Tag: beer writing

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

Why ‘believe it or not’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to do about beer festivals

Steve Dunkley, January 2024

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

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

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

Michael Lanigan, February 2024

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

“The sun hadn’t yet risen at half past seven as the seagulls cawed above the docklands and the quays… On Lombard Street East, the purple painted exterior of the Wind Jammer pub’s first floor faded naturally in with the dark violet morning sky… ‘Open 7am,’ read the golden letters on one of the steel overhangs above the windows of this early house pub… Inside the Wind Jammer, the deep babel of a few dozen male voices chattering boomed through the barroom, and the bright white lights emanating from its chandeliers sent a jolt through each punter stepping in to escape the drowsy city.”

Best seat in the public house

Ross Cummins, February 2024

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

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

Berm: yeast from Upper Telemark

Lars Marius Garshol, March 2024

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

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

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

Anaïs Lecoq, March 2024

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

“It’s unusual to find a big production site in a town center in France, but Meteor brews its 500,000 hectoliters (about 420,000 barrels) right in the middle of Hochfelden. The gigantic silo, with the brewery’s name in large, bright red letters, is unmissable from afar, giving Meteor a place in the skyline… The aroma of wort that blankets the streets is also part of the town’s atmosphere, with Meteor brewing as often as seven days a week in the busy season.”

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

Ruvani de Silva, April 2024

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

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

A drinking life: lessons of my two fathers

Jeff Alworth, April 2024

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

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

Let’s make craft beer great again

Pete Brown, May 2024

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

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

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

Dave Infante, May 2024

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

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

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

Jimmy McIntosh, June 2024

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

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

Opinion: a closer look at Ireland’s oldest pubs

Liam K, June 2024

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

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

RIP IPA: who killed craft beer?

Ella Doyle, June 2024

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

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

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

Fred Garratt-Stanley, July 2024

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

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

German beer vignettes: memories of Franconia, Mönchsambach edition

Franz D. Hofer, July 2024

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

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

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

Katie Mather, July 2024

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

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

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

David Jesudason, August 2024

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

“‘We brought an atmosphere to the pub,’ says Albert. ‘It became known as a friendly pub in Cambridge – you could come in there and chat with either me or Lorna. We had a good relationship with our customers. We help them, sometimes [they] ask us a favour – we would jump in a car and take them wherever they want to go… People loved us – even now people talk about “Albert from the Midland Tavern”. Everyone after tried to build on what we started. A lot of people came and saw how Jamaican people lived and the Jamaican way of life – the happy part of our life. One of the things we gave to them is the music.’”

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

Will Hawkes, August 2024

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

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

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

Matthew Curtis, August 2024

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

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

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

Martyn Cornell, September 2024

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

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

The Zinnebir Index

Eoghan Walsh, September 2024

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

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

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

Evan Rail, October 2024

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

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

Working inside beer’s sinking ships

Will Ziebell, October 2024

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

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

Timothy Taylor’s Landlord – a polyptych of a pint

Rachel Hendry, October 2024

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

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

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

Jonny Garrett, November 2024

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

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

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

Mark Blacklock, December 2024

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

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

---

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

Every Saturday morning we put together a round-up of the best writing about beer and pubs from the previous week. And once a year, we sift through that to find the best posts and articles of the year.

In 2022, Pellicle and Good Beer Hunting (two households, both alike in dignity) continued to dominate.

They provide platforms for heavier bits of beer writing – stuff that might take some time, effort and money to put together – and present it beautifully.

Close behind is Ferment, the widely respected magazine that comes with the monthly box from a widely disliked beer subscription service. In particular, it provides a platform for Matt Curtis, who edits Pellicle, but doesn’t tend to feature his own writing there.

Where does that leave blogs? As in, proper blogs, written by enthusiasts, or semi-professionals, and published on platforms they own.

They’re still about, and they’ve been joined by a new beast: newsletters on Substack, or similar, which perform essentially the same function, but right up in your inbox. Will Hawkes’s excellent London Beer City is one notable example.

We try to feature as much of that stuff as we can, and would love to see more. Let us know if you’ve got a beer blog we don’t know about.

Putting this piece together, we totted up which writers had featured most often in our round-ups.

Forty-three got mentioned in more than one round-up, and these people all ended up in more than five:

Eoghan Walsh	15
Jeff Alworth	12
Courtney Iseman	11
Martyn Cornell	10
Liam K	8
Pete Brown	7
Mark Johnson	7
David Jesudason	6
Will Hawkes	6
Ruvani de Silva	6
Gary Gillman	6

We’ve got our own preferences and biases, of course, but what these people all have in common is that they:

• sit their arses down and write, regularly
• tell us things we don’t already know
• take us to places we’ve never been
• show us new perspectives
• tell compelling stories
• have their own unique voices

Now, here’s a list of 20 substantial pieces of beer writing from 2022 that, looking back, we especially liked.

