Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we\u2019ve got news of the passing of a beer blogger, among other things.<\/strong><\/p>\n First, some sad news: Peter Edwardson, AKA the Pub Curmudgeon, has died<\/a>.<\/p>\n His posts featured in these round-ups many times over the years and we corresponded with him many times. He was one of those people who\u2019d been around a long time and seemed to remember everything. Pick up any old edition of CAMRA\u2019s What\u2019s Brewing<\/em> and you\u2019ll probably find a challenging correspondence from Peter on the letters page.<\/p>\n Politically, Peter was on the right, and you\u2019ll see variations on \u201cWe may not have agreed on everything but\u2026\u201d in many of the tributes being paid. Some of his arguments, especially away from beer and pubs, could sometimes be pretty extreme and, frankly, quite maddening. But he was also capable of great lucidity on the subject of what made pubs tick and the challenges they face in the 21st century.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once again, we find ourselves hoping that his blog<\/a> \u2013 a valuable resource with almost 20 years of posts \u2013 is somehow preserved.<\/p>\n As it happens, a debate broke out this week into which the Pub Curmudgeon would have no doubt enjoyed wading. Why don\u2019t young people like cask ale? Does it matter? And, wait, is that actually true?<\/p>\n It started with a somewhat melancholy piece<\/a> by Anthony Gladman<\/strong> at his newsletter, The Glass<\/em>, in which he wonders why we spend so much time fretting about how to get young people into cask ale:<\/p>\n The kid wasn\u2019t wrong, he just liked different things to me. His tastes had nothing to do with me just as mine had nothing to do with him. The only real difference between us, when it came down to it, was that his preferences represented the coming world and mine did not\u2026 It made me think of cask ale \u2014 that glorious, valuable, unique drink to which we in its homeland fail to pay proper heed. It is subtle, delicious, delicate, and increasingly ignored. I am in my 50s now and count myself among its confirmed lifelong fans. Even I think of it partly as an old man\u2019s drink. The kid would think it most assuredly so. If he stopped to think about it at all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This prompted a response by Matthew Curtis<\/strong> on BlueSky, arguing that, actually, there\u2019s plenty of evidence that young people do<\/em> like cask ale and are<\/em> interested in it. The short thread starts here:<\/p>\n Sales of cask Bass have grown nearly 20% this year, and its now sold in over 1000 outlets as opposed to 400 12 months ago. Landlord is #1 by value. Boddington’s was relaunched. Other breweries I speak to are in cask growth: Theakston, Thornbridge, Abbeydale, Siren, Five points\u2026<\/p>\n \u2014 Matthew Curtis (@totalcurtis.bsky.social<\/a>) 11 December 2025 at 11:00<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And publican Hazel Southwell<\/strong> also chipped in<\/a>:<\/p>\n Black Sheep is in the top ten sellers by cask ale and has the administrators in pulling it apart\u2026 the biggest threat to cask ale isn\u2019t a lack of demand, it\u2019s fear from publicans who don\u2019t understand how to handle it and big beer companies killing brands (many built on real ale!)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n For what it\u2019s worth, our impression is that Matthew is right \u2013 cask ale is doing relatively well in 2025, at least in terms of prominence in the better pubs. It\u2019s just that, per Anthony\u2019s first point above, the youngest people drinking it aren\u2019t \u201ckids\u201d, but people in their late twenties or thirties, with jobs and kids. It\u2019s something you mature into, we reckon, and maybe that\u2019s fine.<\/p>\n On a related note, Jeff Alworth<\/strong> at Beervana<\/em> has been pondering taprooms<\/a> and how what many of us still think of as the new-fangled coming thing are, in fact, old hat:<\/p>\n It is becoming clear that a lot of the \u201clessons\u201d the industry absorbed during the Great Expansion were wrong. Flagships were not dead. Hazy IPAs were not going to supplant clear hoppy beers. Erstwhile craft breweries, fueled by national distribution and big beer ownership were not going to become the new Budweisers. And for the purposes of this post, taprooms were not always going attract large audiences merely because they sold beer\u2026 Part of this is a trend thing. During that great expansion, a bunch of related fixtures of craft brewing got white-hot: hazy IPAs packaged in four-packs with bright, geometric designs; ultra-fruity, sweet beers that would attract huge lines; and spare, industrial taprooms. At the time, those taprooms seemed cool and futuristic in their minimalism and were full of 20- and 30-somethings. They were highly specific in the way that white-hot trends get, and that means they perfectly captured a moment. Unfortunately for an industry trying to capture young drinkers today, that moment happened a decade back, when Gen Z were kids on dad\u2019s expeditions to tick off a few more beers on Untappd. And now, for a lot of 20-somethings, taprooms don\u2019t seem cool and futuristic; they have the vaguely cringe feel of dad\u2019s old passions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n At