Clik here to view.
More notes towards a history of the beer mug
Loved and disliked in equal parts, and enjoying an unexpected renaissance in hipstery parts, despite being more than 70 years old, the dimpled beer mug is undoubtedly an icon of England. It was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In which I give more badly written beer history a good kicking
Why oh why am I still having to write lengthy corrections to articles about the history of India Pale Ale? Well, apparently because the Smithsonian magazine, the official journal published by the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eight per cent of British craft brewers have PhDs and other dubious statistics
I have a new book out, A Craft Beer Road Trip Around Britain, with snapshots of 40 of Britain’s top small breweries from Scotland to the South West. Don’t rush to try to buy it from Amazon/your...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Welsh beer blogger Simon Martin is a superstar in Poland
Two of the more than 300 bronze dwarfs to be found on the streets of Wrocław. They commemorate the surrealist anti-Communist Orange Alternative protest movement of the 1980s, whose symbol was a dwarf,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Meantime sold up to SAB Miller – the inside story
Meantime Brewing’s surprise sale to SAB Miller, the second largest brewing company in the world, was prompted by a growing realisation at the Greenwich-based craft brewer that it did not have the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Rooney Anand is talking rubbish on minimum alcohol pricing
I was disappointed and angry to see Rooney Anand, chief executive of Greene King, calling in the Daily Telegraph last week for minimum unit pricing for alcohol. Disappointed because the arguments for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Greene King doesn’t care that the haters hate its IPA
Hard luck, haters: Greene King knows you don’t like its IPA, you think it’s too bland, “not a real IPA” at 3.6% abv, and it doesn’t care at all. Not the tiniest drop. In fact it’s probably quite...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How I got Mikkeller to call me a bastard
What sort of bastard goes along to a book launch just to point out to the author the mistakes he’s made? Errrr … Me. OK, it was done in what I’d like to insist, really, was a semi-joking way, and in a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
More notes towards a history of the beer mug
Loved and disliked in equal parts, and enjoying an unexpected renaissance in hipstery parts, despite being more than 70 years old, the dimpled beer mug is undoubtedly an icon of England. It was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
In which I give more badly written beer history a good kicking
Why oh why am I still having to write lengthy corrections to articles about the history of India Pale Ale? Well, apparently because the Smithsonian magazine, the official journal published by the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eight per cent of British craft brewers have PhDs and other dubious statistics
I have a new book out, A Craft Beer Road Trip Around Britain, with snapshots of 40 of Britain’s top small breweries from Scotland to the South West. Don’t rush to try to buy it from Amazon/your...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Welsh beer blogger Simon Martin is a superstar in Poland
Two of the more than 300 bronze dwarfs to be found on the streets of Wrocław. They commemorate the surrealist anti-Communist Orange Alternative protest movement of the 1980s, whose symbol was a dwarf,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Meantime sold up to SAB Miller – the inside story
Meantime Brewing’s surprise sale to SAB Miller, the second largest brewing company in the world, was prompted by a growing realisation at the Greenwich-based craft brewer that it did not have the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The three-threads mystery and the birth of porter: the answer is …
One of the biggest mysteries in the history of beer concerns a drink called three-threads, and its exact place in the early history of porter. Three-threads was evidently a mixed beer sold in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ciao Biella: an Italian family brewery woos the bloggerati
You can hardly get fresher beer than from a bottle snatched off the production line by the managing director of the brewery, only seconds after it had been filled and capped – and, indeed, it’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Strange Tales of Ale – ideal summer reading for the beach-bound beer fan
Of all the different styles of books about beer, the old-fashioned anecdotal ramble, as exemplified by John Bickerdyke’s classic Curiosities of Ale and Beer from 1889, or Richard Boston’s Beer and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The porter in Majorca tastes like what it oughter
If you want a single statistic that shows how the craft beer movement has become a world-wide phenomenon, let it be this: there are now seven eight craft breweries on the Mediterranean island of...
View ArticleSimon Williams hits the bull’s eye about what’s wrong with GBBF and why the...
I don’t think I’ve ever read a blogpost I agreed with more than Simon Wiliams of CAMRGB’s take on the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia last week versus the London Craft Beer Festival, also last...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The IPA shipwreck and the Night of the Big Wind
The “IPA shipwreck” is one of many long-lasting myths in the history of India Pale Ale. The story says that IPA became popular in Britain after a ship on its way to India in the 1820s was wrecked in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A short account of the surprisingly long history of putting beer in cellar...
Tank beer – “tankova” – may be a hot new trend in London, with Meantime in Greenwich and Pilsner Urquell delivering fresh unpasteurised beer to pubs in beautiful shiny big containers, but the idea of...
View Article