We arrived from Prague and exited the busy station onto a busy ring road crowded with trams and traffic. As is often the case, the area around a station isn’t where a city chooses to reveal its personality. That came up the hill as we skirted the main square (harvest festival underway, corn dollies and cimbalom bands) on the way to the Hotel Avion – a functionalist, Bauhaus-style building designed by Bohuslav Fuchs in the 1920s.

“Those who do not sweat during the harvest will go hungry in winter” was a proverb on display at the harvest festival while “Form follows function” was the slogan of the functionalist architecture movement repeated in various places around Brno.

There are more layers, too, of course. When we went for a coffee, we ended up in a minimalist cafe with a scattering of pot plants and deadpan hipster waiters who seemed to have styled themselves after Nikola Tesla. A run took us out along endless arterial roads lined with apartment blocks, concrete towers and the remains of factories. And around the city centre are various post-war flagship Communist-era buildings that continue the principles of functionalism with less charm.

There are also, naturally, plenty of places to drink beer.

If the ideal German beer hall is fixed in about 1900, and the ideal English pub in about 1880, in the ideal Czech pub it’s always about 1923, when Czechoslovakia was still young. The walls are white, cream or nicotine coloured. Wood panelling, not too fancy or ornate, stained brown, comes about halfway up. By way of decoration there might be a few advertising plaques, a photo of some regulars (living, or long dead), a calendar, a Swiss-style clock, a small amount of small scale taxidermy, and a board listing the beers on offer. Anything more would be showing off.

Pegas, a post-Communism pioneer

Our first beer in Brno was at Pegas, one of the first new microbreweries to be founded in Czechia after 1989. It felt as if it had always been there – no doubt the vibe they were going for – with enamel plaques from historic Czech breweries breaking up the white walls and the lights a little dim by 21st century standards.

We worked our way through the full range of beers on offer, from the golden Světlý Ležák 12° with its softly citrusy hops to the oatmeal stout, which was heavy on coffee character and reminded us of the Baltic porters we’ve encountered. Each beer was served in a particular glass and presented with a certain pride by the waiter.

The food makes a show of being big and hearty with huge plates and oceans of gravy but wasn’t actually as overwhelming as the theatre might suggest.

We were joined by a rotating cast of tablemates, including an older Czech couple who seemed almost as geeky about beer as us, ordering one of each, like us, and taking notes, as we were doing. They liked the oatmeal stout best, perhaps because if you find golden lager everywhere, all the time, a dark ale has a certain novelty value.

The sounds of a small string ensemble rehearsing drift from the windows of the conservatoire as young people carrying violins and cellos spill from the front door. In the park there’s a cafe and beer garden next to a tennis club with its own bar (Plzeňský Prazdroj) and small beer garden next to a volleyball club with its own bar (Radegast) and small beer garden. On the other side of the park, beyond the tramlines, there are villas and apartment blocks, with more pavement cafes where chic older women share cakes. Europe Endless.

Standing up beer

It’s always fun to come across a type of pub we just don’t have at home. Na Stojáka in central Brno has no seats, only the kind of sloping perches you might find at a bus stop, if you absolutely insist on being lazy.

We were becoming used to the lofty, cosmic aloofness of Czech waiters, uninterested in the affairs of we mere humans and certainly not keen to chit-chat. They served us quickly and efficiently and turned away to consider more important matters.

Stojácké Poupě 12° was a hazy, coppery, chewy beer reminiscent of a Kellerbier. Čechr 11° was clean and cask ale-like with notes of orange pith and a satisfying breadiness.

Next to us, a burly bald man in work overalls chomped through an open-faced sandwich and worked his way through a couple of pints while reading a newspaper. On the square in front of the church, someone who had already had a few – German, or maybe Danish? – was speaking too loudly, and laughing too often. It didn’t fit the vibe.

