Tag: longreads

Categories
Beer history london pubs

The Snug Bar Preservation Society

The Black Friar, City of London.

With photographs by Teninchwheels.

For those of us who feel sad whenever a pub vanishes, this is a sad life. Progress, reconstruction, town-planning, war, all have one thing in common: the pubs go down before them like poppies under the scythe.

Maurice Gorham, The Local, 1939

Early in 2012, regulars at the Ivy House, a 1930s pub in Nunhead, South London, were stunned when its owners, Enterprise Inns, gave the manager a week’s notice and boarded the building up.

Howard Peacock, a secondary school teacher in his 30s who regarded the Ivy House as his ‘local’, felt what he calls a ‘sense of massive injustice’:

[The] pub was one that should have been able to stay open in any fair trading environment. The small local pubco that was running it… had been making a go of it even with restricted stocking options and limited profit margins thanks to the beer tie…

But he and his fellow drinkers (Tessa Blunden, Emily Dresner, Stuart Taylor and Hugo Simms) did something more than merely grumble and begin the hunt for a new haunt: instead, they launched a campaign to SAVE THE IVY HOUSE!

Nowadays, the idea of a community campaign to save a pub hardly seems remarkable — they are seen as an endangered species, the cruel property developers’ harpoons glancing off their leathery old skin — but a hundred years ago, thing were very different. Then, a cull was underway.

Read the rest of this ‘go long’ post after the jump → “The Snug Bar Preservation Society”
Categories
bottled beer breweries buying beer

News, Nuggets and Long Reads 01/02/2014

Marston's revisionist keg range.

It’s Saturday! But wait — before you rush off to bomb around the town centre on your BMX and buy Pick’n’Mix at Woolworths, here are a few things we’ve spotted during the week.

→ The picture above shows Marston’s new range of keg beers branded and sold under the ‘Revisionist‘ label. Though some will inevitably groan at a big player with a poor reputation among beer geeks ‘jumping on the bandwagon’, we can’t deny that we’re intrigued.

→ Meanwhile, we also hear that the same brewery is putting some beers that have been packaged, to their detriment, in clear glass, back into amber (brown) bottles. They are also planning to do more bottle-conditioning. Good news, we think.

→ American brewery North Coast is to begin distribution in the UK via Left Coast. We’ve never tried their beer so have no idea if this is good news, but Old Rasputin is in The Sacred Book, so we’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

A nugget of trivia from Brewdog

Long reads

→ This week’s tips for saving to Pocket: a piece from Punch on ‘the art of drinking alone’ by Brad Thomas Parsons (via @allesioleone) and another excellent piece from Good Beer Hunting with some timely commentary on contract brewing.

→ BBC News Online seems to be running a story about beer once a week at the moment. Last week, it was women in beer; this week, some pondering on the Rheinheitsgebot. Next week: what does ‘craft beer’ really mean?

Around the Blogoshire

→ Stephen Beaumont has named the well established Allagash his American brewery of the year. He makes the case well and we have added their beers to our hit list.

→ David ‘Broadford Brewer’ Bishop has this week’s most inspiring home brew recipe. Well, not a recipe — just a germ of an idea, but a good one: the dankest beer ever. (Would 1001 Inspiring Ideas for Home Brewers be a good book?)

Categories
Blogging and writing

News, Nuggets and Longreads 18/01/2014

Bloke drinking beer.

Before we sit down to watch Going Live! it’s time to round-up links to beer-related writings that have caught our interest this week.

→ Continuing the discussion on sexism in the world of beer, Yvan Seth (a ‘progressive’ active CAMRA member) suggested some ways in which the Campaign might be more active in making women feel welcome. As always, there’s a risk of imposing too many rules, but his ideas seem very practical to us. Are there really any blokes who would come away from a beer festival saying, ‘Well, it was OK, but I’d have enjoyed it more if there’d been a few more pump-clips with tits on’?

→ This week’s inspiring home brew recipe is from Ron Pattinson and Kristen England’s series of ‘Let’s Brew Wednesday’ posts: Tetley’s Mild, 1945. It’s interesting to see flaked barley among the ingredients — a hangover from wartime restrictions, Ron reckons. We’re definitely going to make this at some point.

