It’s exciting to be able to buy imported Helles beers from both Augustiner and Tegernsee at Sainsbury’s, while we’re picking up canned tuna, Woolite and ‘crispy nuggets’. And £3.40 a bottle doesn’t seem like a terrible price, either.

But then you see four 500ml cans of Rheinbacher Pilsner at Aldi for £3.99 and you think, hmm, now, I’ve just paid £13.60 for the same volume of the posh stuff. And you start wondering whether a blind taste test might be in order.

As usual when we do something like this, Jess does the blind tasting, because evidence suggests she has a more sensitive palate and is generally more capable of something approaching objectivity.

Ray prepped three beers in ceramic German beer mugs and presented them together. They were:

• Augustiner Helles (Munich, Bavaria, 5.2%, bottle)
• Tegernsee Helles (Tegernsee, Bavaria, 4.8%, bottle)
• Rheinbacher Pilsner (Strasbourg, France, as far as we can tell, 4.5%, can)

Jess knew that the test was between German imports and cheaper beers, and suspected Tegernseer Helles was in the mix, but didn’t know for sure what was in the line up.

Ray’s hypothesis was that Jess would instantly dismiss the Rheinbacher and then prefer Tegernsee to Augustiner. He was partly right.

A surprise result

It turns out that, on this occasion, Augustiner was the dud. Yes, we know! It surprised us, too. 

We say “on this occasion” because, of course, even with a beer as reliable as Augustiner, it’s possible we got a bottle that was a little older, or that had sat in a sunbeam for an hour or two on its travels.

Still, not knowing which beer it was, Jess described it as “papery” and “not particularly enjoyable”.

Rheinbacher, on the other hand, earned some “nom nom” noises: “I’d quite happily drink that. It’s quite pleasant.” Ray, knowing what it was, also enjoyed it and couldn’t help but think of the surprisingly decent beer Meteor, also from Strasbourg.

Tegernsee was the winner, though, and by quite a long way. Despite being plucked from the same shelf as the Augustiner, and perhaps having arrived in Britain on the same lorry, it tasted fresh, with a subtle malty sweetness.

It depends how much you’ve got in your pocket

On this basis, if you’ve got an extra tenner to spend on something that will bring you pleasure, four bottles of Tegernsee is a better bet than four cans of Rheinbacher.

It’s exciting and, based on our recent encounters with both the bottled and draught versions, basically flawless.

But if not, four cans of Rheinbacher won’t let you down, even if they don’t feel like a treat with their Microsoft WordArt label design.

But people don’t taste blind

Because, of course, we don’t generally drink blind, and for most of us (not you, you’re too clever to be suckered, we realise that) the story and packaging are part of the pleasure.

In fact, Ray didn’t find anything wrong with the Augustiner that Jess dismissed, possibly because he was dazzled by its reputation and provenance.

Everyone knows that Augustiner has strict quality standards, and won’t let just anyone sell its beer. We’ve all heard stories of pubs being unable to meet the requirements to stock draught Augustiner in the UK, and about the hoops those who have made the cut had to jump through.

All this means that, even before you take a sip, you’re expecting something special. And perhaps, conversely, when you encounter a beer like Rheinbacher, you expect it to taste cheap and nasty.

Doing some sort of blind tasting every now and then can be a great way to reset your prejudices and remind yourself that, actually, you’re more easily fooled than you might like to think.

It’s great but is it worth three times the price? originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

First, some brewery ownership news: Rebellion Brewery in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, has become employee owned after its founders began the process of exiting the business. The BBC article we’ve linked, by Jamie Morris, considers the question of employee ownership more broadly, with evidence from Abbeydale in Sheffield suggesting it improves employee engagement and morale. It does seem like a neat solution to the succession problem, where there are no obvious heirs or proteges willing to take on the business. We particularly like this line in the story, quoting Rebellion co-founder Tim Coombes:

Tim said they could have tried selling Rebellion to one of the bigger breweries… “You only need to look back at how that generally pans out for those breweries and it’s not very good unfortunately,” he added.

