The Pub Curmudgeon

I recently reported on the news that Heineken had agreed to acquire most of the Punch Taverns pub estate , something that very much came out...

I recently encountered an intriguing little moral dilemma. On Christmas Eve, I was in a Sam Smith’s pub. Feeling a rush of seasonal goodwill...

As seems to have become an annual tradition, I’ll offer a few highs and lows of 2016. Not really “Golden Pints”, as it’s much more about pub...

In many older pubs, you will still see a line of redundant bell-pushes around the walls in the lounge. They date back to the days of waiter ...

The government’s new Pubs Code includes provision for the tenants of large pub companies to exercise a Market Rent Option, under which they ...

I was drafting out a “Highlights of 2016” post, for which you will have to wait until next week. One of the categories was obviously going t...

The most recent set of government anti-smoking measures includes a ban on selling cigarettes in packets of less than 20. At first glance, th...

Last week a giant claw unexpectedly reached out from the 1980s and grabbed control of a substantial chunk of the British pub trade, in the f...

CAMRA is, not unreasonably, carrying out a review of the scope and content of its flagship publication, the Good Beer Guide , with a view to...

The issue of drink-driving always rears its ugly head over the Christmas period, and BBPA chief executive Brigid Simmons has urged pubs to p...

At the local CAMRA branch meeting the other day, one member expressed his disappointment on having visited Glossop on a weekday lunchtime, o...

A friend of mine is a university lecturer and has recently taken up a new position in Leeds. As he knows I have an interest in pubs and bee...

You must have been living in a cave if you hadn’t noticed that alcohol prices in the off-trade tend to be considerably cheaper than those in...

The photograph below was taken in the Reddish Working Men’s Club in Stockport in 1977. I have copied it from a Stockport-related Facebook gr...

Readers sometimes confuse a tone of nostalgic regret for one of anger on this blog, and I think that may have been the case with my recent p...