→ Saved to Pocket this week: Rebecca Lemon’s lengthy essay on drunkenness in Shakespeare, and boozing in Elizabethan theatres, from the Lapham Quarterly:

But more than snacking, this audience joins Falstaff in drinking heavily, ordering up their ale and wine straight through the performance and the intermission… As Thomas Platter, a Swiss visitor to London, noted in his diary in 1599, “During the performance food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay one may also have refreshment.” The distractions were many, not only from drunk patrons themselves: ale produced a hissing noise when tapped, and those opening it were shouted down by audience members annoyed by the sound.

→ For the second time in a year, Hollywood actor Shia LaBoeouf has been involved in a fracas at the Hobgoblin pub in New Cross, South London. What next — Channing Tatum in a dust-up at a former Firkin in Lewisham? (This story brought to our attention by Bailey’s former flatmate, with whom he used to drink at the Hobgoblin c.2001, while living nearby.)

→ Nick Wheat of Dronfield CAMRA kindly emailed to tip us off to the imminent release on DVD of an obscure proto-Ealing Comedy, Cheer Boys Cheer:

Two young lovers are caught on either side of a dispute over the territorial ambitions of the monolithic Ironside brewery against an ‘olde-worlde’, traditional family-run concern, Greenleaf.

Categories
Blogging and writing

Let’s Go Long on 1 March 2014

Once again, we’re planning to post a ‘long read’ about beer, and would love it if other writers and bloggers joined us.

Our post will be going live on Saturday 1 March 2014.

We’ll post as many reminders as we can get away with without annoying people here, on Facebook and on Twitter.

There will be a round-up of everyone else’s posts (like this and this) on Sunday 2 March.

If you decided to give it a go, as before, there are no rules, but…

  • Do write something longer than your usual posts. We aim for 1500 words minimum — about three times as long as usual. If you usually write 1500 word posts, then shoot for 3000.
  • Try to make it something people will find it worthwhile downloading to read later using Pocket/Instapaper or other similar apps.
  • Use this as an opportunity to challenge yourself: do something different; do some research; step out of your usual routine.
  • Pro beer-writers: this is a good chance to revisit old material or finally air an unpublished gem.
  • Will Hawkes is a beer writer and journalist who knows what’s what — try not to bore him:


You don’t have to link to us or mention us (though of course we appreciate it when people do), but you will want to use the Twitter hashtag #beerylongreads and/or email us a link if you want to be included in the round-up.

SPECIAL OFFER!

We have already agreed to review and edit another couple of writers’ posts, and have someone lined up to edit ours. If you’d like us to look at your post, give some advice on structure and generally help you polish it up, we can probably handle a few more if you can email your draft to us by Friday 28 February.

What we’re writing about

We’re going to attempt to write a capsule history of the pub preservation movement. If you’ve had a historic involvement in pub preservation, or think there are books and articles we ought to read, drop us a line at boakandbailey@gmail.com, or comment below.

Categories
Blogging and writing News

News, Nuggets and Longreads 04/01/2014

Bloke drinking beer.

This is what we’re using Saturday mornings for now: round-ups, snippets, and things that don’t warrant full blog posts of their own. First, some news.

Weird Beard Brewing revealed that another London brewery, Camden Town, had threatened legal action over a perceived trademark infringement. We’re not trademark lawyers and don’t know the full story, so we keep our nose out of these things, but we can see Camden’s point — what if a small Cornish brewery launched a beer called St Austell? Camden’s heavy-handed approach, however, is undoubtedly very bad for their image.

A long read

The Voice of America website has a long article on craft brewing in South Africa (via @beerhasahistory on Twitter). If you can ignore its offhand attempts to define craft beer, and the assumption that ‘craft beer’ is necessarily ‘good’, it’s an interesting glimpse into yet another burgeoning brewing scene. Highlight? This Afrikaans idiom:

“I think people think I’m a spoilt brat. I think that’s what a big part of it comes down to. You know: ‘Daddy gave her a brewery; sy’t met haar gat in die botter geval…’” [She fell with her bottom in the butter]

Around the Blogoshire

If you’ve spotted any other interesting blog posts (other than those you’ve written yourself…) let us know in the comments below.