It’s summer and the grandparents are looking after the kid. After a day with the kid, lively little fellow, grandpa and grandma need beers and, ah, the first round goes in a few gulps. The kid sucks sadly on a juice box. A young mum and her kid need a snack and a sit down. They both order what looks like beer. The kid is excited, swiping a little foam with a fingertip, licking it, making exaggerated expressions of delight. It can’t be beer, can it? It can’t be? The kid drinks their ‘beer’ and then, at the end of the session, finishes Mum’s, too. It has to be a soft drink that looks like beer, right? Or, at least, non-alcoholic beer, right? Right?

Checking out our local

We went to Pivnice Na Solnici because (a) we were exhausted from exploring in the heat and it was near to our hotel and (b)  because we wanted to try Dalešické beer.

It’s a big beer hall in the centre of Brno with a more modern, brighter feel than Pegas but nonetheless following the same basic principles: plain, canteen-like, unpretentious. (Rather than self-consciously minimalist.)

The beer was excellent. The 10° was perhaps too light, the 11° a little less so, and the 12° just right. Then along came Majova, a golden bock type beer that made everything else seem rather dull.

There was more hearty food in huge portions although we noticed that lots of people were just eating soup, or ordering successive rounds of chips to soak up the beer.

Starobrno (Heineken) is the city’s big brewery, dominant physically and presumably economically, and yet absent from the scene. The building is one of those 19th century behemoths that takes up a whole block, and then some, shooting into the sky like a more useful version of one of Ludwig II’s fantasy castles. The flagship taproom and beer garden is busy with people eating plates of pork but most of them seem to be drinking soft drinks or wine. Nearby, someone is loading a crate of Starobrno cans from the brewery shop into the boot of their car; someone sitting on a bench in the square has a multipack of Starobrno bottles that he’s working through; and a neighbourhood bar so rough and ready it looks as if it might be about to collapse has a Starobrno sign above its shuttered window.

The micropub in the park

After a long day exploring in the endless summer heat we ended up at the top of the Špilberk, sweaty and exhausted. We could have got a beer at the castle from one of several cafes (you’re never more than 100m from a tap) but based on a description from Franz at Tempest in a Tankard we were searching for something specific.

U Alberta looks like somebody’s shed or garage. It’s up a flight of steps and there are a couple of benches parked outside where couples or lone drinkers can sit in the sun.

We went in and found a space that felt very much like a British micropub. It’s still a Czech pub, it still has the key signifiers – wood panelling halfway up the wall, for example – but was brighter and lighter.

The beer from Salina seemed stunningly good. It was intensely bitter and extremely clean, almost as if Young’s Ordinary had been brewed under licence and lagered for several weeks. As we drank on we noticed some faint smoky, phenolic notes which were probably not meant to be there. This made us wonder if our initial euphoric reaction was because the beer was good or because of the thirst we built up on trek to get there.

If you’re drinking beer in Brno, you probably want an open-faced sandwich to go with it, smeared with pungent cheese from Olomouc and garnished with cayenne pepper and onion. They sit under cloches on bar counters and shelves, the perfect salty little snack, help yourself, there are the napkins, we’ll add it to your bill. Between the ripe cheese, wholesome bread and the pepper, they’re surprisingly complex and spicy. It certainly beats a packet of dry roasted peanuts.

Four pubs in one night

We knew we didn’t have the time or the boozing capacity to visit every pub in Brno but we thought we ought to try to get to at least a few more, of various different types, and so set out on a little crawl.

Pivnice U Poutníka is up a sort of mews or alleyway and when we arrived most of the drinking was going on in the street, with a mix of aging punky-hippies, office workers, and hoody-wearing hipsters gathered around barrels. We went inside and were served at the bar before retreating to the back room. It was pretty sparse – there wasn’t even any wood panelling – and smelled of smoke. The shaded windows made it feel like a rainy day. Still, Poutnik 12° by Pivovar Pelhřimov was very decent with more of that almost English orange peel character.

