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Beer history beer in fiction / tv pubs quotes

Pub Gentrification in Jude the Obscure,

“[The inn] had been entirely renovated and refitted in modern style since Jude’s residence here… Tinker Taylor drank off his glass and departed, saying it was too stylish a place now for him to feel at home in unless he was drunker than he had money to be just then… The bar had been gutted and newly arranged throughout, mahogany fixtures having taken the place of the old painted ones, while at the back of the standing-space there were stuffed sofa-benches. The room was divided into compartments in the approved manner, between which were screens of ground glass in mahogany framing, to prevent topers in one compartment being put to the blush by the recognitions of those in the next. On the inside of the counter two barmaids leant over the white-handled beer-engines, and the row of little silvered taps inside, dripping into a pewter trough… At the back of the barmaids rose bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves running along their front, on which stood precious liquids that Jude did not know the name of, in bottles of topaz, sapphire, ruby and amethyst.”

From the Project Gutenberg edition of Jude the Obscure, 1894.

Categories
Beer history Beer styles quotes

QUOTE: Micropubs & Lager

“I used to drink brown and mild but beer in the 1970s was so rubbish that I eventually succumbed to lager… [Then] I discovered the Firkin pubs, Bruce’s Brewery… I had a pint of Whale Ale and thought, wow, this is fantastic! This is how beer is supposed to be… I could be wrong but I don’t think that in ten years, the police have never been called to a micropub. There’s twice as many hops in real ale as in lager, and hops are soporific – they make you sleepy and peaceful.”

Martyn Hillier, founder of the first micropub and godfather of the micropub movement, in an interview with one of the authors of this blog, 12/05/2015.

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Germany quotes

QUOTE: A Moment in a German Pub, 1933

“Beer, caraway seed, beeswax, coffee, pine-logs and melting snow combined with the smoke of thick, short cigars in a benign aroma across which every so often the ghost of sauerkraut would float.”

Part of a longer, highly evocative description of Zum Schwarzen Adler in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, 1977.

Categories
American beers Beer history quotes

QUOTE: His Courtroom was also his Saloon

“Roy Bean gave cold-blooded killers, cattle rustlers, and horse thieves no mercy. ‘Court’s in session,’ he would announce, and then delivered his sentence without pausing: ‘To be hanged by the neck until dead.’ As each trial ended, he would serve up cold beer all around; his courtroom was also his saloon.”

From The American West by Dee Brown, 1995.

Categories
pubs quotes

QUOTE: The Warmth of the Little Pubs

“The warmth of the little pubs and their no-delay service stand in pleasant contrast to the waiting, formality, boredom, and frustration evoked by city offices, museums, churches, concert halls, airline terminals, and retail stores. Not far from the likes of these may usually be found a pub into which one, given the least interlude of freedom, may ‘bolt’ and therein soothe the irritations of urban chafing with an interval of pure felicity.”

Ray Oldenburg on The English Pub’, in The Great Good Place, 1989, repr. 1997.