For Pellicle Imran Rahman-Jones has written about the place of 80 shilling in modern Scottish beer culture, and in Edinburgh in particular, where affection for it clings on:

The Diggers has a deep and proud history with 80/-. The Scotsman stated in 1983 that it was so good, it made “the eyes of grown men grow dreamy; a smooth, memory-sapping liquid which is described by restrained connoisseurs as the best 80/- ale in the world.” Rumours swirled that it must have been piped in directly from McEwan’s Fountain Brewery, which, before it closed in 2005, was just a few minutes’ walk away… McEwan’s was once phenomenally successful, and dominated eastern Scotland’s beer trade for decades, thanks in part to its 80/-. (Glaswegians were more partial to a Tennent’s Lager.) So when the brewery, or perhaps its accountants, decided to stop brewing it on cask in the mid-2000s, there was uproar among The Diggers’ regulars—which included many of the brewers at the Fountain Brewery.

Have you ever heard of ‘simmer and strip’ technology in brewing? We certainly hadn’t until we read this profile of, and interview with, Eddie Gadd of Gadd’s Brewing, in Ramsgate, Kent, from the Brewers Journal:

[Simmer and strip is] a patented technology that bubbles inert gas through the kettle during boiling, removing unwanted flavours without the energy demands of a vigorous boil. “Not many people are doing it,” Gadd says. AB InBev licenses it to craft breweries producing under a million hectolitres a year… “It’s breaking brewing dogma. We’ve been boiling our wort for hundreds of years, and when I started brewing, my head brewer would tell me my minimum evaporation rate should be 7% an hour, for 90 minutes. Woe betide any brewer that fell short, because their beer could turn into rubbish. We didn’t actually know what happened during the boil, other than that it got bitter from the hops. Boiling was just boiling.”

(We’re not sure who actually wrote the article or took all of the photos attached to it. It might be a press release. If it is, it’s a pretty good one.)

Jeff Alworth is grappling with the absence of autumn in Oregon where it should be porter weather by now, but isn’t:

Two nights ago, Sally and I strolled over to Baby Doll Pizza, which is owned by Old Town Brewing. It’s one of my favorite stops, a New York-style by-the-slice pizzeria on one side (lots of young people in black buying $5.25 pepperoni), and a dive bar, unexpectedly, on the other… I am standing at the bar looking at the beer list, and I am confronted with a new confusion, one hounding me these past weeks. Amid the requisite IPAs I might choose a pilsner or a vintage 1990s 4.9% brewpub porter. These are excellent choices and typically the calendar would dictate my selection. But on that Wednesday, late into October, I was confused. I should have wanted the porter, because it should have been cold and wet outside. Instead, the sunny day reached the mid-70s, even though it gets pitch black by 6:30. Confused, I stammered, delaying the decision by ordering Sally’s pilsner. (She is ruthless about beer and ignores seasonal cues.)

Lars Marius Garshol has spent more than a decade correcting a misconception that where farmhouse brewers in Scandinavia and the Baltic used spices, the spice most often used was gale (bog myrtle). Now, he’s written a substantial academic paper on the subject and, thankfully, a slightly plainer summary of the key points on his blog:

Today the database has 2490 individual accounts, totalling 11,561 pages of archive documents, and recording 43,115 data points. (The data covers much more than just what herbs were used.) I keep adding more and more data, and that made me constantly delay writing the paper on spice use, because I knew it would get better if I just waited a bit. Eventually I started wondering, “how long does it really make sense to wait?” I knew I’d eventually have to publish, and when I passed 1000 accounts describing spice use I told myself that now the time had come… There are quite a few surprises in the data. One is how few people used no spices (1-3%). But perhaps the biggest surprise is how consistent the answers are from country to country. Only a single spice, bitter orange, is reported only from one country. And the number of spices in wide use is very low. Only three spices are reported used by more than 5% of accounts! These are hops (well, of course), juniper (no surprise), and alder. Yes, alder, the tree.

Breaking away from his ‘two pubs’ format Mark Higgins has given us a portrait of The Pocket, a much-hyped London pub that we’ve yet to get to:

The Pocket’s only been open since last year, sibling to the half decent Southampton Arms. Aside from the bars being mirror images (on the left here, the right there) they’ve much in common. On top of the dark wood panelling there’s loads of old pub ashtrays. Like when people used to hang plates on the wall, then get shirty when you tried to eat off them… It’s a long trek down to the toilets, a Victorian version of what Wetherspoons would later come to bless us with. Red pipes, tiles, and a sense of being inside, outside and upstairs all at the same time. No AI has been used in the making of this pub quiz poster.

Finally, from BlueSky, snapshots of somewhere we will visit one day…

Back at Pilsner Urquell today. Ive probably been here 40 times and I can honestly say the beer from the wooden barrels has never tasted better.

