I dunno, you wait hundreds of years for a herb-flavoured beer, and then two come along at once. Just coincidence, I’m sure, but two new beers (ales, strictly), from the Pilot brewery in Leith, Scotland, and the Ilkley brewery in Yorkshire, have been announced this week that go back to the pre-hop tradition of flavouring… Read More Was it ever Gruit Britain? The herb ale tradition
There is, I suggest, a thick slice of what the Irish call begrudgery in the responses around the British beerosphere to the success of BrewDog. Here are these young guys, starting in their early 20s, who managed in a few years to build one of the best-known and fastest-growing breweries in Britain, worth on the… Read More The discreet charm offensive of the BrewDoggies
An old friend of mine gained a PhD in the relative clauses of William Shakespeare, with particular emphasis on the later plays. Ground-breaking stuff, she told me, and I’m sure that’s true. My own contribution to Shakespearian studies is rather less linguistic and more alcoholic: I seem to be the first person in centuries of… Read More Why Shakespeare liked ale but didn’t like beer
Did you see the news? It was in all the papers last week, and on TV and radio too. Apparently someone’s opened a pub within less than 750 yards of a road. Journalists, I’m sorry to say, love a moral panic. If we can get someone to be vocally outraged, our day is made. And… Read More Moral panics, Tim Martin and motorways
Get out the pitchforks and the blazing torches: I’m about to talk again on the subject of pub companies and their tied tenants. The trouble with trying to have a rational debate about the tied pub system, where pub tenants have to buy their beer from a list provided by the company that owns their… Read More The words nobody wants to hear about the on-trade
There are some images that are just wrong: uncanny, creepy. One of them is a poster of a smiling, steel-helmeted Nazi-era German soldier holding a pint of stout, with the words in Gothic script: “Es ist Zeit für ein Guinneß!” What makes this poster even weirder is that it’s by John Gilroy, the artist… Read More Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Guinness …
This post has its roots in something my 14-year-old daughter said to me this morning, about how she would never drink tea or coffee. “You will,” I told her, thinking that, as with so many pleasures, the joys of the Chinese camellia and the Arabian coffee bush were hard to understand when you are only… Read More The nine beers every 16-year-old needs to try
It is a truth universally asserted, at least in the comments section of the Morning Advertiser, that Pubcos Are Evil, their business model consisting solely of luring the naive into their sticky webs, where, entrapped, the poor victims can be sucked dry of all their money and spat out, poorer and sadder. All their policies,… Read More In praise of Ted Tuppen
“Never be afraid to be controversial” is less a statement of policy and more like a reason for living, as far as the BrewDog guys are concerned. Last week James Watt, the brewery’s co-founder, put up on his blog an impassioned argument putting the case for an “official” definition of craft beer to be adopted… Read More BrewDog couldn’t be more wrong in wanting an ‘official’ definition of craft beer
If you want to start a punch-up, gather together some brewers from small operations, producing less than 5,000 barrels a year, add some brewers from larger concerns, producing 60,000 barrels or more, clamp a steel helmet on your head and then ask them to discuss Progressive Beer Duty. Never mind about discussions over the exact… Read More PBD, the issue that splits British brewing