Not far away is Malt Worm, which very much signals its intent to be a modern craft beer bar, with white walls, exposed ducting, bare (fake) brick and Keith Haring-esque graffiti-type murals. Almost everyone else seemed to be drinking various forms of IPA and pale ale from British-style Nonic pint glasses. Not having come all this way to drink the kind of beers we get at home, we had a couple of lagers which, frankly, were among the least exciting we had during the trip. But they were still more than drinkable, and quite characterful, and it certainly made a change to be greeted with a smile.

Pivovarský dům Poupě is an enormous beer hall absolutely packed with smart young people in groups, on dates, or after-work partying with colleagues. Food seemed to be the main attraction and as we weren’t eating we ended up on the fringes watching the machine in operation. The uniformed staff almost gave it the feel of an American chain restaurant, or somewhere that wants to be one.

Finally, on a whim, we ended up at Stopkova Plzeňská Pivnice on the main drag. Plzeňský Prazdroj is their thing and we were pleased to encounter it. Our hypothesis was that, after a week of characterful beers from smaller breweries, it would taste bland or corporate. It did not. It is, of course, one of the best beers in the world, and all the better when served from the tank as it was here. In Brno, though, it feels like a foreign beer. Still, Staro Brno, the local big brand, must look on with jealousy as Prazdroj is venerated, treated as the premium option, served with reverence, its awards and certificates proudly displayed.

If you don’t want another beer, it’s up to you to send the right signal. Otherwise, they’ll keep it coming. You don’t need to catch the waiter’s eye or wait. Once your glass gets dangerously low, with only maybe an inch or two of beer left in the bottom, somebody will swoop in and offer another. It’s not unusual to watch people finish a beer, hand over the glass, and start on the next beer immediately. Chain drinking. Some drinkers also supplement their beers with shots and yet, somehow, hardly anybody ever looks or acts as if they’re even slightly drunk. This is a country that wears its booze well.

The mighty Thor

On our final evening in Brno, we decided to repeat our mix-and-match approach but, this time, starting out in the suburbs.

We read somewhere that Hostinec U Bláhovky had the best Prazdroj in town and so decided to start there. The vibe is different outside the ring road where people live and it felt as if we were crashing a backyard neighbourhood barbecue that just happened to be taking place in and around a pub. The beer was, indeed, fantastic, served in a chunky handled mug that weighed heavy in the hand and made us feel as if we were drinking ingots of liquid gold. Everyone else was smoking, doing shots, clinking glasses (clink, bump, drink) and fussing over each other’s dogs.

A solo drinker asked the barman-waiter to mind his spot while he went to the toilet. The barman-waiter refused, then reluctantly agreed, then immediately gave the table away to someone once the man had gone inside to piss. Good natured deadpan pranksterism, we think… Either that or they really do hate their customers, even the regulars, as their unsmiling faces suggest.

We chose to pop into Zastávka purely because we happened to walk past it and it was sending out good vibes. How, exactly? The bar staff weren’t scowling middle-aged men, for one thing. The beer was from a variety of smaller Czech breweries and we especially liked Mazák Extra Hořká (bitter) 11° which could almost have come from Sheffield.

A sign hanging on the beer taps read “Ústřední hřbitov smyčka”. What could it mean? Jess tried applying her limited knowledge of Czech, and better knowledge of Polish, but got nowhere, so we asked Professor Google: “Central cemetery loop”. Ah. Right. Presumably it used to live on the front of a tram or bus.

We’d saved Pivo & Syn for our last beer in Brno because it has a good reputation and we didn’t want to finish on a dud. It’s a modern pub, but a pubby pub nonetheless, and we immediately felt at home. The decor is trad insofar as there’s a brown-white split but the details suggest something a little quirkier and more pop culture savvy.

The clientele was mostly made up of middle-aged men in black T-shirts: Rock against communism, the Beastie Boys, I’m with this idiot → (but in Czech). There was also a lone woman in red who seemed quite comfortable and relaxed despite the daddishly macho atmosphere.

At one point, a standoff occurred: a drinker had lost the slip totting up how many beers he’d drunk and he couldn’t remember. Everyone in the pub started paying attention and someone heckled: “Charge him for 16 pints!” Then, eventually, he found the ticket in his back pocket and everyone cheered.

