The Pub Curmudgeon

I am the man, the very fat man That waters the workers’ beer And what do I care if it makes them ill If it makes them terribly queer I’ve a ...

An ongoing theme of this blog has been the conflict between the interests and desires of pub customers and the commercial companies who own ...

From the beginning of this month, new government regulations prevent restaurants and fast food outlets from providing unlimited refills of...

The Morning Advertiser reports on research carried out on behalf of Ossett Brewery showing that cask suffers from a visibility problem in ...

Having left the Old Swan, a short walk back west towards the town centre of Atherstone brought us to the Hat & Beaver , its plain front...

Atherstone is a market town in North Warwickshire with a population of about 11,000, located between Coventry and Burton-on-Trent, very clo...

Over the years, I have often praised Wetherspoon’s business success in building an empire of large, thriving pubs from scratch in the face o...

The Waggon & Horses , a large Greene King-owned dining pub located in Handforth, just south of the Stockport boundary, has recently clos...

I recently saw this interesting post on X/Twitter about how smoking bans are a touchstone for a society’s general attitude to freedom. I wo...

Scarcely a week goes by without the present government announcing a policy to antagonise yet another group in society. They have now put fo...

The licensee of the Wonston Arms in Hampshire, a former CAMRA National Pub of the Year, recently had an article published in the Daily Tele...

Budweiser Brewing Group (the new name for AB InBev in the UK) have announced that they are relaunching Boddingtons Cask Bitter , which was l...

In an attempt to combat “food poverty”, the government have announced a pilot scheme to set up state-subsidised restaurants offering cheap ...

The Morning Advertiser recently published figures confirming the continued decline of cask beer sales in the UK, which were reflected on b...

The Daily Telegraph reports that the government have spent over £35,000 on beermats to boast about increasing the minimum wage. This in it...