Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got expired beer, closed taprooms and anti-Kindle sentiment.
First, news from Cornwall, where the 2011 takeover of Sharp’s by Molson Coors has reached its inevitable conclusion with the closure of the brewery at Rock and production of cask Doom Bar moving to Hartlepool in the North East of England. To be fair, 15 years is a good old time for a brewery to persist after being taken over. But now Doom Bar – a dying brand as far as we can tell – really has no claim whatsoever on Cornishness, even tangentially.
For VinePair Aaron Goldfarb has written a piece that highlights how craft beer culture has changed in the past decade, focusing on the utter lack of value in ‘rare beers’ hoarded by collectors:
In the early-2010s, [Wes Leslie] had begun collecting barrel-aged beers, buying rare releases when he worked at Speakeasy, grabbing other cool bottles he saw when he hit specialty beer stores in town, like the famed (and now closed) City Beer Store in San Francisco… “I just thought it’d be like fun to have a little cellar,” Leslie tells me. And by “cellar,” he meant some bottles tucked under his bar. “Then the years passed and I just sort of fell out of love with beer. I became more of a cocktail guy. Then it was just like, I’ve sat on them so long, I don’t even like beer anymore.”… Thus, the expired craft beer party where Leslie and several other friends — many former craft beer nuts themselves who had fondly enjoyed the beers when they were fresh in the previous era — tasted through a few dozen over-aged bottles… Though Leslie found all the beers still interesting, and some better than others, he ultimately agreed they had aged way too long and were now “kinda disgusting.”… At least they were no longer in his life.
At Pellicle Matthew Curtis makes the case for Manchester’s Café Beermoth as one of the world’s greatest bars:
This feeling is pulled into focus when I travel home from Maine to Manchester, and arrive at Beermoth’s door once again. Before approaching the bar and deciding what to order, I find myself pausing for a moment to take in the space and soak up some atmosphere. I consider that, before my travels, I might’ve taken the existence of this place for granted because of how close to home it is, and how familiar it has become… I realise then that Café Beermoth isn’t just as good as Novare Res, or any of the bars I mentioned earlier. It’s better. If I could only visit one more bar in the world for the rest of my life, this would be it. And that’s because it has one thing going for it beyond every other beer destination, or indeed any other bar, I’ll ever visit: It feels like home.
We always enjoy it when people put forward an argument in favour of a particular beer or venue, especially one that’s arguably somewhat overlooked. We’ll share more thoughts on this, and on Beermoth in particular, in the footnotes post on Patreon that accompanies this round up.
Dermot Kennedy was a student in Sheffield in the 1970s and has been back to explore the city with his Pub Gallery hat on, looking at the pubs as historic buildings, as functioning boozers, and as repositories of personal memory:
The Hallamshire House was in the Beer/Pub news recently because of a remarkable story about a 1970s pub sign. The sign found its way to the apartment of an American couple in New York who gave it to their new English neighbours. The English couple moved back home and hung it on their wall for several more years before they decided to ask the Hallamshire House if they wanted it back. They did and the sign now hangs on the wall of the lounge as shown in the photo above right… The story caught my attention because the Hallamshire was my local when I was a student in Sheffield in the late 1970s when the sign was probably hanging outside the pub. We always met in the snug on the left and I managed to track down a photo of a group of us there… with some fine 1970s haircuts and moustaches… The 1930s Ward’s art deco window (like those in the Riverside) is still there and there’s another pair in the front tap room.
From Brussels Eoghan Walsh reports on the closure of the Brussels Beer Project bar (not taproom) on Rue Dansaert, and the small brewery housed in it:
Beer would be served until 12 December, they announced, with the shop closing on New Year’s Eve. I was in the supermarket when I saw the email arrive in my inbox and read the headline, and let out an involuntary yelp in the middle of the cereal aisle. It’s hard to exaggerate what a seismic event the place was when it opened in 2015. It was not the first brewery with a bar attached in Brussels… Here though was a real life, purpose-built taproom, of the kind that Brussels beer drinkers might have visited on trips to London or Berlin. And it was all done in typical Brussels Beer Project style: big lights, bright colours, transgressive beer styles, with the bar’s – and the brewery’s – mantra painted in big white letters on the wall: “Leave the abbey. Join the playground”. It was a place that made us provincial beer drinkers feel cosmopolitan, part of a wider, global community.
It’s easy to romanticise pub life, observes Adrian Tierney-Jones, that most Romantic of beer writers, sharing notes on some recent pub visits:
One more pub, a pint of porter, a bit tired, an ale house I am told, conversation is king here I am also told, as well as cash (yawn) and no phones. ‘Out with a couple of mates for beers, we’ve been allowed out,’ I hear and I am reminded that I often think that there is an innate conservatism amongst some cask beer drinkers. They might vote Labour or Lib-Dem but sometimes I often think when overhearing conversations that a certain kind of cask beer drinker remains conservative in their thinking and pub habits. As I sit there reading my Kindle a man goes by and says you shouldn’t really be doing that as it is a phone free pub and I wonder sometimes that I am guilty of gilding the lily when it comes to pub life.
Finally, from YouTube, James Wright, who has made it his mission to set the record straight on which pub can actually claim to be the oldest in England, visits The George Inn at Norton St Philip in Somerset:
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 3 October 2026: Ludwig originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog
