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News, nuggets and longreads 4 January 2025: New Year’s Evil

Every Saturday we round up good writing about beer from the past week. Here’s the first for 2025, with landladies, pork pies and Golden Pints.

First, a set of stats, released annually, that we find helpful in gauging what’s up with the state of beer in the UK: how many London breweries are there? And how many pubs and bars are there worth including in a guide to drinking in London? These are now compiled by Stephen Jackson, who took over stewardship of Beer Guide London when founder Jezza moved to Belgium. The headlines are:

  • “2024 started with 108 London breweries on our list and the year ends with 103, a decrease of 5 over the year. This is the smallest net decrease for a number of years…”
  • “2024 started with 315 Guide entries… and we end the year with 291 entries, a reduction of 24…. Of the deletions the bulk (25) came about following an editorial decision to remove all BrewDog bars and all Laine Brew Co bars…”

Drawing: a pub bar.

Just before Christmas The Standard published a piece by Millie Milliken profiling six female publicans from across London:

A black eye, an armed robbery, a run-in with British acting royalty: Natasha Purdom’s 25-year career working behind pub bars has been colourful to say the least. Her first pub job was at The Flower Pot in her hometown in Bedford. She remembers being in awe of landlady Kathy: “She was a strong woman, the driver of the business… Whenever she worked a Saturday night, she was always dressed up: she put on her makeup and clothes and her job was to engage with the customers – I liked the glamour of it.”


A neon sign advertising Suenner Koelsch at a beer hall in Cologne.

Katie Mather has been in Cologne and her write up is a joy both in terms of the writing (she’s cut loose a bit here) and the pleasure at experiencing new things and places she conveys:

It’s illegal, or at least impossible as far as we could work out, to park a van in the centre of Cologne, so I booked a very cheap hotel for two nights. This was actually an amazing idea and a stroke of genius too, because Mühlen Kölsch ended up being right around the corner… This being our first Kölsch in Cologne, we were excited to be ushered to a tall drinking table in the heart of the building. The building itself is an historic brewery hall, dating from 1858. To get in you must navigate a heavy revolving wooden door and then push yourself through an equally heavy velvet curtain, adding a definite feeling of pizzazz to the dining room you enter into. As most people in there have been seated and enjoying a peaceful meal until you arrived, they probably won’t enjoy your squeals of delight at being shoved through into what is essentially German Narnia.


A row of colourful houses in a Bavarian town.

When Ferment went behind a paywall we lost access to some good writing, and good writers, so we were pleased to see that Charlotte Cook has shared something she wrote for them about Zoigl on her own personal Substack:

In the Upper Palatinate of Bavaria, nestled in a hilly landscape of broadleaf forests and gently peregrinating rivers – very close to the Czech border – there are a handful of small towns that have a unique brewing culture. After brewing rights were bestowed on these towns in the 15th century they established communal brewhouses, and a tradition of serving beer from the homes of the brewers, which has remained largely unchanged ever since… This style of brewing used to be fairly common across Europe, in England women would serve beer from their homes, but this gradually died out, with permanent inns and taverns replacing the temporary domestic openings. In these Zoigl towns, however, you can still turn up to a strangers house, sit in his living room, and for the very reasonable price of €2,40 per beer, have as many pints as you care to imbibe, often with the whole family chipping in to serve beer and small snacks.


The meat raffle at The Furnace Inn. SOURCE: Jane Stuart.

Jane Stuart has kicked off 2025 as she means to go on: with a pub crawl and a beer festival, this time in Derby. This description made us want to get on a train:

Now I visited the Furnace almost ten years ago and it has stuck in my mind because, on that visit, I enjoyed the Best Pork Pie Ever. I don’t actually like pies, least of all pork pies. But this one was outstanding… I was dismayed to learn that they had sold out and were awaiting their next delivery from Barry Fitch Butchers in Little Eaton… Pie famine notwithstanding, this was an epic pub – not least because of our incredibly knowledgeable hostess. I smiled to myself as the three women enthused about various beers and I trotted off to take some pics of the interior.