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— Evan Rail (@evanrail.bsky.social) 23 October 2026 at 11:59

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 24 October 2026: Pen Mari originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

We’ll start with beer scoring which came up in conversation when we bumped into Bridget, one of Jess’s pals from the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) Bristol and District Ladies group, in the pub.

As we were finishing our pints and preparing to crawl on, she asked us a simple question: do we score the beers we drink in the pub? And if not, why not?

It was a genuine attempt to understand what might be holding people back from doing this when the data is so valuable to CAMRA, and informs decision making for the annual Good Beer Guide book.

We confessed that we could count the number of times we’ve ever scored beers on one hand and then reflected on our reluctance.

Ray’s explanation was something like this: “When we’re in the pub we’re usually too busy chatting and debating to do our homework.”

Jess said: “It’s another app, isn’t it? We don’t want to be looking at our phones.”

What’s this post all about? We wrote a separate newsletter for about a decade but retired it earlier this year. Now, we do a monthly newsletter style post here on our blog and share the link on BlueSky and Mastodon. We also recommend setting up an RSS feed reader to keep track of blogs; we use Feedly.

Bridget asked if we’d tried scoring since the system was changed from numerical (rate your pint from 1 to 5) to a descriptive scale that ranges from undrinkable to excellent.

We have not but we agreed that it might make it more accessible.

One perceived flaw with the new system is the loss of half-point scoring options but, actually, that might be a feature rather than a bug, forcing people off the fence and making it less tempting to give everything 2.5 or 3.5.

Bridget also made the point that scores for less-visited, out-of-the-way pubs are especially helpful.

This made us think of The Langton which has consistently excellent cask ale, even if the range is limited and unchanging, and despite its suburban location.

We doubt The Langton will ever win district pub of the year but CAMRA members might want to know that it exists in case they find themselves out this way and feeling thirsty.

We also learned from Bridget that the number of individual scores a pub receives is significant and, yes, of course it is, now we think of it. In every other context you’d trust a 4.3 star average rating based on 30 reviews more than you’d trust a 5 star rating based on a single review.

We can’t guarantee we’ll be scoring every pint of cask ale we drink – it’s another bloody job to do in lives already overwhelmed with thousands of little admin tasks.

But we are going to make an effort to score pints that surprise us, one way or the other, especially in pubs that aren’t on The Circuit.

Was cask Vintage Ale on really as great as it seemed in the moment?

Jess was fortunate enough to stumble across cask Vintage Ale (Fuller’s (Asahi)) at the Mad Bishop & Bear at Paddington Station in London last week.

Actually, “stumbled across” isn’t quite accurate. John Keeling (ex-head brewer at Fuller’s) shared a list of pubs that were getting a barrel or more on BlueSky. Jess noted with excitement that the MB&B was one of them and that she just happened to be planning to be in London at the right time.

Even with the knowledge that there was a more than zero chance of the stars failing to align, her heart still skipped a beat when she saw the proudly austere pump clip in real life.

She ordered a tentative half to start with, partly because it’s 8.4%, partly because she remembered people talking about the year when the casks weren’t great, and partly because it’s an expensive beer to take a punt on.

After posting the requisite pictures for (a) poor Ray back home and (b) social media, she got stuck in. It had a strong pear drop aroma. There was lots of fruit in the flavour, predominantly plum and cherry, with a layer of toffee. There was a good earthy bitterness to finish, just on the right side of earthy. But there was something a little unfinished about it, as if lots of competing flavours trying to get out, or hadn’t quite melded together. Perhaps it needs to settle into a more rounded form.

Like drinking a favourite Belgian beer on tap, it’s exciting as a novelty. But you wonder if the method of dispense actually does it any favours if it’s designed primarily for bottle, and to mature in said bottle for months or years. It would be fascinating to try it in cask after it had been on for a few days but we’re unlikely to ever get that chance because of the buzz that surrounds it.

Anyway, this makes it sound like it wasn’t a great experience, and it absolutely was. It was special enough to decide to get a later train in order to drink another pint, and to get home an hour later. It would have been special enough to detour in London to seek it out, in fact, and we’ll remember that in future years. And it was definitely special enough to make us order a few bottles to mature at home for the first time in a while.

On the blog in September and October 2026

This little bit of admin that we used to do on the blog, then on the newsletter, and now on the blog again, seems to be useful to people who only check in with us every now and then. We often get new comments on these old posts from people who missed them the first time round.

Last month, we posted about the flood of low quality beer- and pub-related apps and websites being enabled by artificial intelligence (AI). Since posting that, we’ve continued to receive emails from people who are excited about slick-looking but ultimately pointless, soulless projects in the same vein.