The double act behind the bar comprised a smiling, chuckling barman-waiter and a professional beer puller. We were mesmerised by his mighty Viking-like arms, honed by pulling one beer approximately every 30 seconds for, presumably, years. Adjusting the taps, tweaking the flow and the foam, testing the beer every 30 minutes or so, he looked like the pilot of a steampunk spaceship.

Futuristic functional folk: impressions of Brno, Czechia originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

Well, it is, and it isn’t. On this trip around Czechia, and last year’s big trip around the Balkans, we observed a local variant of the global foodie style which is more businesslike, more austere and perhaps a touch brutalist.

In Czechia, perhaps we should say ‘functionalist’. That was the dominant local architectural style in the 1920s whose slogan was “form follows function”.

Pult is very much a machine for drinking in or perhaps we might say it’s a laboratory for encountering local beer.

It’s self service at the counter – not traditionally Czech – and the menu is displayed on a big, easy-to-read illuminated board with black lettering on a bright yellow background. Think No Brand.

The beer list is what really got us excited, not so much for what’s on it – what do we know about Czech beer? – but for the logic behind it.

The idea is that the list changes every year in October with four new lagers appearing alongside regular classics Plzeňský Prazdroj and Budějovický Budvar. Breweries can submit their lager for consideration and a tasting panel made up of industry experts and regulars in the bar decides the next year’s list.

There are also 3 non-lagers in various craft beer styles.

This means that, for visitors like us, there’s more than enough on offer for us to try a different beer with every round, without being overwhelmed by choice.

At the same time, locals get to find an indie beer they like and, if they want, drink it every week for a year. Although we imagine that many locals would also hate the concept for not being enough like an authentic local boozer, or for being oriented to tourists.

For the breweries, we imagine this must be great for a couple of reasons. First, exposure in what feels rather like an embassy for the Czech beer industry in the capital city. Secondly, because it means they can rely on selling a certain amount of beer for a full year.

Back home in the UK, there’s something of a fascination with ‘guest ales’ but we’ve often said we’d be quite happy to find a Bristol pub that always has, say, Jaipur on offer – or at least has it on for long enough that we can enjoy it over a period of time rather than in one short, mad, hype-fuelled rush. There’d presumably be a financial and administrative advantage for the pub too.

We suppose we do have this in that some family breweries have historically made arrangements with others from the tweed blazer crowd to stick with each other’s beers as their regular guest beers.

Pult’s approach feels like something different, however.

Drinking (and loving) a 12° from Dva Kohouti we found ourselves wondering if and how a bar like this might work in London. A welcoming venue, with clear simple rules, that always has a classic like Timothy Taylor Landlord, plus 5 or 6 guest beers that represent the best of British brewing.

We bet that most locals would be fairly sneery about it on the basis that it’s not a ‘proper pub’. But what if it was also guaranteed to have a perfect pint of each beer, every time?

And of course everyone would bitch and moan about the choice of beers on the menu, if the Champion Beer of Britain competition is anything to go by. They probably do the same about the list at Pult, wherever Czech beer enthusiasts go to do their moaning and bitching. But wouldn’t this also add to the fun?

Our list, in case you were wondering, would probably include:

• Thornbridge Jaipur
• Fyne Ales Jarl
• Lost & Grounded Keller Pils
• Fuller’s ESB

But we’ll let others decide on the wacky pastry stouts and sours and what have you.

Another way that Pult works for both consumers and breweries is that, the next day, we were able to ask ourselves which of the beers we particularly liked and seek out more from the same producer. That took us to the Dva Kohouti taproom in a former industrial area in Prague where we worked our way through a good chunk of their whole range.

Our imaginary London version might help people visiting the UK for only a week or two decide whether to spend a day or two of their time travelling to Keighley, Bristol, Scotland, or somewhere else.

Pult in Prague has an approach worth stealing originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

First, some news. Or, rather, some ‘news’: Prime Minister Andy Burnham has told Time Out his three favourite London pubs. This is interesting for a few reasons.