A vintage illustration of a beer glass and beer bottle with the text Golden Pints 2024.

We were pleased to see quite a few ‘golden pints’ posts around – as well as some ‘definitely not golden pints’ which do the same job. Here are those we’ve spotted:


Finally, from BlueSky, a reminder…

Not all good pints are about the beer. Pint of Madri in a plastic cup 1.34 miles out to sea on Southend Pier last year. The donuts were bangin’, and we sipped our pints watching locals fish off the end of the pier.

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— Bramling Ross (@rossisdead.bsky.social) January 2, 2025 at 8:55 AM

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

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News opinion

News, nuggets and longreads 21 December 2024: The Parallax View

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from Samuel Smith to red hot pokers.

First, some news that’s created ripples among beer geeks, even if it’s not likely to trouble civilians: RateBeer is closing down. Founded in 2000, it was acquired by AB-InBev between 2017 and 2019. Jeff Alworth has commentary: “It was an old platform with a mission that has grown obsolete. At the turn of the century, a few years after the birth of the internet, it helped beer fans locate and sort good beer, a task that became ever more hopeless with the proliferation of breweries and beer.”


An empty Samuel Smith pub in central London.

By way of contrast, a story that did break out of the bubble was Mark Blacklock’s forensic investigation into Samuel Smith’s brewery, and Humphrey Smith’s influence in particular, for The Guardian. We get an attempt at an article like this every now and then, usually recycling the very limited information that’s available, but this piece has both some new facts and, crucially, some fresh insight:

Throughout the months I have worked on this article, I have tried to gain a sense of why Humphrey Smith rules his empire as he does. Perhaps it’s as simple as a desire to turn back the clock to an earlier period, when business owners ruled their realm as they pleased, even if that meant self-destruction. Even so, one mystery has continued to dog me: his obsession with blocking development in the green belt… The Labour government had built a busy road at the bottom of Humphrey Smith’s garden on the advice of a planning expert, and there was nothing he could do about it. His childhood home was invaded by planners who claimed to be bringing progress. Ever since, Smith has militantly resisted both planners and progress. He has built an alternative world, one whose every aspect he tries to control. And if the little king cannot do as he pleases, everyone else can go hang.


Closed sign on shop.

At 8-Bits and Bobs hospitality pro Michael Deakin has written about the tension between the need for pubs to be open at Christmas and the need for hospitality staff to have time off. On the one hand, it’s a time of year when loneliness can feel especially acute, and when we’re most eager to connect with (willing to tolerate the company of) our neighbours. On the other hand…

I have spent almost my entire working life in an industry and a system where if you don’t carve out time for yourself where you can, it will be carved out of you. In most other industries there is no consideration as to whether you should work Christmas or not, but I expect this to change. As we hurtle towards ever more extreme forms of capitalism, worker rights will continue to be eradicated and more and more people will be expected to give up the last few remaining bastions of free time they have… There will be tens of thousands of well wishes sent between hospitality staff and regular pub goers this Christmas Day, in both directions, because, like a proper family Christmas, through the drinks,toil, and festive friction, lingers genuine affection. That’s the essence of the struggle we face. The possession of empathy in a system that will not credit you for it, rather use it to exploit you and wring out those last few precious pennies.


A pub at Christmas with tree and decorations.

Have you ever seen a hot poker plunged into a tankard of ale? No, us neither, but we’d like to. At British Beer Breaks Phil Mellows has written about this tradition and the concept of festive beers more generally:

In the middle of November the Hand in Hand brewpub in Brighton staged an unusual ceremony in which a red-hot poker was plunged into pints of Hand Brew Co’s old ale, Kora, to mark the dark beer style’s return to the bar after its long summer holiday… The brew bubbled, hissed, steamed and overflowed, leaving a warmer, and slightly caramelised drink. There was a time when this was common practice. My dad, who was brought up in a pub between the world wars, remembered pokers being heated in the open fire in winter so customers could heat their mild ale to taste. There were no reports of casualties… These days it seems to me that beer pokering is a great theatrical way to introduce the festive season, when plain beers are not enough and the dark depths of winter demands something special, an extra spice.


