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News, Nuggets & Longreads 30 December 2017: Helensburgh, Hammers, Home-brewing

Here’s everything that grabbed our attention in the world of beer and pubs in this final week of 2017.

It’s been slim pickings with the Christmas break and the ubiquity of Golden Pints (check out the hashtag on Twitter) but we found a few things to chew on. First, there’s this stream of recollection by Peter McKerry at Brew Geekery which amounts to a tour of pubs that have meant the most to him over the years:

Then it was the Clyde Bar in Helensburgh, a well-healed town on the Clyde coast, during a prolonged period of unemployment in my early 20s. I’d drop in for a few Tennent’s on ‘Giro Day’, and it was here that I witnessed taxi driver and regular, Dermot, rescue eight pence from the trough WHILE I WAS URINATING IN IT. While that event is imprinted onto my mind (it was a 5p, 2p and a 1p), it gives a false impression of the pub. It was a great live music venue, and featured in a video from purveyors of beige jock rock, Travis, if such trivia interests you.

News, Nuggets & Longreads 23 December 2017: Thornbridge, Theatre, Tinsel

This is, obviously, the last Saturday news and links round-up before Christmas, featuring theatres, hot beer and juicy IPAs.

First, a bit of news: in partnership with Pivovar (Sheffield Tap, Pivni, &c.) Derbyshire brewery Thornbridge is to open ten bars across the UK. They’re a sensible, fairly cautious bunch and this reads to us as a vote of confidence in the health of the UK craft beer scene.

Illustration from Walks In London Vol. 1, c.1896.

As part of a project on the history of British theatre Andy Kesson gives us notes on the role of inns in the days before Shakespeare:

When we think of Elizabethan London playhouses, most of us think of an amphitheatre: big, round and outdoors. Sometimes we might also think of indoor playing spaces, particularly at the Blackfriars: small, rectangular and indoors… [But inns] are rarely included in accounts of the playhouses at all. This, I’m going to suggest, would have surprised Elizabethans, who may well have considered the inns as the primary, most prestigious playing houses in town. As we shall see, figures as diverse as the Queen’s Men, Richard Tarlton’s horse and Satan himself all sought access to performance at the inns.

(Via @intoxproject/@andykesson)