The Pub Curmudgeon

Some surprisingly positive figures in the latest BBPA British Beer Barometer . The statistics for the third quarter of 2013 show a 5.2% rise...

Pendle Witches Brew, from Moorhouse’s in Burnley, was one of the flagship beers of the early microbrewery revolution. Weighing in at a powe...

If I had a pint for every time I’ve heard someone say “you’d have to be an idiot to fail with that pub, it’s the only one for the best part ...

Brandon Lewis, the “Minister for High Streets”, recently attracted a lot of criticism when he said that popular fast food outlets such as Mc...

More excellent stuff from Chris Snowdon in this must-read extended essay on how the tyranny of “Public Health” is seeking to extend ever cl...

The 2011 Localism Act allowed local authorities to designate non-residential buildings as “assets of community value”: Nominations for com...

The Guardian recently published an interesting article on Ten things that bad boozers get wrong . Some of them I agree with, some I’m not t...

My recent post about the under-representation of family brewers in the Good Beer Guide made the point that some of them had been effectivel...

Chris Snowdon has received a number of honourable mentions on this blog, in particular for his role in marshalling the arguments against min...

I’ve made the point in the past that pub selections for CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide seem to concentrate more and more on those offering a ra...

Interesting results in my poll on when people last visited a Sam Smith’s pub. 11% (including myself) had done so within the past week, while...

On the recent CAMRA pub crawl of Didsbury which I mentioned here , it was noticeable that there was a certain saminess to the beer range in ...

In the comments on my recent post about Sam Smith’s pubs , John Clarke writes “go into one of their Stockport pubs late afternoon and it...

The beer blogosphere regularly runs a feature called “The Session”, in which bloggers are invited to give their thoughts on a particular top...

1973: All keg beer is crap 1983: All real ale produced by the national brewers is crap 1993: All real ale produced by the bigger independ...