There’s also a focus on writers who didn’t feature every week. It’s all too easy for that one fascinating one-off contribution to The Discourse to come, go, and be forgotten.

They’re ordered chronologically, earliest to most recent, and each writer is limited to one entry.

Magic from the Baltic coast | Charlotte Cook | February 2022

“When most people think of Estonia, their minds tend to conjure up images of a post-Soviet wasteland inhabited by concrete tower blocks and spluttering Ladas. That, or they imagine an icy landscape filled with impenetrable pine forest and permafrost. Most people don’t know what language they speak in Estonia, never mind much about its culture and people, and least of all about its burgeoning and unique craft beer scene.”

The Campaign for Real Architecture | Matthew Bliss | February 2022

“CAMRA obviously conducts architectural preservation as part of its mission, since preserving the function of a building necessarily preserves the building itself. Buildings and their functions are awfully hard to separate most of the time. If you change the function, you usually have to change the building… But CAMRA’s architectural project, along with that of the ‘pub’ itself, is a profoundly nostalgist one. It, like the branding of most British beers (you don’t find this with, for instance, East Asian beers), is reliant on notions of the Good Old Days.”

Why bootleg Moe’s Taverns are all over Latin America | Tamlin Magee | March 2022

“For anyone in Latin America, visiting one of these unlicensed bars is a lot cheaper than flying to California or Florida to the official Moe’s Tavern at Universal Studios. ‘For many, our bar is the only chance to live the Simpsons experience, since our customers often don’t have the means to visit the official Moe’s Tavern,’ says Nicolás González Milano. In 2017, he and a group of friends at ‘differing scales of Simpsons fanaticism’ opened a Moe’s Tavern in the Ituzaingó district of Buenos Aires, which has served fans who can’t travel across the globe.”

The pub with no beer (fiction) | Kevin Barry | April 2022

“He took up the cloth and dampened it in the sink and ran it along the bar top. He brought up a quiet shine. The intention of the polishing was to approximate soft labor. Daily the bar top was polished to show its grain and the nicks and scratches of its great age. The pub had been his father’s for the long shift of four decades. His father in turn had taken it from a bachelor uncle. For three generations behind this bar much the same set of thick, knitted eyebrows had insisted on a semblance, at least, of decorum. The sunlight crept by slow inches across the floor. It was the moment, in more usual times, of the primary school’s letting out and he missed the high excited chatter from the yard across the way. Neither loudness nor drunkenness in this barroom had ever been tolerated.”

I want to see mountains again: the banked beers of Teesside, North East England | Reece Hugill | April 2022

“Unique and beautiful things rarely come from boring places… In the industrial glow of lower North East England, along the banks of the River Tees, a tiny handful of pubs still serve beer the way my grandad, and his dad used to drink… Half-full glasses are pulled from the bar-back fridge, topped up feverishly from the hand-pull. Placed in front of me are two ridiculous looking pints of ruby-red cask beer. Foam cartoonishly mounded a full four inches higher than the brim of the glass. Wobbling and bubbling, alpine peaks and whips of pure white.”

Chloé | Katrina Kell | April 2022

“Chloé, the French nude by Jules Joseph Lefebvre, is an Australian cultural icon… [In] 1908, Henry Figsby Young bought Chloé for £800 and hung the famous nude in the saloon bar of Young and Jackson Hotel, opposite Flinders Street Station in Melbourne… Enjoying a drink with Chloé at the hotel has been a good luck ritual for Australian soldiers since the first world war… The ritual of having a drink with Chloé at Young and Jackson Hotel, opposite Melbourne’s busiest railway station, began after Private A. P. Hill, who was killed in action, put a message in a bottle and tossed it overboard…”

‘..it Makes Me Want to Shut Down, Cover Up’ | James Green | May 2022

“This article seeks to provide a detailed account of emotional labour adopted by female bartenders when faced with unwanted sexual attention at work. In the field, I implemented an ethnographic research design and maximised opportunities for data collection through the use of interviews with eight participants and participant observations while employed at the same venue. Drawing on previous theoretical thought, the data gathered will outline the learnt, and most common, forms of display rules barstaff demonstrate while engaging with unwanted interactions, and, from the viewpoint of the female barstaff, the expected display rules envisioned by some male customers.”