We continued to write up our recent trip to Czechia with notes on a stop in Strasbourg on the way back, where we found a pub we particularly liked. A member of staff at that pub read the post and left a nice comment, which was lovely.

We wrote an account of how we’ve found ourselves drinking more alcohol-free beer and even engaging in so-called ‘zebra striping’. There were a few dissenting comments on this one and we think it probably prompted this from Tandleman, at least in part.

Last week, we wondered what the point of the pub sofa might be, and where it might have come from. Most of the comments, on the blog and on BlueSky and Mastodon, supported our reading: it’s a 1980s and 1990s thing and it was about softening the edges of the pub. Phil Mellows shared some particularly good intel suggesting that one pub designer in particular might deserve a large part of the credit/blame for Chesterfields appearing in pubs.

There were also the usual Saturday link round-ups and, on Patreon, follow-up posts on each of those with further commentary and bonus links. You can now get access to our Patreon posts for a year for a one-off payment of about £20, if you want to do the equivalent of buying us a couple of pints each.

Instead of a newsletter for October 2026… Beer scoring and vintage ale originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

First, a bit of news about the revival of an old brewing brand: Allsopp’s IPA is a cask ale apparently ‘inspired’ (yes, we know) by an 1822 recipe. There’s something romantic about these old brands – names you know from tin signs in museums and perhaps the occasional stained-glass window in a well-preserved pub. Allsopp’s has the advantage of the involvement of an actual Allsopp and has its beers brewed by a trusted name, Kirkstall. Do we think this beer is really, in any meaningful sense, historic? Of course not. But will we get a thrill out of ordering a pint of Allsopp’s IPA if we come across it in a pub? Certainly.

When we saw Evan Rail in Prague during the summer a theme of our conversation was the increasing availability of lighter beers with lower alcohol content. Now, for Craft Beer & Brewing, he’s written about this trend:

Countries with long brewing traditions tend to stick with what works—until, eventually, the ground shifts… For centuries, people in the Czech lands consumed far more 10°P than 12°P lager—the desítka often being 4 percent ABV, while dvanáctka is around 5 percent. Over the past few years, however, those longstanding preferences have flipped, and the stronger pale lagers are now outselling what once were the daily drinkers… And at the same time, a new trend is emerging: highly hopped lagers brewed at 7°P or 8°P, generally ending up with an ABV in the neighborhood of 3 percent. More Czech brewers are introducing these lower-strength beers and finding a receptive audience.

Ron Pattinson at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins has made an argument for 1880 to 1914 as ‘the Golden Age of UK brewing’. He’s got plenty of reasons for saying this, but is open to debating the question:

Do I really believe it was? Sort of. And I certainly wouldn’t be unhappy if a local pub starting selling a beer range from the period. But I’m still reluctant to unequivocally state that it was the best ever period. I’m sure many would disagree… The points in favour… 1. A wide range of strengths was available… While average strength was over 5% ABV, there were beers that were significantly weaker. Down as low as 2,5% to 3%, at least in some parts of the country. And, at the other end, there were beers as strong as 11% ABV. And plenty of 8% ABV and more… 2. A wide range of styles was available… In an Edwardian London pub, for example, the following draught beers were available: X Ale Mild, Porter, Pale Ale, Stout, Burton Ale, Strong Burton Ale (in the winter)…

At Daft Eejit Brewing Andreas Krennmair has written about the rebirth of the Austrian hop-growing industry after World War II and its reliance on a hop whose name might, at first glance, suggest German roots:

By 1954, hop production seemed to have grown dramatically: from 80,000 plants on 16 hectares, 190 Zentner (= 19 tons) of hops could be harvested, and the expected harvest for the following year was 25 to 27 tons. By that time, the hop growing trials were conclusive, and one English hop variety turned out to be particularly suitable for Mühlviertel, as it was quite resistant against hop diseases at the time… This English hop variety was Malling, which originated in England, and is still grown in Austria nowadays. In fact, it’s the only country where it’s still grown. In 2024, I identified Malling with Malling Mid-Season, but now I’m not so sure anymore where I got that information from or whether it was an educated guess on my end. Malling Mid-Season would make sense, as the variety was trialed in England in the 1940s, and was found to be unharmed by mosaic disease, and resistant to downy mildew.

