The Pub Curmudgeon

It’s reported that the Passionate Pub Company, a seven-strong pub operator in the North-East, has gone into liquidation after its bank RBS ...

The various recent discussions about the Cask Report made me think how, during the lifetime of CAMRA, the market for real ale has been tota...

Yesterday, the latest edition of the Cask Report , written by Pete Brown, was published. Broadly speaking, this gives a positive message for...

I cut my drinking teeth in the late 1970s, a period that surely will come to be seen as the all-time heyday of the British pub. Annual on-tr...

Piped music in pubs used to be a perennial source of complaint, but I don’t recall mentioning it once since the creation of this blog. Howev...

Prompted by this post on Mark Dredge’s blog , I ran a poll asking whether people bought the Good Beer Guide . There were 77 responses, broke...

There’s an excellent article here from The Spectator (oddly uncredited) pointing out how the crackdown on underage drinking in pubs has en...

Some very wise words here from Jeremy Beadles of the Wine & Spirit Trade Association on the need for the drinks trade to speak with one...

There’s a rather strange line of reasoning here from Neil Robertson of the British Institute of Innkeeping, who argues that the pub trade m...

Quite amazingly, Sir Peter North, who was responsible for the report proposing the reduction of the UK drink-drive limit, has admitted in ev...

A couple of weeks ago, I made the comment that “I always picture most of the readers of this blog as middle-aged blokes.” A commenter sugges...

There’s a thread on the CAMRA forum started by the indefatigable Richard English entitled “Some pubs don’t deserve to succeed” . And, regret...

Across much of the South-West, Sharp’s Doom Bar seems to be the current cask beer of choice to put on the bar. If any pub wants to do someth...

There’s always a worry, when visiting a pub you’ve enjoyed many years before, that you will find it changed beyond recognition and no longer...

One fascinating aspect of people’s behaviour in pubs is the extreme difficulty elderly couples seem to have in deciding where to sit. Of cou...