Why we should all be raising a glass to the 160th birthday of the working men’s club movement – even if they aren’t | Pete Brown | June 2022

“On 14th June 1862, Unitarian Minister Henry Solly convened a meeting which founded the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union. At the time, philanthropists and reformers of all stripes were desperately trying to ‘improve’ the working man – some out of genuine concern for his plight, others because millions of men were about to get the vote for the first time and therefore needed to be ‘civilised,’ so they voted for the ‘right’ people… Solly recognised that if he wanted to attract working-class men after a gruelling, monotonous, ten- or twelve-hour shift, they needed a place where they could relax as well as being lectured to. A club, rather than an austere institute, was his model.”

A History of Brussels Beer in 50 Objects // #48 Support Local Breweries T-shirt | Eoghan Walsh | June 2022

“Brussels’ hospitality industry has a long history of entanglements with public health emergencies. In 1866, 2732 people died in Brussels’ last deadly cholera outbreak (1.5% of the population), with city authorities forced to cancel that autumn’s annual festivities. Their contemporary successors had to deal with COVID-19, arriving with a bang on March 12, 2020. That evening the Belgian government announced the nationwide closure of hospitality businesses, as the country registered its first COVID-19 deaths and case numbers rose exponentially… The reaction of many in the industry was panic.”

Beer Myths on Beer Mats? A Closer Look at the Legendary Marketing of Smithwick’s and Kilkenny Ales | Liam K | June 2022

“Smithwick’s brewery – or the St. Francis Abbey Brewery to give it its proper name – is an establishment that I am mildly obsessed with for a number of reasons… But is there a nagging issue, a grey murkiness that muddies its history, which means that the brewery has lost more than it has gained in the promotion of ‘Brand Smithwicks’ and becoming for the most part a single product within the portfolio of a much larger global company? This is a subject I have written and commented about before, both in a short history on brewing in Kilkenny and in a piece on the dubious history of Irish Red Ale, but I have never explored these legends one by one…”

The Ten Pubs That Made Me Part 1: Fernandes’ Brewery Tap | Mark Johnson | July 2022

“Wakefield operates under the famous One Degree of Separation system when it comes to locals. You cannot have a volatile break-up with a partner in this city as they will always be in your life through others. You either remain friends with your ex or you leave the city for good… That is the crux of Wakefield; it never really wanted you anyway… There is a pub here, however, that makes my top ten list of pubs that aided my beer journey.”

The broon dog that walked so that others could run: celebrating 95 years of Newcastle Brown Ale | Emmie Harrison-West | July 2022

“‘Bottle of Broon, please,’ I said, smiling nervously to the barman, hoping he wouldn’t ask for my (clearly fake) ID. He didn’t seem bothered I was dressed as a cowgirl… I was 17 and on my first night out in my hometown, Newcastle upon Tyne, when I first tried the fabled Newcastle Brown Ale… To locals it’s known as ‘Broon’ or ‘ah bottle ah dog’ (pronounced ‘derg’) – lovingly named after the saying “I’m off to walk the dog,” which naturally meant ‘I’m off to the boozer,’ instead. To everyone else in the UK who felt a fool for attempting to imitate the Geordie dialect (trust me, you can’t) it was a bottle of ‘Newkie’.”

Britain’s most remote mainland pub | Daniel Stables | August 2022

“Our journey began at the end of the road. The longest dead-end road in Britain, in fact. It took two hours of knuckle-whitening jags around hairpin bends and past sheer descents, on a 22-mile taxi ride from the town of Fort William in the western Scottish Highlands, to get to our starting point of Kinloch Hourn… In the company of two friends, Carl and José, I was embarking on a journey to the most remote pub in mainland Britain. Accessible only by sea ferry or by a two-day, 18-mile hike across the Scottish Highlands from the small settlement of Kinloch Hourn (or an even longer, 28-mile yomp from the hamlet of Glenfinnan), the Old Forge sits in the village of Inverie, on the southern coast of the Knoydart peninsula. ‘Walking in’ to the pub is a rite of passage in the outdoors community, and one we were keen to tick off, thirsty in equal measure for adventure and the extreme satisfaction of a pint well earned.”

Campaigners face uphill battle to save two BS5 pubs from redevelopment | Alex Turner | August 2022

“Walk down Church Road from St George Park and it feels as if this part of Bristol is bucking national trends towards pubs closing. As you leave the park there’s the recently opened Red Church, then the Fire Engine, Dark Horse and George and Dragon… But wander through the sidestreets towards Barton Hill and a different picture emerges. Within 10 minutes you pass the former Three Crowns, Hauliers Arms, Hop Pole, Swan and Russell Arms. All have closed within the last decade or so, with most turned into housing… Now, two of the area’s most recently departed pubs face the same fate. They are St George’s Hall on Church Road, and the Rhubarb Tavern in Barton Hill.”

