The Pub Curmudgeon

In the face of rocketing energy bills, many pubs are currently reducing their opening hours. They really can’t be blamed if turning the heat...

In my Review of 2022 , I mentioned that I had visited 128 different pubs during the year. This was considerably more than in the two years o...

In my post about Falling out of love with alcohol , I mentioned the British Beer & Pub Association’s detailed table of beer sales statis...

Over the weekend, there was an interesting article in the Observer entitled Last orders: how we fell out of love with alcohol . This isn’t ...

Wetherspoon’s are currently running a January Sale including price cuts across a whole range of food and drink items, including reducing the...

July saw the fifteenth anniversary of this blog, which of course was originally sparked by the smoking ban. Sad to report that I have achiev...

This time last year, pubs had been spared the Covid restrictions that had been reimposed on large sections of the economy due to concerns ab...

A significant development of the past few years that has perhaps not received the attention it deserves is the rise of franchise models for ...

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how the unintended consequence of banning displays of “HFSS” foods in supermarkets had been a mushroom...

Regular readers will know that I’m an enthusiastic user of Twitter. In recent weeks, there has been a mixture of excitement and consternatio...

The Scottish government must be disappointed by the effect of the raft of anti-alcohol measures they have already introduced, so they have d...

Next August, the Scottish Government will introduce a Deposit Return Scheme under which buyers of all glass and plastic bottles and cans us...

At the beginning of this year, Wetherspoon’s carried out a substantial revamp of their beer range, one of the major elements of which was de...

From the beginning of October, new regulations were introduced in England to restrict the display and promotion of HFSS foods (“high in fat...

I recently had a somewhat unedifying experience in one of my local Wetherspoon’s: Oh, I’ll try one of the beers in the Spoons real ale fest...