minimal in terms of decor:

  • picnic benches
  • white walls
  • bare wood
  • fairy lights

In other words the IKEA showroom school of bar design.

But with two levels, partitions and careful lighting, it felt cosy and intimate, rather than like a shop unit.

Every seat was taken by groups of older people, couples with babies, couples with tiny dogs, couples on dates, groups of lads, and various other combinations.

“It’s great to have more than three people in,” said Steve England, the owner, when asked how it was going by an inquisitive customer. (Not us. We just happened to be standing there when the conversation happened.)

There was only one beer from Bruhaha on offer, a Doppelbock, that was decent enough, if perhaps lacking the crisp cleanness of the German originals. If it was rebadged as a strong winter ale it would pass.

We didn’t struggle to find tempting beers from other brewers on the menu, though. From Good Chemistry’s Oatmeal Stout to New Bristol Session IPA. Lost & Grounded Keller Pils was there as a safe fall-back, too, and tasting particularly fresh and fine.

For the peckish, there was Indian food from the Roti Shack on offer, or nuts from big jars on the bar.

The bar is also being used for various local community groups and activities, such as oil painting classes – very laudable.

We found it hard to leave and agreed that we would not let the obstacle-strewn industrial and natural landscape of Bristol prevent us visiting again soon.

Bruhaha is at 156-158 Wells Rd, Totterdown, Bristol BS4 2AG, and is currently open on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Details of events and food pop-ups are on the website.

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News

News, nuggets and longreads 13 January 2024: Light Cycles

January’s a great time for writing about beer and pubs as dormant blogs spring back to life and New Year’s resolutions kick in. Here’s our pick of the week.

First, a few items of news:


A canvas sign advertising a beer festival car park.

The longread of the week really is long: it’s Steve Dunkley on the problem of beer festivals. How can they be made to work for drinkers and for the people and organisations lumbered with organising them?

At the more traditional festivals fun entailed tombola, drinking horns, silly hats and suspect t-shirts. At the craft festivals it was DJs and stickers and serving beer from slushie machines. There really was a generational divide… But even the newer craft festivals could be accused of getting stuck in their ways. Where once they hosted a range of brewers not usually seen, they have often settled into an annual showcase of the same breweries and beers, which like the CAMRA festivals before them are now available in the surrounding pubs throughout the year… I think CAMRA can learn a lot from the newer festivals, and they already have. But I also think that these newer festivals can learn a lot from CAMRA.


A painted sign on a pub wall: real ale and real food.

For the Morning Advertiser (you get two free articles before you have to register) Victoria Wells, Professor of Sustainable Management at the School for Business and Society at the University of York, has written about her analysis of some old pub guides and what it tells us about the ways pubs have changed to survive:

My 12-year-old niece… [gave] me a 1992 copy of Pub Walks in the Yorkshire Dales​ by Clive Price… It’s perhaps a sign of the times, with so many pubs at risk or closing, that my first thought was not “great, I can plan a few nice days out walking and visiting pubs” but was instead “how many of these pubs are still going to be there?”… My first response as I worked my way through the pubs was surprise. Of the 31 pubs listed in the guide, 29 still existed – although I would say only 26 of these could be defined as a pub (defining pubs in itself is a problematic endeavour) – with three becoming restaurants or hotels.


Someone in orange boots on an orange brewery floor transferring beer from a fermenting vessel, we think.
SOURCE: Matt Curtis/Pellicle.

At Pellicle editor Matt Curtis has himself put together a profile of RedWillow Brewery in Macclesfield. If you have your brewery profile bingo cards out you’ll get an immediate tick against ‘Owner left a successful career in IT’. But, snark aside, it’s good to have a detailed record of a brewery founded as a cask ale brewery during the keg-focused UK craft beer boom, which has outlived many of its peers:

RedWillow’s first commercially released beer was a 4.2% cask golden ale called Directionless… Directionless gradually became less popular as RedWillow’s audience developed their palates and began to demand more up-to-date flavours in their beer. An evolution that ran in parallel with the arrival of modern North American hop varieties such as Citra and Mosaic. Wreckless, a 4.8% ABV pale ale, and Weightless, a 4.2% ‘session’ IPA gradually filled the space Directionless previously occupied in its core range. These were bookended by the 3.9% Headless, an accessible cask pale for traditionalists, and Contactless, a distinctively modern, hazy, 5.2% pale ale aimed squarely at the growing number of younger beer enthusiasts.


Closed sign

It makes total sense for pubs to limit their opening hours and match them to demand… doesn’t it? Maybe it doesn’t. Tandleman, who spends plenty of time on the front line chatting to publicans, has been grappling with this question:

Concentrating efforts and resources on peak business hours, can – or here I’ll say should  – ensure that the service, atmosphere, and offerings are of the optimal standard. It does not work at all if you simply take the same sad old offering and simply spread it over a shorter period. If you are going to open less, greater efforts have to be made to make the pub attractive when you do.  And above all, you need to ensure that potential customers know when you will be open. Even now, far too many pubs seem to think that opening hours are some kind of state secret that should jealously be guarded. Telling potential customers about opening hours and what’s happening in the pub is not a bothersome extra. It is an essential part of the business.


A pitcher of dark beer on a pub table with someone making 'ta-da!' hands behind.
SOURCE: Jeff Alworth.