Go West: resistance, Ricky Reel, and the real Southall | David Jesudason | August 2022

“Southall is so varied, so personal to me, that it is hard to describe it to people who are unfamiliar with it. The best I can say is: Imagine a town that has somehow managed to recreate many aspects of daily life in South Asia – it’s often dubbed “Little India” – but appears distinctly harmonious, with Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian residents all living side by side… Southall is, unsurprisingly, the place to buy South Asian ingredients in London – you can find everything from huge bags of spices to Indian spirits like Old Monk. Large-scale wedding celebrations regularly spill out onto the streets. And it’s also the place to eat a hearty, South Asian meal, whether at traditional restaurants or British-Indian “Desi” pubs, even though it’s overlooked by many Londoners in favour of Brick Lane’s heavily commercialised curry houses.”

The essential guide to IPA | Matt Curtis | August 2022

“To the educated beer connoisseur – very much a minority, even among beer drinkers themselves – the language of IPA comes instinctively. They know their Citra from their Nelson Sauvin. But to the majority of people, labels like NEIPA, DDH, and the other myriad terms associated with one of beer’s most argued-over styles, are ultimately meaningless. You could even go a step further and suggest they’re a form of gatekeeping; if beer is truly for everyone, why go to such great effort to make it so fucking complicated? IPA used to mean ‘strong and hoppy’, now it could mean pretty much anything. Today’s breweries are as comfortable using it to label what is essentially an alcoholic fruit smoothie as they are for a beer that tastes like licking a goat.”

No one gets to tell anyone they’re tasting beer wrong, actually | Courtney Iseman | September 2022

“It seems like every few months someone thinks (incorrectly) that the world desperately needs to hear his (because let’s be honest, it’s probably an older white dude) opinion on some beer descriptor, and will log on to Twitter-dot-com to fire off some embarrassingly overzealous judgement on the word in question. It’s one of the gross but stubborn elements of craft beer culture that seems like it will just carry on until we’re all on our deathbeds wishing we didn’t waste so much goddamned time on arguing about adjectives.”

Dual identity, death, and decolonization | Ruvani de Silva | September 2022

“English IPA should, by all logic, stick in my throat, yet I continue to devour and praise them. I know full well the excessive damage the British East India Company, purveyors of said IPA did to the Subcontinent, how rich they became from plundering our resources and labour, and how that wealth still circulates among the British elite… How can I, armed with full awareness of the damaging nature of its marketing, enjoy a bottle of Bengal Lancer? And yet not only was it one of the first English IPAs I really rated, I still regard it as an excellent example of the style. Can we separate the beer from its history, its heritage? Can I disconnect my love for it from my own history and heritage?”

‘Beer for all, or for none’: The Busch-Lasker controversy of 1922 | Brian Alberts | October 2022

“It was May 1922, and August A. Busch Sr. needed a break. A long one. So he did what America’s wealthiest dynasts do, and treated the word “summer” like a verb… Reaching the coast, Busch boarded the SS George Washington, a passenger liner about half the size of the Titanic. However, as soon as the ship passed into international waters and out of United States jurisdiction, something peculiar happened. The staff threw open cabinets stocked with European beer, liquors, and wines, and opened not one but five bars throughout the ship. It was as if Prohibition never existed at all… As you might imagine, this upset Busch more than a little.”

Gay men drink craft beer, too: on lad culture, stereotypes, and beer’s cultural barriers | Damian Kerlin | November 2022

“My first introduction to beer was through my dad: When I was young, I used to ask for a sip from a freshly opened bottle. I liked it cold – the colder the better. But as I got older, I stopped drinking beer and instead ordered what felt representative of me: vodka and Coke, gin and tonic, wine… I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but now that I’m older, I understand why my drinking preferences changed. It’s not because I stopped liking beer—instead, I wanted to fit in with my peers, those who I drank with and wanted to emulate. I came to see beer as macho, laddy and rough, just like vodka and Coke was chic, sophisticated. Even the glasses in which the two were served seemed to confirm that: one a chunky pint glass, the other a small, light tumbler.”

For more, do check out the backlog of our weekly round-ups. Stan Hieronymus has put together a list of his favourite writing of the year and Alan McLeod has done the same, with additional thoughts on the state and future of beer writing.