A half-drunk glass of dark beer in a taproom.
Cask ale at Suarez Family Brewery. SOURCE: Kevin Kain/Casket Beer.

For some reason, we’re always fascinated by stories about cask ale in the US. Perhaps it’s a latent desire to exert some kind of cultural influence over the most powerful country in the world. Or maybe it’s just that it seems odd and interesting. At Casket Beer Kevin Kain has written about the influential Suarez Family Brewery in Livingston, New York, which recently acquired a hand pump for its taproom:

Though the taproom hand pump is new, Suarez planted the seeds for their cask beer service years ago. They’ve been making a few beer styles associated with cask beer that have been well-received. This includes their English-style Dark Mild, Saunter. That’s a style that many were not familiar with here in the US, and, like the influence they’ve had on lager, Suarez’s production of Saunter has likely helped many appreciate the traditional English ale. As a result, it’s not hard to find the style now… Inspired by Theakston’s Old Ale, a beer that recently began being distributed here in the US again, they also released their take on that style late last year. The beer, Be It Known, is nitrogenated when canned to provide a texture that mimics cask beer.


We don’t usually listen to beer-related podcasts but long-time reader Oliver Holtaway particularly recommended this episode of Footprints about community pubs, with a focus on three community pubs in Bath in Somerset:


Finally, from Bluesky, a treasure trove…

I decided a while ago on my #12BeersofXmas. Every Fullers Vintage from 2023 back to 2012. While I still buy these every year, the excitement has gone since the big overlords took over the brewery, so it feels like time to drink up and close the chapter.

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— LouOnBrew (@louonbrew.bsky.social) December 20, 2024 at 4:41 PM

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

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News

News, nuggets and longreads 7 December 2024: Ceremony of Carols

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from Guinness to barley wine, via dark mild.

First, news of the ongoing hype – hype! – around Guinness.

Will Hawkes spotted this story in The New York Times about the rising popularity of Guinness in the US: “Oran McGonagle, an owner of the Dubliner, a two-year-old pub in Boston. In 2023, his bar sold more Guinness than any other bar or restaurant in the city. And this year, the Dubliner’s purchasing volume of the stout is up 63 percent to meet rocketing demand.” (Paywalled, but the link worked for us the first time.)

And on this side of the Atlantic Diageo is reportedly limiting supplies of Guinness because of rising demand in the run up to Christmas: “While overall beer drinking was slightly down between July and October, the volume of Guinness consumed from kegs was up more than fifth.” The last thing Diageo would want you to do, of course, is panic buy.


A red brick pub with a sign that reads The Royal Oak.
The Royal Oak, Chapel Ash, Wolverhampton. SOURCE: British Beer Breaks.

For British Beer Breaks Phil Mellows has been considering what the discontinuation of Banks’s Mild on cask means for pubs which have made a name supplying it:

At the Royal Oak, Chapel Ash, however, the matter is more than an academic debate. Run by Emma and Terry Cole, the Royal Oak is a brilliant community pub that cares about local people and understands the role a pub plays in their lives. It’s also proud that it keeps a great pint of Banks’s Mild only a few hundred yards from where it’s made at CMBC’s Wolverhampton brewery, serving up to 200 pints a week… In fact, since we learned the brand was in its final days, the pub has been especially busy, Terry reports, with people coming in for what might be their last ever cask Banks’s Mild.


The City Arms, a Victorian pub in central Manchester.

