The Pub Curmudgeon

I wrote here about how Wetherspoon’s had bought the former Kings Bar and Lounge in Poynton and were busy working on it with a view to ope...

Over the years I have been consistently critical of the dogmatic “real ale good, keg beer bad” attitude but, on the other hand, I have seen ...

As someone known to have an interest in beer, over the years I’ve received my fair share of rather naff beer-related Christmas gifts. Pos...

A comment by Phil alerted me to the dubious delights of CAMRA’s Nottingham Drinker magazine: I've just got back from Nottingham, whe...

In the days of the old licensing laws, the “lock-in” where a pub continued serving after hours to a group of favoured customers was commonpl...

Yesterday was widely described as “black Friday” – the day of the year on which most pressure is placed on emergency services from drunken...

It often seems to be assumed by people involved in the pub trade that either alcohol minimum pricing won’t affect them at all, or it may eve...

Sometimes you get a wonderful juxtaposition of stories in the papers, and today provided a good example of this. On the one hand, we had the...

Call Me Dave has recently made the claim that supermarkets are subsidising alcohol sales at the expense of wholesome food by selling alcoho...

When I was a kid, we never had any drink in the house apart from at Christmas. At Christmas dinner, it was bottles of Greenall’s Bullseye ...

Or so is minimum pricing south of the Border, according to a report in today’s Sunday Telegraph . Isn’t it fun when the wheels come off a st...

The various CAMRA branches in Cheshire collectively produce a quarterly magazine called Out Inn Cheshire . It’s an attractive-looking A5 p...

I had to raise a wry smile at this report that the Scottish ban on multibuy alcohol discounts was actually leading to people buying wine mo...

Following my post earlier in the week about online pub guides , commenters suggested another couple of sites that were worth looking at. B...

Mark Daniels is a long-standing columnist for The Publican and The Morning Advertiser , and in the past I’ve sometimes linked to his commen...