On Substack, at Enjoying Pubs, Mark Higgins has been to Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire where he visited two places that are not pubs:

Vocation & Co. is opposite the Rochdale Canal, housed in a weathered building with pointed Gothic windows and ivy crawling unrequested up the sides. Inside, it’s a stark contrast – pale wood, white walls, and vegetation that toes the line… The twenty taps behind the bar confirm my suspicions that this may, in fact, be a brewery taproom. Turn your back and you could just as easily be in a coffee shop, were it not for the mural of a cartoon mascot wielding a pint… A quiz happens every week, and there are waist-level hooks to put your bag or coat on. They’re just nowhere near the bar.

This is an interesting reminder of the fact that, though the traditional pub might feel endangered, types of drinking venue that feel pub-adjacent are increasingly common.

Franz D. Hofer has made an attempt to illuminate Zoigl beer culture by speaking to a couple of his fellow obsessives, including Jack Anderton from The European Beer Guide who provides these interesting insights:

I love that Zoigl is tied up with a genuine folk culture rather than being a highly commercialised and commodified entity. A lot of the produce is of local origin (or even produced by the families themselves as their day job), which gives it all a strong regional flavour. It is the only area of Germany I can remember being sat with other German day-trippers who were equally uncertain about the format! … Most Zoiglstuben are not lavishly designed but homely furnished, often with wood bench seats or sturdy communal tables. The sense of pubbyness is strong. People at one table can be eating dinner while people at another table are there to catch-up, to play cards, share stories and jokes over a few beers. The groups span the generations too, a crucial element for a vibrant pub.

Finally, from BlueSky, a Zoigl chaser…

More Zoigl-ing today in the Oberpfalz.  I'm not sure how it has taken 10 years of living in Germany for me to visit this region.

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— Ben Palmer (@johnzee7.bsky.social) 11 October 2026 at 18:26

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 17 October 2026: Nutkin’s Last Stand originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

Pub sofas are generally big, squishy, and covered with leather.

They’re at the edge of the room beside the fireplace, or under a painting of, say, a horse, or a blackboard advertising upcoming events.

There might be a low coffee table, or an end table or two, for the placing of drinks. Sometimes, two sofas will face each other, or there might be a matching armchair.

We’re not fans of sofas in pubs. We sink into them, they make us drowsy, and they make us feel as if we’re at home. Not in the sense of homeliness; as in, why did we bother coming out?

It’s not even as if they’re usually especially comfortable. You’ll see people perched on the edge of the cushions, leaning forward, as if they’re not stopping for long.

Most frequently, people sitting on the sofa in a pub are using it as a sort of waiting area, hoping that a proper table becomes available soon.

What we’re wondering is, were they always there, these great lumps of useless soft furniture? Our gut feeling is that they appeared in the 1990s and 2000s as part of the general middle-classing of pubs.

That’s certainly when we remember first noticing them, at pubs in places like Brixton and Hackney, where someone might be DJing ‘chilled out beats’ to go with the Sunday Roasts.

Let’s test that hypothesis with a little research.

Is there evidence of sofas in pubs before the 1990s?

Of course our hypothesis is proven wrong within ten minutes of doing any research.

We often refer to a wonderful book called The Planning and Equipment of Public Houses by Francis W.B. Yorke, published by the Architectural Press in 1949. It’s a practical manual for how to build, set up and run a pub, and offers a (belated) snapshot of the interwar scene.

In a section about how to furnish a pub, Yorke writes:

Superior rooms, particularly rest rooms, should be provided with settees.

In this context ‘rest room’ isn’t American for ‘bog’ and elsewhere in the book Yorke calls it “a ladies’ rest room” and says it should be “furnished with settees and a table for periodicals”. He specifies that this type of room is usually found in “the larger roadside inn”.

This is all very specific, though, and Yorke doesn’t recommend sofas/settees for any other type of room in a pub, including lounges, where he only recommends “loose furniture” and says: “Tables should be small and seats comfortable.”

There’s also this from the Western Morning News for 18 June 1924, about The Queen’s Head in Plymouth, Devon:

The entrance is unusually large for such a house, and once across the threshold one has to pause to take in the tasteful layout of the interior… Large red tiles form an Old English floor, and all around the room are placed oldfashioned settees, such as can be found in many a Devonshire farmhouse. These have slightly sloping backs and Sheraton legs. In front of the settees are placed dark stained oak tables.

Now, we’re not experts in the history and design of the sofa (although writing blog posts like this can easily send you down the rabbit hole) but that doesn’t quite sound like the type of plump and padded sofa we’ve got in mind. As far as we can tell, it’s more like a bench, only not bolted down.