First, because it’s part of a wider strategy to engage the public through social media and lightweight comms, meeting Nigel Farage on his own turf and demonstrating that he’s less stiff and aloof than Keir Starmer. Secondly, it positions Mr Burnham as a Londoner “I don’t think there’s a pub in London I’ve not been in”) when he’s spent the past decade or so building an association with Manchester. And, thirdly, it’s quite a risky move, as demonstrated by the fury and ridicule the article prompted online.

Though obviously not the three pubs we’d choose, and perhaps showing signs of having been workshopped by advisers and comms people, it strikes us as… fine? And quite relatable. Lots of people are fond of The Chandos; lots of people like Wetherspoon pubs; and choosing the pub where you had an important birthday party feels quite sweet.

Every now and then we spot an academic paper or journal article that’s worth putting on our concentrating hats for. This time, it’s from the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science and is by Michael Kempf who has attempted to provide a rigorous answer to the question of whether Guinness “just tastes better in Dublin” (PDF, linked from that page):

Simulating population thresholds >300 inhabitants and assuming an average of at least one pub in each populated agglomeration, a Guinness Distance to Pint Index (GDPI) is calculated by averaging transportation speed and travel time in a least-cost network analysis… Distance is key to freshness, which is mirrored in large parts of southeast England, including London as well as Cornwall and Devon being cut-off from rapid Guinness supply and showing low GDPI values. Ireland itself keeps a high GDPI, supported by distance, quick and centralized access to Dublin as well as a higher maximum speed on motorways compared to the UK. The drop in GDPI when crossing the border to Northern Ireland becomes immediately visible and most likely reflects UK road speed limitations and infrastructural development. Even remote Irish regions show higher GDPI values compared to Northern Ireland.

In other words, there might be something in the idea of the Shit London Guinness.

Chris Dyson has been to St Helens in (on?) Merseyside and his write-up is another of those that makes us start wondering about travel logistics: “With numerous well-maintained hanging baskets adorning the attractive, painted exterior walls, the Cricketers Arms… had the look and aura of a real oasis…”

But it’s also got some good stuff about how difficult life can be for pedestrians these days, which we can perhaps add to the list of reasons people might (literally) struggle to make it to the pub:

My enforced diversion had led me off in a different direction, so with the pub I had planned to do last now the closest to me, I decided to do the route in reverse. I turned left and followed the road to where it met a busy road, with a retail park and a supermarket straight ahead. There was a Nando’s to the right, and Google Maps was telling me to go on past it and follow the road until I came to the next roundabout where my first pub of the day was located a couple of streets beyond. I arrived at said roundabout, but how to get across? There was not a pelican crossing in sight and the flow of traffic from all directions was relentless. WTF! The most direct route was the widest road to cross, so I would have to leg it at some point, but I ain’t getting any younger! So I settled on a longer route, crossing three narrower roads, and got across safely in the end, but it took a while.

At Enjoying Pubs Mark Higgins has written about visiting every pub in East Wittering, West Sussex, in a single day:

The Thatched Tavern is a little outside the village itself, set in a curve on a fast road, and has for some years had a sign unequivocally stating they do not serve food. Such an overt announcement demands investigation. You have to drive to this place, there’s Chinooks flying overhead and everything… As befits a thatched property, the ceilings were so low that I needed to duck the whole time I was in there. I’m used to this by now and it doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. What did make me feel uncomfortable were two separate signs stating kids aren’t welcome – one suggesting dogs were fine but children should be leashed – and a large stack of Reform UK flyers… There was also a chalkboard abandoned on the floor with the heading “Landlord mood today:” It wasn’t filled in. Presumably the landlord’s mood was blank, black, or simply none of my concern.

