Pernicious myths and a ban on hops

When I worked on a local newspaper in one of Hertfordshire’s duller towns in the mid-1970s, the news editor rushed in from the pub one lunchtime frothing with excitement – he had just been given a story by a guy in the bar that was bound to make the week’s front page splash.
This man’s mate [...]

Rake’s Prowess

Co-incidence time again – I went to the Rake by Borough Market last night with Patto, who was over from Amsterdam, without knowing that it had just won the best bar award in Time Out’s Eating and Drinking Awards.
It’s not the smallest pub I’ve ever been in but it’s certainly smaller than my living room, [...]

The potboy in history, literature and art

I was born, in what Carl Jung would have insisted was no coincidence, on the site of an old pub, the Upper Flask in Hampstead, near the Heath. The pub closed in the second half of the 18th century, and the building that housed it was replaced in the early years of the 20th by [...]

There Are No Favourites in Our House

Michael Jackson, whose funeral was yesterday, used to complain that people kept asking him what his favourite beer was. It annoyed him, I think, because it showed what a limited view the questioners had of great pleasures and deep enthusiasms, as if you could only like football by supporting one favourite team.
I have a favourite [...]

Top beer and cheese choices

As an example of truth in marketing, Charles Martell’s Stinking Bishop cheese is tough to beat – it really does stink enough to waken the dead, according to the Oscar-winning Wallace and Gromit film The Curse of the Were Rabbit. which climaxes with Gromit reviving his master by waving a wedge of the [...]

A three-threads thread

Corrected June 20 2008 to adjust for more accurate information – see this post.
The economic values displayed on eBay sometimes bemuse me. Last October a copy of the first, 1974, edition of the Good Beer Guide went after frenzied bidding from what I assume were completists wanting to own a full set of GBGs, for [...]

The nettle and the damage done

Another benefit of being a member of the Zythographer’s Union is that occasionally nice brewers send me beer through the post (and, since I don’t live in Maryland, I don’t have to be registered to receive it.) The only hitch is that Parcelfarce are a cretinous collection of cack-handed clowns, which means that when the [...]

Pale Stout

Plugging different beer-related key words into the search facility in the Times newspaper archive 1785-1985 is continuing to turn up gold. In June 1843 a series of small ads began to appear in the newspaper for Bavarian Pale Stout – put that one in your BJCP guidelines – brewed, not in Munich, but by Beamish [...]

Celebrity Big Brewer

What do the following people have in common: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, celebrity chef and TV presenter; Helena Bonham Carter, Oscar-nominated film actress; Lord Brocket, failed insurance fraudster and I’m a Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here contestant; and Kirstie Allsopp, presenter of the television programme Location, Location, Location?