The Pub Curmudgeon

The Treasury have just published the results of their review of alcohol taxation . In general, this doesn’t recommend any major changes to t...

I was taken aback to see the headline in today’s Sunday Telegraph “Minimum price for alcohol” . But, on reading the article, it seems that ...

A while back I was taken to task in the comments on this post for ignoring the range of “hugely varied and interesting food” that is now av...

It is common to see commentators ascribe part of the decline of pubs to “stricter drink-driving laws”. There was an example only this week i...

There was a particularly nauseating piece in the Morning Advertiser recently proclaiming the virtues of “gastropubs” and arguing that they...

Minimum alcohol pricing has recently been decisively rejected in Scotland, but the Manchester Evening News reports that the ten Greater Man...

It seems that Schadenfreude is one of the few pleasures still legal. And I got an especially enjoyable dose on hearing that Labour MP Eric ...

Statistics suggest that during the next twelve months, the “tipping point” will be reached where off-trade beer sales exceed on-trade sales...

There’s an unusual case here where police officer Myles Hughes escaped a drink-driving ban after it was shown his drinks had been “spiked” ...

Police in North Wales have been hiring actors to go in to pubs pretending to be drunk and seeing if they can get served. While it is illega...

There has been a huge kerfuffle in the beer blogosphere in the past week or so about the role of CAMRA and whether it shoots itself in the f...

I’ve often heard it claimed that the main reason for introducing the smoking ban in the UK was the protection of workers. This, of course, i...

In conclusion, the bottles I was kindly given to sample by Wells & Youngs represented a varied range of quality beers that were all dist...

My poll asking the question ‘Would you drink a keg “craft” beer from BrewDog or Thornbridge in the pub?’ has now finished. There were 81 res...

The final Wells & Youngs beer to sample is the flagship of their range, the 6.4% ABV, bottle-conditioned Young’s Special London Ale . It...