Here’s one to bookmark: Jack Anderton has published the 2026 edition of his list of the 100 best bars in Europe:

The European Bar Guide is the only guide you’ll find that includes bars of any style. We rate venues simply on how well they do what they’re trying to do. Spectacle, atmosphere, social scene, intriguing customs, local culture and yes, the quality and choice of drinks… Sometimes a bar’s deficiencies can be handsomely compensated for in other ways. Sometimes they’re good at everything! In this list you’ll find bars that are love/hate – we don’t sit on the fence!

If you’re heading off on a city break or holiday, it’s a great starting point. Or, alternatively, you might enjoy arguing with Jack’s list – especially if you have local knowledge. Although you know what we think about that: write your own.

Lisa Grimm’s excellent Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs project isn’t just about reviews of individual pubs but also has posts that pull together multiple pubs by theme. This week, she shared a piece about pubs in the city with actual history, as opposed to history which is claimed or assumed:

For our purposes here, we aren’t looking for Dublin’s ‘oldest’ pub (we bang on enough about the bogus entries in the ‘oldest pub’ category across the country *cough* Sean’s Bar *cough*) or most literary pub, but rather, those with a reasonably legitimate historical claim to fame. Not of the ‘was once mentioned in Ulysses‘ or ‘Brendan Behan drank here’ sort, as we’d be here all week, but those with documented (or at least well-attested) historical connections. Given that the Wide Streets Commission knocked down much of medieval Dublin, we have no truly ‘old’ pubs (or even ‘old’ pubs that were once built as something else) to explore, so we’ll start off with pubs that have associations with the 1798 rebellion… The Brazen Head and The Lord Edward both have arrays of 1898 memorabilia…

And do follow the links! And the links from the links, which point to external sources like Liam K’s blog for more detail on ‘historic’ Irish pubs.

Finally, there’s this amazing spot by Phil Mellows…

Brighton, 2026: Bass re-enters popular culture.

[image or embed]

— Phil Mellows (@philmellows.bsky.social) 3 September 2026 at 11:38

For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and (despite some stressful-sounding technical problems) Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.

News, nuggets and longreads 5 September 2026: Grand Vitesse originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

First, some stats on community pubs via the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA):

Since May’s bulletin, the number of community-owned pubs has increased from 227 to 234. Those not owned but run by the community has seen a slight decrease of two, down to 29, however, one of the losses is now community owned. The number of active campaigns has risen from 90 to 101, so there is clear public interest in community ownership.

This grabbed our attention because we’ve been posting about pub closures quite a bit recently and in a comment on one of those posts Richard Brooks raised them as part of the solution. Despite having written about community pubs at some length in our 2017 book 20th Century Pub we haven’t really felt the influence of the movement in our day-to-day drinking in the way we have noticed, say, micropubs, or taprooms.

For Pellicle new-to-us writer Sophie Prosolek has painted a picture of micropubs and their place in working class former-industrial communities in the East Midlands:

In the East Midlands of the 1980s, beer culture went hand in hand with mining. Back then, the brewing industry in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was thriving, and many of the collieries hadn’t yet hit peak production. A pint of mild or bitter was less a curated lifestyle choice, and more a hard-earned punctuation mark at the end of every laborious day, best enjoyed in jam-packed, smoky welfare halls where the air was thick with chatter… But today, in the towns and villages that remain around the former colliery sites, a cultural shift appears to be taking place. Decades after a corporate vacuum swallowed up the social clubs, a number of modern micropubs have opened up. In the process, they’ve revised the working-class third space – much to the surprise of many locals (including my father and me).

Alan McLeod went for a drink at a ‘tav’ (tavern) in Kingston, Ontario, earlier this week, and found it loud, lively and energising:

Me, I grew up in Nova Scotia, that eastern province that is almost entirely encircled by the Atlantic. The common word for public house back there back then was tavern or “tav” for short. Like the old Midtown Tavern in Halifax. Tavern is the same word used by Thomas Raddall in his 1965 portrait of the city Halifax: Warden of the North. The word originally was supposed to indicate a better sort of establishment – with tables and wine… When I moved [to Kingston] in 2003 I was expecting a similar tavern culture but modernity had intervened. There were plenty of drinking spots but instead there were mainly bar restaurants called roadhouses, big screen sports bars, ditto band dance bars, swell cocktail bars and even the first brewpub in Ontario. Not a lot of the same sort of beer pounding taverns that I was familiar with back in Nova Scotia – or even up in the lumber towns of the Ottawa Valley where we had also lived. Places with communal tables, cheap beer, cheap food and a clientel that reached across all strata – college students, military, business folk. Young and old. Tavs.