For the blog of a homebrewing supplier Matthew Curtis has written his list of the best beer cities in the UK. If he was expecting furious disagreement, he might have been disappointed, because the chat online was unusually constructive and harmonious, with most people broadly agreeing with his judgement – or at least understanding his rationale. We didn’t find much with which to argue, either, including this bit on Bristol (at number 5):

What makes the scene great here is each of its many different layers. You’ve got genuinely world class breweries – the aforementioned Left Handed Giant for starters – but also Lost and Grounded, Wiper and True, and several more besides… The only funny thing about Bristol is that its scene is quite insular. It can be difficult to find a variety of interesting beer that isn’t made in Bristol sometimes, because here is a city that prefers to look after its own. When the offer is as good as that of the breweries I mentioned earlier, however, you can see why it’s one of the best cities for beer in the country.


A bottle of Gordon Xmas beer in a Christmassy bar.
SOURCE: Eoghan Walsh.

Eoghan Walsh has been to “the most Christmassy pub in Brussels” and now, of course, we want to go there too:

I must have walked past Le Saint Nicolas, on the narrow Little Butter Street just downhill from Brussels’ Grand Place, innumerable times and never noticed it. The café is opposite the compact St Nicolas church, and its entrance is overshadowed by the large rainbow flag hanging outside a neighbouring LGBT bar. Whether it was named for the church or the Greek saint who delivers pepernoten and mandarins to good Low Countries children in early December is immaterial, because the owners have leaned fully into the latter as Le Saint Nicolas’ overriding leitmotif. A sign hanging over the entrance has Sinterklaas in white beard and red mitre painted on it, and the rest of the bar takes its cue from there.


A smiling person with white-grey hair and a hi-viz jacket working in a brewery.
Derek Prentice brewing Thomas Hardy Ale. SOURCE: Ed Wray.

It’s easy to think that Thomas Hardy Ale just materialises under one owner or another every year, or every few years. But Ed Wray has shared some insider info on when he was involved in producing a batch a few years ago:

The last is of particular interest to me as I worked at Hepworths when production moved there. For this legendary beer another beer legend, Derek Prentice, is the brewing consultant employed by the brand owner and we worked with him to bring the beer back again… I wasn’t doing much actual brewing by that stage of my work at Hepworths but I made sure I brewed one of the batches of Thomas Hardy. Oh yes, I wasn’t going to miss that opportunity. Unlike at Eldridge Pope it’s brewed as a single gyle and it proved to be surprisingly problematic… We had to throw everything we could at it to get the beer down to target gravity and the ABV up to the strength we wanted. It spent a long, long time in tank.


A pair of Tennents Lager branded socks.
SOURCE: Tennent’s.

Katie Mather has some helpful suggestions for your relatives on what to buy you for Christmas, instead of the gift set of world lagers they’ve currently got their eye on. You might want to print it out and leave it lying around. This is a particularly good idea:

Put Money Behind Their Favourite Bar… Genuinely, genuinely do this if you’re feeling generous. Instead of getting a gift card for an online beer company or buying them a crate of something they might not like, go to their favourite pub or bar and put some money on tick for them… Not only will the bar absolutely love you for giving them a little cash boost at an important time of year, your mate will love you because they can go in and get pints whenever they want for free until the money runs out… From personal experience as a bar owner, this also encourages people to try things they wouldn’t normally buy, which is also a brilliant thing.


Finally, from BlueSky, a snapshot of a brilliant pub…

Great night at the Dog and Bell. One of London’s most unique pubs.

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— Will Hawkes (@willhawkes.bsky.social) November 30, 2024 at 8:44 AM

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

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News

News, nuggets and longreads 30 November 2024: Birding

Here’s our weekly round up of the best writing about beer. This week, we’ve got cask ale, Belgian beer, and lots of different boozers.

First, some news: Carlsberg-Marstons has decided to stop brewing a bunch of the cask ale brands it has acquired over the years. Some have shrugged – these aren’t beloved beers, on the whole, and why brew them if nobody wants to drink them? Others, like Tandleman and Pete Brown, are concerned about the message it sends: “Are CMBC honestly trying to deliberately destroy the UK’s cask ale market? Of course they’d say no, if they could ever be arsed to comment on the situation. But if they really were trying to murder cask ale, what would they be doing differently to what they’ve done so far this year?”


