The Pub Curmudgeon

This year, I have made 80 posts on my Closed Pubs blog, the highest figure since the early days of “shooting fish in a barrel” and in fa...

At the end of last year, I wrote “Despite the optimism surrounding the roll-out of vaccines, I expect I will still have a long wait before ...

I was originally going to call this review of the past year “A Year of Two Halves”, reflecting the decisive transformation in the prospects ...

Back in the Autumn, there was a wave of hysteria in the media about people supposedly being injected with “date-rape” drugs in bars and nigh...

New Zealand used to have a reputation as a relaxed, free-and-easy kind of place, but more recently it seems to have succumbed to a growing a...

Most of the single bottles and cans of beer and cider in the off-trade in this country are sold in multibuy offers, 4 for £6, 3 for £5, 2 fo...

It was dismaying, although perhaps hardly surprising, when Boris Johnson announced last Saturday teatime that some Covid restrictions would ...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the appalling decision in Northern Ireland to introduce vaccine passports for hospitality venues . At ...

The other day in Tesco, I spotted ten-packs of canned Draught Guinness that were being sold with two cans of the alcohol-free version includ...

Last week, Mark Johnson published a thought-provoking blogpost about how the language people use to talk about drinking can have an adverse...

The hospitality industry in Northern Ireland will have been dismayed by yesterday’s news that the province’s ministers had decided to introd...

Four weeks after our exploration of Stockport , our latest Proper Day Out took us to the former silk town of Macclesfield, just a 12-mile tr...

During the lockdown, Holt’s brewery bought and refurbished the Lower Turk’s Head on Shudehill in Manchester city centre, and reopened it in ...

In his budget earlier this week, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the most comprehensive review of alcohol duties for many years, and indeed...