The Pub Curmudgeon

The latest version of the annual Cask Report has been published this week. There’s a lot to digest in there, and I’m not proposing to do a ...

Following last year’s exercise in shooting themselves in the foot , this year CAMRA were more on target with their Good Beer Guide press la...

Although the pace has slackened a bit in the past couple of years, pub closures are still very much with us. It seems that, whenever a pub c...

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that it’s always easier to drum up support for banning or restricting something than leaving it alone. One ...

Outgoing Good Beer Guide editor Roger Protz has called for CAMRA to embrace craft keg beers to ensure its survival into the future. It is ...

In response to my last post about the link between supermarket pricing and the decline of pubs, I was sent a link to a fascinating document ...

In their new book 20th Century Pub , Boak and Bailey, in surveying the various reasons put forward for the decline of the pub trade in recen...

Hard on the heels of Heineken’s acquisition of Punch Taverns comes the news that Admiral Taverns is being sold to C&C Group , owners of ...

One thing that has struck me about the comparison between the 1978 and 2018 Good Beer Guides is how much more homogenous pubs were back the...

The 1978 edition, which came out six months after I turned eighteen, was the first Good Beer Guide I ever bought. It played a formative rol...

As an emergency cost-saving measure following some disappointing financial figures, CAMRA have announced that they are not going to send out...

Following my post last week about the pitfalls of returning beer to the bar , I thought I would run a poll on how often people actually did ...

In their new book 20th Century Pub , Boak and Bailey reached the conclusion that “we feel unfashionably optimistic for the pub”. Now, in my ...

In writing my review of Boak & Bailey’s 20th Century Pub the other day, the thought occurred to me that a strong parallel could be draw...

There have been plenty of books written on the history of the British pub, and for the most part they cover the same ground. They run throug...