The cap of a bottle of Westvleteren 12.

For Belgian Smaak Jonny Garrett has written about one of the great puzzles of beer geekery: why did we all decide Westvleteren 12 was “the best beer in the world”?

Local news stations reported chaos in that late summer of 2005. Drivers in the Flemish village parked wherever they could, churning up grass and leaving debris. The police were summoned. Helicopters scrambled. People queued for hours outside the village’s monastery, bringing traffic to a standstill… Then the world saw what was going on and the press started calling. They asked how a handful of monks had achieved such a thing, and why they would even want to… The monastic inhabitants of St Sixtus Abbey, a few kilometres south of Westvleteren, had brewed beer for centuries, using the profits to support their peaceful way of life. Like any conscientious brewery, they wanted their beers to be as good as they could be, but it was far from their focus. They certainly didn’t list Westvleteren 12, their Belgian Dark Strong Ale—or “Quadrupel”—on any beer rating sites. So they were probably more surprised than anyone when, in 2005, an American website crowned Westvleteren 12 the “best beer in the world”.

(Public service announcement: to close the ‘Sign up to our newsletter’ popup you want the little cross hidden in the top right corner of the screen, nowhere near the popup itself.)


A typical Alpine inn with ornate text on its frontage and flags of various nations.
A Wirtshaus. SOURCE: Tempest in a Tankard/Franz D. Hofer.

At Tempest in a Tankard Franz D. Hofer has been exploring an important Austro-Bavarian institution – the Wirtshaus, or village inn. It starts with a typically delightful anecdote from his travels:

A small group of burly men with broad grins joined us at our table, curious to hear about these two wanderers who clearly weren’t from this Bavarian village snug up against the border with Bohemia. So it goes at the Wirtshaus, where tables for two are rare. Some had worked in construction. Another was a local farmer who supplied pork to the butcher around the corner. The conversation grew more animated as the empty glasses lined up and the talk turned to the state of the world today. Our food arrived and we tucked in. After a few minutes the farmer proudly proclaimed that the Schweinsbraten and Schnitzel on our plates had come from his farm.


A red brick pub on a street corner.
The Lamb & Flag, Leeds. SOURCE: Chris Dyson.

Closer to home Chris Dyson at Real Ale, Real Music has been exploring Leeds and provides a useful update on the state of the city’s beer scene:

I carried on down past the Duck & Drake under the railway bridge towards the Minster where on one side was the Lamb & Flag… This lovely brick-built pub dates from the 19th century and was formerly run by Leeds Brewery until their demise, when the small pub estate was acquired by Camerons and the beers were taken on by Kirkstall. With its mullioned windows, interior featuring exposed brickwork and timbers, wooden floors and fittings it is one of the most attractive pubs in the city… I ordered a pint of Kirkstall Three Swords, missing out on the few Leeds beers that were amongst the 8 hand pumps on the bar, and took it to a corner table at the side of the door facing the bar… 


The sign of the Moon Under Water on Deansgate in Manchester.

For news outlet CNN Will Noble has done his best to explain the UK’s Wetherspoon pub chain to Americans. We suspect British readers will enjoy it, if only for the strange sensation of seeing our own culture presented as alien and exotic:

Utter the single word “Wetherspoon,” or even the colloquial “Spoons” to a Brit, and they’ll know what you mean. Some will grimace. Some will groan. Others will excitedly rub their hands together like you’d just cooked their favorite meal… Wetherspoon pubs are an institution in the UK. They enjoy cult-like status both among admirers, lured in by real ale and “pub grub” sold at astoundingly low prices, and detractors, who see them as emblematic of everything that’s wrong with modern Britain… More than 800 Wetherspoon chain pubs freckle the country — from The Muckle Cross in Scotland to The Tremenheere in Cornwall. In just a few decades, “Spoons” have become so ingrained into British daily life that they probably now deserve to be up there with Stonehenge on the list of UK cultural institutions.


The cluttered and cosy interior of a Dublin pub.
The Glimmer Man, Dublin. SOURCE: Lisa Grimm.