Steve at Wait Until Next Year has written about a disappointing visit to a pub. He doesn’t name the pub in question which makes his post work almost as a universal review of every so-so pub in the country:

I drank there, periodically at least, years ago. It had closed during Covid and my assumption was that it would never come back. And yet, here it was, recently re-opened. A pub back from the dead is a miracle in this day and age. And I wanted to support the pub, both through buying and pint and through sharing the good news to my tens of readers… And yet. My excitement soon dissipated. The interior had been gutted. Sure, it had been a little old-fashioned rather than “traditional”. It probably needed a bit of a refresh. Maybe there had been a load of damage from it sitting empty for years. But it was still a shame to see the place stripped back to brickwork, the bar re-situated to lurk near the back rather than welcome near the front, the nooks and crannies that gave the place character gone from all the knocking-through that had gone on.

We love (or love to laugh at, or love to hate?) neologisms and Randy Mosher’s latest article for Craft Beer & Brewing has highlighted a couple of great ones. It’s called ‘From “swicy” to “newstalgia”, here are some flavor trends to consider for your next beer’:

Nostalgia, as always, remains a strong driver, but now it must be coupled with a twist – a phenomenon known as ‘newstalgia’… There’s also an overall desire to – as one survey participant said – “make me feel something.” That can manifest in several ways. First is simply big and bold: ‘dirty’ sodas with high syrup ratios, with cream sometimes swirled in, soda-fountain style, along with intense flavors, colors, and textures… Layered, multisensory flavors are popping up in all kinds of foods, drinks, and snacks… Surprise is also a valued experience for people.As far as a layered multisensory experience, beer already delivers, with sweet, bitter, acidic, creamy, and carbonated qualities… Salty, spicy, and savory – dubbed ‘swalty’, ‘swicy’ and ‘swavory’ when balanced with sweetness – will be trickier and need a compelling story to make them work. Cocktails might provide useful inspiration…

At Public House History Donal Fallon has written about Albert Pierrepoint, the last hangman in England, and his connections with both the pub trade and with Ireland. The post is based largely on Pierrepoint’s own 1974 memoir, titled Executioner:

He recalls visiting the Guinness Brewery with his uncle following a hanging in Mountjoy [prison in Dublin], at a time when brewery tours were conducted more informally, and his father had a friend working there: ‘We called at the brewery and my uncle drank a sample or two. I had one glass myself, of some special new porter they were introducing, but I found that it did not agree with me.’… Albert later juggled his career as a hangman with the life of a publican, running the unfortunately named Help The Poor Struggler in Oldham… When the man on the other side of the counter had ended at least 430 lives, people might behave themselves. Still, he discouraged what we might now call ‘dark tourism’. He was known to end the occasional night with a verse of Danny Boy on the piano…

Finally, from BlueSky, a ‘signal’ we’ve pinned…

If the young men I spotted in London these past 24 hours wearing Landlord t-shirts and courage ale caps unironically are anything to go by, we’re going be just fine.

— Matthew Curtis (@totalcurtis.bsky.social) 22 August 2026 at 03:27

For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.

News, nuggets and longreads 29 August 2026: Europe Endless originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

Kien Tan is a retail consultant and analyst and one of the most interesting people we follow on BlueSky. He doesn’t only write about pubs but when he does, it’s in the wider context of retail and hospitality.

His response to our blog post was this:

Pubs already ARE protected. Giving MORE protection than other hospitality IS Reform-coded: a cabinet minister confirmed this to me. You know I love GOOD pubs. But factually we drink out less, so closing BAD pubs will help good ones do better, improve industry standards, and, yes, create more homes.