We’re enjoying Jeff Alworth’s reports from a January he’s spending in the pub, especially because the experience he has in Portland, Oregon, is similar to ours in England in some ways, but different in others. This account of a momentary connection with strangers sounds exactly like something that might happen in The Drapers Arms here in Bristol:

On that particular night, my friend and I got our beers, rejoined our group and fell into the flow of conversation. Some time later—could have been a few minutes or two hours, in the manner of bar time—we looked up to see the two women from the line. They were proffering a pitcher of Scottish Holiday, a full, malty winter ale. I tuned into this development late and the pitcher was being deposited on the table by the time I noticed what has happening. Their group was breaking up and donning coats, and I missed why they had this spare pitcher of beer. But we had spoken, and our table wasn’t far from theirs, so they decided to leave us with the extra ale. We took pleasure in this unexpected generosity, and they took pleasure in our wonder. It was one of those things that happens sometimes, if you’re living right, in bars.


Finally, from Facebook, via BlueSky, an invitation to a rabbit hole we hope we have time to go down…

A photo of what looks like a typical English ‘brewer’s Tudor’ interwar pub only it’s actually in New Zealand, shared on a local Facebook group and then shared with us by Kieran Haslett-Moore.

For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday. We put no effort at all into making sure our links are different to theirs; if a piece appears in more than one round-up then you know it must be good. But there’s usually plenty of stuff they’ve highlighted that we haven’t.

Categories
opinion

The Blackhorse Beer Mile at Twixmas

Between Christmas and New Year we finally had chance to do most of the craft beer crawl that has emerged in my home town of Walthamstow, East London.

I say ‘finally’ because one of the last blog posts we published before the COVID lockdowns was about the number of breweries in Waltham Forest. Four years is a long time to leave something like that unexplored.

Before diving in, though, I just want to reflect a bit on how weird it was for me personally to be exploring this part of Walthamstow.

The illuminated sign for Signature Brew against a grey sky.

The overlooked island

I grew up in E17 and felt I knew it pretty well but I only came to Blackhorse Lane for the first time on a work trip a year or so ago.

At the time, I found it astounding that I had never walked this way before on foot, or explored the wider Higham Hill area at all.

The landscape and architecture are rather striking, with some huge Art Deco factory buildings and acres of post-war housing, alongside the occasional row of pretty Georgian cottages.

It’s an endangered landscape, too, with many 20th century buildings slowly disappearing to be replaced by vast new high-rise housing developments.

But when you look at the geography, it makes sense that I had overlooked it.

The area is bordered by reservoirs on two sides and you don’t go through it on the way to anywhere else. It’s almost an island.

Nor were there any ‘Walthamstow Wetlands’ to visit when I was a kid – only the Marshes, with a few paths, and lots of brambles.

Old industrial buildings plus new residential developments might be the perfect recipe for a beer mile, though.

Just think of all those young professionals itching for something to do at the weekend, and property developers keen to establish that this is A Place rather than a dead end.

A tumbler of clear golden IPA with the Hackney Brewery logo.

The crawl

Our exploratory walk took place on a grey Saturday before New Year, which is always a weird time for hospitality. But there was a surprising amount of life to be found.

We began our crawl at the top with a visit to the Tavern on the Hill rather than the Wildcard Brewery. We do, in theory, prefer pubs after all.

It was quiet but welcoming and we found both cask ales decent enough. (Ray was more critical than me, though.)

We’d be interested to come back when it is a bit busier; it felt like an inviting community space, only without much evidence of the community.

At the Hackney Brewery we had our standout beer of the entire crawl. Millions of Melba (4%) was a wonderful peach-raspberry sour that tasted like a Fruit Salad chewy sweet with a dry champagne-like finish.

The space was small but not busy, and overlooks a much bigger room crammed with brewing equipment.

It’s also a handy place to get a pizza delivered from round the corner – but do remember to use the free delivery discount code in the small print on the menu.

Exale was closed, which seems fair enough.

Beerblefish felt quietest of all – we were the only visitors for most of our mini session, but enjoyed their Rauchbier.  It’s cool that lots of breweries seem to be able to turn out decent versions of this style now, which is fun and show-stopping in a different way to pastry stout or super-hoppy IPA.

At the Pretty Decent Beer Company we were charmed by No Not the Buttons, a 5.5% Gingerbread Stout which smelled like a German bakery and tasted like liquid Printen biscuits, even down to a subtle herbal note. It had a proper cake-like finish which felt warming on a miserable day in a fridge-like tap room. You could almost sense crumbs on your tongue. I could Get Better at Tesco – what a great passive-aggressive name! – was a decent standard 4.5% session IPA. 

The space had a few more punters than previously, although this was mostly a couple of large families meeting up to coo over each others’ babies, so it felt a bit like we’d crashed a private party. (That’s on us, not the families.)

The Big Penny Social Club (formerly the Truman Social Club) is a hell of a space. It looks as if it ought to have X-Wing fighters parked about getting ready for an assault on the Death Star. But we struggled to work out who actually brewed the beer we were drinking, and where, without Googling. There was a very impressive Table Beer, branded Big Penny, which was a mere 2% and had a zingy sherbet flavour.

This was the busiest venue yet, with exhausted parents trying to entertain their kids with ping pong, arcade machines and various other games. The space is big enough to handle all this and still handle groups of drinkers of various sizes and ages.

Finally, we visited Signature Brew, which is another location where the actual brewing is segregated from the tap room. The latter sits in a temporary-looking cube. It was warm and cleverly lit with fairy lights, and felt the most like a pub of any of the taproom venues.

Black Vinyl Nitro Stout (4.5%) by Signature is clearly designed to fill a Guinness shaped hole in a hipster East London bar and, actually, does that very well – much more so than Camden Stout.

We will be back

The problem with doing a crawl is that you can really only do a couple in each place, and most had pretty lengthy beer lists, so we definitely need to come back.

Ideally in spring when it’s lighter and warmer, and we can enjoy walking around the area rather than rushing with heads down through the drizzle to the next covered space.