As we near the finish, let’s pop into a few pubs around and about.

First, in Dublin, Lisa Grimm takes us to a pub with the brilliant name The Glimmer Man: “The name comes from the Emergency/WWII-era job title – think a sort of proto-TV license inspector role – tasked with seeking out people using too much gas. It’s been applied to the pub here since at least the 1980s, though a previous proprietor, T. Lyster, is still commemorated in the tiled entrance.”

Then we’ll bob over to Ramsgate in Kent with Alex at Pub Vignettes for a snapshot of life at The Hovelling Boat Inn, among others: “You here for the Meat Raffle, son? Wasn’t aiming for a whole side of lamb kind of afternoon, but carpe diem. Strip of five tickets. Sonny and Cher. Simon and Garfunkel. Micropub and Butcher. Get the collab while it’s happening, nothing’s eternal.”

Finally, with Adrian Tierney-Jones, let’s visit Whitelocks in Leeds: “I engage in the tradition of vertical drinking at the long bar, its polished copper top gleaming like a much-loved child on Christmas morning, while the well-polished glasses standing on shelves at the mirrored back bar add to the impression that this is very much a glittering palace of beer…”


Finally, from BlueSky…

The AEB – GEB yeast packet designs go so hard. Would have each of these on a t-shirt. (Pic from geterbrewed.com)

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— Katie Mather (@katiematherkm.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 11:26 AM

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

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 23 November 2024: The Enchanted

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer and pubs from the past week. This time we’ve got festivals, malt, Kölsch and more.

First, some news: AB-InBev is closing the Elysian brewing facility in Seattle. Now, we don’t generally jump on every item of news from the US (it’s not our beat) but, as Jeff Alworth explains, this is significant as a sign of a wider shift in the market: ‘Big beer is done with craft.’ We’ve all spent so much of the past decade talking and thinking about small breweries being taken over by multinationals that it hasn’t dawned on everyone that we’re in a new phase:

With ABI sales of eight breweries  last year and Molson Coors dumping four of their breweries a few months ago, we can call 2024 the final chapter in ‘corporate craft’ era of American brewing. ABI will no doubt radically scale back Elysian’s offerings going forward to streamline production, distribution, and sales. In 2020, ABI purchased Craft Brew Alliance for a single beer, Kona Big Wave, which is now a standalone brand in their portfolio. I would expect them to strip Elysian of everything but Space Dust going forward… This was never a great union. National breweries and small, regional breweries have not just different business models, but nearly opposing reasons for being. since this is the end of the line for these relationships, it’s worth doing a bit of forensic work to understand why they didn’t work.


Grains of malt.
SOURCE: Lutz Wernitz/Unsplash.

For Pellicle Pete Brown has written about Baird’s Malt in Essex, with a particular view on the future of the malting industry in the face of climate change:

It’s January 2024 and I’m on the train back to my new home in Norwich. It’s a cold, blue day, and winter light fills the carriage. I look up from my laptop and see that we’re speeding past a beautiful lake, the sun shimmering on its surface. I knew about the Norfolk Broads, but I never knew about lakes like this!… Quickly, I stab at my phone and bring up Google Maps. I want to see exactly where we are so I can bring Liz back here for a lakeside picnic in the summer. When the app responds, I’m momentarily disorientated. The blue dot informs me that my immediate location is surrounded not by blue, but green and gold. This is not a lake. It is—or was—farmland. Somewhere under all that water is what was supposed to be the 2024 winter barley crop.


The crowd at a beer festival in a tent, with a long bar.
SOURCE: Quare Swally.