Beer Diary<\/em> Phil Cook<\/strong> has a typically thoughtful analysis of how breweries approach brewing awards as part of their wider marketing strategies<\/a>, by presenting themselves as underdogs:<\/p>\n Whatever Mountain Culture are now, \u201cunderdog\u201d ain\u2019t it. They have earned their successes and I\u2019m still a big fan of a lot of what they do, but this side of them \u2014 continuing to downplay how they\u2019ve changed and claiming the mantle of the brave battler to rally support in a survey of beer drinkers \u2014 is getting ridiculous\u2026 But this kind of campaign is the \u201cnew normal\u201d for the Hottest 100: make a pitch about the general worthiness of your \u201cteam\u201d and direct sympathetic voters towards a specific one of your beers, to maximise its chances; asking some flagship beer to stand in for your support of its brewery, essentially\u2026 \u201cVote for this beer because we\u2019re the longest-surviving indie in the running\u201d or \u201cbecause no local brewery has made the podium before\u201d or \u201cto put this small town on the map (while we awkwardly riff on what its name sounds like in English)\u201d or just plainly \u201cbecause it\u2019s tough being a small brewery and we could use the boost.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n We don\u2019t often include academic papers here (they\u2019re often locked behind paywalls and, when they\u2019re not, they can be heavy going) but one caught our attention this week. It\u2019s about the Spanish craft beer market<\/a> and, between the tables and formulas, there\u2019s a story about what \u2018drink local\u2019 means in practice:<\/p>\n The results described above show a profile (Table 2) of Spanish craft and industrial beers as having a slightly high price (4.08 euros) and price-litre (10.21 euros), as well as a moderate alcohol content (6.21\u00b0), packaged either in a bottle or can, in 33 cl or 44 cl format, with an overwhelming majority of Pale Ale style beers (48.30 %) and labelling unrelated to real elements (71.55 %)\u2026 Among these results, it is striking that, despite the existing previous literature that relates the importance of the narrative of craft beers in their local context to increase the sense of place (Ik\u00e4heimo, 2021) and the need to link craft beer to place, creating labels that represent it and are unique (Mathews & Patton, 2016), the sample collected barely identifies 5.96 % (n = 70) of beers whose labelling has some representative and identifiable element of the place of production.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In other words, craft beer in Spain is unanchored from the places where it is brewed; beers tend to have wacky, abstract labelling and names; and most of the production is some form of pale ale. This feels to us like a valid description of the craft beer scenes in quite a few countries \u2013 including, at times, the UK.<\/p>\n It\u2019s interesting partly because that sense of being placeless used to be the complaint levelled at \u2018macro\u2019 beer.<\/p>\n At British Beer Breaks<\/em> Phil Mellows<\/strong> has been reflecting on what \u2018Christmas beer\u2019 means in 2025<\/a>, and how the market has changed:<\/p>\n You\u2019ll see quite a few Christmas cask ales in pubs, though it seems to me not as many as there used to be. Often, they\u2019ll have an ABV of little more than 4%, which isn\u2019t a problem as long as they\u2019ve got the flavour. But some of them fail to distinguish themselves from the kind of ales you might drink all year round. The festive tag is just a marketing thing\u2026 This is the danger. Sticking a bit on tinsel on it and calling it Christmas. The beers we\u2019re looking for here require substance. They need to be special. They have to match the smells and flavours of the season.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Finally, from BlueSky, a public service announcement\u2026<\/p>\n I drank (probably too many) pints of London Porter at the Coach and Horses in Greek Street yesterday, it was absolutely perfect. It might still be on so why not get down there?<\/p>\n [image or embed]<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Will Hawkes (@willhawkes.bsky.social<\/a>) 11 December 2025 at 20:24<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n For more good reading check out <\/em>our Patreon-exclusive<\/em><\/a> \u2018Footnotes\u2019 to this post and <\/em>Alan McLeod\u2019s round up from Thursday<\/em><\/a>. In a controlled way, Stan Hieronymus is also back in the \u2018featured links\u2019 game, highlighting one link and one quote, <\/em>the most recent of which was a corker<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we\u2019ve got news of the passing of a beer blogger, among other things. First, some sad news: Peter Edwardson, AKA the Pub Curmudgeon, has died. His posts featured in these round-ups many times over the years and we corresponded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":342746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137],"tags":[18092,3764,75200,1820,75199,34986,52301],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-342745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beer","tag-bites","tag-december","tag-longreads","tag-news","tag-news-nuggets","tag-nuggets","tag-stollen"],"yoast_head":"\n
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