Another Architectural Press book, Inside the Pub by Maurice Gorham and H. McG. Dunnett, published in 1950, includes numerous photos of pubs, including some very smart ones. None of them have sofas.

There is, however, an illustration by Gordon Cullen of an ideal “Lounge Bar or Cosy” which does feature something that, to our eyes, look distinctly like proper, upholstered, comfy sofas.

But looking through the many photos of post-war pubs that we’ve scanned and shared here on the blog, we can’t see any free-standing sofas. The closest it gets is the occasional padded bench, apparently fixed to the wall – and even those are quite rare.

A third Architectural Press book, The Traditional English Pub by Ben Davis, published in 1981, puts a capper on this discussion, because he has no time at all for “Reclining chairs” (armchairs), never mind sofas. They are, he says, “ill-adapted for conversation in any room where the sound level is high”. His general feeling is that pub furniture should be small, with tables just big enough to hold 6 pints of beer and chairs with just enough space for a single bum.

We think we can say at this point that, yes, historically there were occasionally sofas or settees in pubs, but they were pretty unusual.

Plastic plants and sofas

Here’s something handy from the Kentish Express from 10 June 1993 in which Digby Kennard attempts to sum up what happened to pubs in the 1980s:

Out went dominoes, strippers, meat raffles, cabaret acts and half of mild in the corner snug. In came video screens, disco lights, fake palm trees, sofas and pina coladas on the patio.

This is fascinating because it connects sofas with something similar to – but not quite the same as – the gentrification of the pub. It’s the same trend that John Sullivan was satirising in the yuppie-era episodes of Only Fools and Horses when Del Boy forsakes The Nags Head for the wine bar.

On 17 April 1985, The Liverpool Echo published an interview with Whitbread Merseyside’s property manager Dough Howarth which includes this insight:

When it comes to designing for pubs women use, Doug says: “I would perhaps use some pastels and softer furniture, like sofas.”

We found several promotional stories about pub refurbishments from the late 1980s which make a point of mentioning the installation of sofas as a selling point. For example, there’s a piece headlined‘Dream pub is a reality’ from The Sussex Express 4 April 1986: “Festoon blinds adorn the windows and sumptuous sofas are placed around one of the open fires.” Sumptuous! We’re definitely getting into squishy territory here.

One rather critical piece, from The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer for 19 June 1990, is headlined ‘Shock of the nouveau pub’ and expresses dismay that, in refurbishing a pub in Mexborough “Tetleys have gone for the pink sofas with plates and prints effect”.

We reckon we can conclude from all this that by the start of the 1990s, if you were refurbing any larger pub you might well pop in a sofa or two. We also think it’s probably fair to say that this represented the ‘loungification’ of the pub as a whole.

What job is the pub sofa doing?

Researching this, we’ve developed a theory about one useful function of the pub sofa: softening the edges of pubs that, throughout the 20th century, lost much of their character.

Partitions were bashed out to create larger spaces, with snugs and lounges disappearing in the process. Historic fixtures and fittings were torn out or covered up. Ornate decoration was replaced by clean minimalism.

Eventually, attempts were made to rectify this by giving pubs elaborate themes or re-Victorianising them. But the former came to seem naff pretty quickly, and the latter became more difficult as the supply of genuine antiques dried up. (See: reproduction Britannia tables.)

In this context, a big leather sofa with deep buttons became an easy, affordable way of adding instant ‘production value’. They implied a touch of luxury, despite their impracticality, in the same way gilded signs, cut glass, elaborate ironwork and wood panelling made 19th century pubs feel like palaces. And they perhaps evoke the textures of the good quality padded bench seating that went into a skip decades ago.

It’s a particularly chunky form of greebling, if you like, to go with the horse brasses and faux-vintage Reader’s Digest books purchased by the metre.

Perhaps they also helped to fill dead spots. Back in 1981, Ben Davis was concerned with packing people into pubs and maximising the use of space. By the 1990s, the narrative had switched and the great worry was that pubs didn’t have enough customers.

The pub sofa is out

In 2026, pub sofas feel like a hangover. There are a few around in Bristol, especially in pubs that pride themselves on having a laidback atmosphere.

At The Old Stillage near us, for example, there are a couple of sofas in one corner of the bar that create a sort of replica of the lounge in a stoner flatshare.

But if in the 1980s and 1990s a refurb was an opportunity to pop a sofa in, in the 2020s a refurb is when you whip them out.

What is the purpose of the pub sofa? originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog