The Pub Curmudgeon

In the late Seventies and Eighties, I had too many experiences where I was served a pint of soup masquerading as beer and, on taking it back...

I’ve been in a growing number of pubs recently where I’ve been charged over £3 for cask beers of ordinary strength, around 4% ABV. That incl...

Good news from the Scotch whisky industry where exports broke new records in 2011 , increasing in value by 23% to £4.23 billion. This was pr...

So, all those entreaties from CAMRA, SIBA and the BBPA fell on deaf ears, and Osborne put up beer duties by RPI + 2%, just as he had said he...

There’s a wonderfully splenetic attack on minimum alcohol pricing by Tim Worstall on the website of the Adam Smith Institute: Minimum alco...

Well, pretty much everything that could be said about the government’s minimum alcohol pricing plans has already been said, for example by C...

It was clear well before July 2007 that the British pub was already in a long-term structural decline. Between 1997 (when the BBPA statistic...

This weekend, the Davenport Arms in Woodford will be celebrating eighty years under the stewardship of four generations of the Hallworth fam...

Some sections of the media – although fewer than last year – were misled by the statement in the Budget that there would be no change to alr...

In the sidebar there’s the following quotation from Chris Snowdon, author of the Velvet Glove, Iron Fist blog: “If I see one more politicia...

On a few occasions recently I have been having a meal in a pub with friends or relatives, and noticed the clock ticking up over 25 minutes f...

Boak and Bailey recently referred here to meeting up in the pub for a drink immediately after work. There’s a long tradition of having a co...

A strapping, healthy-looking man walks into a pub, and orders a half-pint. You immediately raise an eyebrow and think “hmm, something’s up h...

The Scottish Conservative Party has dropped its opposition to minimum unit pricing for alcohol, in a deal that would see it scrapped in fiv...

Here’s a sad picture taken yesterday of the closed and boarded Traveller’s Rest in Runcorn, better known locally as “The Tup”. A former Gree...