Roy at Quare Swally has an impassioned piece about the importance of the Belfast Beer and Cider Festival to a place whose indie beer scene has struggled to establish itself in the past half century:

It was a time pre-Covid, pre-Ukraine war, pre-Liverpool winning the Premier League. It was also a time when you could get a decent beer in Belfast for well under £7. That time was 2018 and that’s when the last Belfast Beer and Cider festival took place – until now. For reasons we won’t go into here, there’s been no such CAMRA NI-organised festival since 2018 and it was great to see it returning, now at Banana Block, opposite Boundary Brewing on the Newtownards Road… If there was no appetite for a Belfast Beer Festival, it simply would not exist. The reason such an event happens is because people want it to happen. The drinkers of Belfast and Northern Ireland made the festival a success… There’s also something special occurring across the wider beer scene in Northern Ireland. The festival proved, as if we needed reminding, that more people are embracing independent beer and seeking a better range of styles. The festival didn’t sell Guinness, Carlsberg, Harp, Madri or Tennent’s. It didn’t have what NI hospitality chiefs are telling others is our “taste profile”, yet the place was rammed.


An improvised sign that reads "Sorry for the condition of the toilets, refurb on the way, thanks, Team L.A.H."
SOURCE: Jane Stuart.

Jane Stuart has been exploring again. This time, she’s been checking out the pubs of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, and it’s more about the photos than the words, really, although there’s poetry in those snippets, too:

We were intrigued by the front door – had this previously been a prison door? I enquired of the barman, who confirmed that the door had been custom-made for the pub. This was in fitting with the general quirkiness of Harrogate that was endearing me to this wonderful spa town… I must point out that there was absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with the condition of the toilets… The friendly barman remembered us from earlier and I told him that we were back after visiting seven pubs because his beer was the best (I had that lush liquorice porter again)… 


Koelsch barrels on a serving counter in a Cologne beer hall.

We’re bothered by the lack of a definitive, detailed history of Kölsch, the unique top-fermented lager-like beer of Cologne. We may have dropped hints to this effect at various times, hoping that someone like Andreas Krennmair, who has ability to read sources in the original German, might take on the job. Now, on his blog, he’s shared notes on how to brew a pre-World-War-II version of Kölsch, with historical notes on the side:

Johannes Olberg’s book Moderne Braumethoden from 1927 contains a multitude of recipes for more than 50 different beer styles. One of them is Kölsch, briefly discussed as the “national drink” of Cologne, and characterised as golden, thirst-quenching, “not too heavy but digestible” beer. The recipe is particularly interesting because it’s the only well-documented Kölsch recipe I’m aware of from before the end of World War 2… A lot has changed since then, and the Kölsch of 2024 is of course very different from Kölsch about 100 years earlier. Even the modern standards of what Kölsch is supposed to be, the “Kölsch-Konvention”, was only developed from 1981 onwards, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office signed off on in it 1985, and it was finally signed by 24 Kölsch breweries in 1986.


The interior of a pub with shiny wood panelling and a framed portrait of an older man on the wall.

A few weeks ago Time Out published a guide to London’s best pubs that made everyone angry. In response, we said: “Remember, if you see a list in a newspaper you don’t like, that’s nature’s way of telling you to make your own list. (We would like to read your list.)” To our delight Tommy Palmer, a Belfast man in London, has done exactly that. Some of these pubs wouldn’t make our list, and some pubs we like aren’t included. But there are also lots here that we’d now like to visit thanks to Tommy’s short, evocative descriptions:

The Auld Shillelagh serves all the standard drinks that you might expect from an Irish pub, and although I’m not really a Guinness drinker, I have been reliably informed that they pour it well… Once when I was in there on a Friday night a proper seafood seller was coming round, so I helped myself to a little pot of prawn cocktail. My only experience of the classic pub fish man, but it made me wish it was still common… It also serves Nordie Tayto, which as you’ll see is a recurring theme when it comes to pubs that I enjoy.


Finally, from BlueSky, a proper thread from one of our favourite beer historians…

Michael Jackson did great work, but he also left the beer community permanently confused about stone beer. The problem is the Beer Hunter episode where he visits Rauchenfels in Franconia to see their stone beer. What's truly weird is that everything he said was true, and yet it's deceived everyone.

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— Lars Marius Garshol (@larsga.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 8:23 PM

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