— Kien Tan (@kientan74.bsky.social) 18 August 2026 at 11:23

This is an established thread in the debate over pub preservation and makes one big assumption: that the pubs which are closing are ‘bad’. Often, they’re not, unless you define quality very specifically and/or narrowly.

In a comment on the blog post Canadian beer writer Gary Gillman said:

The situation you describe suggests demand is there for a new pub. So someone should fill that demand, at another location in your area.

Our instinctive reaction to this was, “Oh, if only it was that easy!” Which then made us pause and think about why, specifically, it is not easy.

New pubs do open, of course, and micropubs have been a notable development on the scene in the past decade or so. If you broaden the definition of ‘pub’ to include brewery taprooms, there are even more. And ‘lounges’ – cafe-restaurants with draught beer and brunch that feel like bourgeois branches of Wetherspoon – might also count. These new types of ‘pub’ seem to be doing well, too, in terms of custom and reputation.

In that sense, the market is doing exactly what Kien and Gary suggest it might: supplying drinking establishments that meet modern needs, in the places where people want and need to find them.

But what they are not, not really, is pubs. Pubs are pubs. And there’s something rather tragic about historic pub buildings that have served communities for centuries being allowed to crumble, rot, fall down, or burn down, while we’re all shunted off to drink in industrial sheds, railway arches or high street retail units that have no real charm of their own.

Putting that aside – brushing it away as mere sentiment and subjectivity – why are new pubs so often pushed into edges and corners in this way?

First, it’s because there are no other spaces. The same pressures and incentives that make property developers who live in London buy up pubs in suburban Bristol also reduce the number of suitable plots or units in these neighbourhoods.

If someone wanted to open a new pub where we live in Barton Hill, East Bristol, their choices would be limited. There’s a run of shops in the basement of a modern housing block, currently occupied by a convenience store and a couple of takeaway restaurants. There’s another convenience store and takeaway combo around the corner. And two more convenience stores and two more takeaways as standalone units. None of these are going anywhere.

When someone did manage to open a new hospitality business in the area, a hipster coffee shop, they only pulled it off by converting their garage without planning permission and then retrospectively getting it signed off after much hoo-ha. And it really is tiny, too – more microscopic than most micro of micropubs.

Let’s assume property and land weren’t at a premium, though, and that there was space to pop in a new pub with seating for, say, 50 people. The next problem would be licensing.

Licences are attached to specific pub buildings. That’s why pub businesses have, until quite recently, persisted in the same locations for decades on end. When breweries wanted to open new pubs between the wars, or after World War II, they had to agree to close existing pubs and transfer the licences, sometimes swapping three or four small pubs for one larger premises.

Micropubs have been able to get licences by agreeing to limited opening hours, often closing early and opening for only a few days a week, and sometimes by convincing councils that their clientele will be middle class, middle aged, and no bother at all.

Which brings us to the next problem: people like the idea of there being a pub nearby, but they don’t want one on their block. All that noise and litter! Comings and goings at all hours! Drunks pissing and vomiting in their rose bushes! When a planning application is made, they will object, and their objections will probably help the authorities take the easiest course of action which is saying “No.”

Keeping an existing pub going is easier than making the case for the insertion of a new one into a community. Whereas no sharp-elbowed homeowners live next door to that railway arch, or factory unit, or row of high street shops.

What stronger protections for pubs might mean is that, rather than a property developer being tempted to close a viable pub in a historic building so they can make millions of pounds building flats, a smaller business (perhaps a community group) might take it on and make just enough. And isn’t enough enough?

In terms of making neighbourhoods feel like communities, commercial property more generally probably needs some of the same protection as pubs. What’s the point in building housing if the people living there can’t buy a pint of milk, a cup of coffee, or a pint? And, of course, the people running those businesses need to be able to make a living, not spend every single penny on rents that an algorithm increases to the theoretical maximum at every opportunity.

Why not just open a new pub? originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog