One thing our recent holiday brought home is that we\u2019re definitely over the urge to visit every brewery or important pub in any given city.<\/strong><\/p>\n In the early days of this blog (it turns 20 next year) we very much had a ticking mentality. This was especially true of Jess who, as you might know, plans and organises most of our expeditions.<\/p>\n With a bit of effort, it was usually possible to track down the beers from every brewery in a given city. Sure, we might have to dash from place to place, and drink slightly more than we wanted to.<\/p>\n And yes, our acquaintance with each brewery might be brief and superficial.<\/p>\n But we could say we\u2019d done<\/em> them.<\/p>\n Of course it was generally easier to do this c.2009 there weren\u2019t three, five, fifteen, twenty new breweries in every town you turned up in. In fact, you\u2019d sometimes be lucky to find one or two.\u00a0<\/p>\n When we visited Bristol as capital B Beer Bloggers for the first time it was, as we recall, Bath Ales, Bristol Beer Factory, Zero Degrees and\u2026 that was about it.<\/p>\n What\u2019s 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<\/a> and Mastodon<\/a>. We also recommend setting up an RSS feed reader to keep track of blogs; we use Feedly<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n We often took a similar approach to pubs, drawing up a list of the must-visit venues and whizzing between them.<\/p>\n The problem is, after a while, you start to wonder if you\u2019re actually enjoying yourself. What if the third pub is great but you have to leave it to visit four more, none of which is anywhere near as good?<\/p>\n In recent years, though, we\u2019ve got better at saying: it\u2019s nice here, let\u2019s settle, and let\u2019s throw the wish list on the open fire.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve also got better at:<\/p>\n As we explained on Patreon the other day our \u2018Impressions of\u2026\u2019 format is a deliberate attempt to downplay the completeness and importance of what we write. When we\u2019re in, say, Antwerp for a couple of nights, all we can do is scratch the surface.<\/p>\n Even with multiple trips to some places over the course of decades, our knowledge is still partial and superficial \u2013 and that\u2019s fine. In fact, we like it. Knowing that there are always new-to-us places to drink is part of what keeps us going back to, say, Cologne. Leave yourself wanting more and all that.<\/p>\n In Munich the other day, in search of Augustiner Helles, we asked ourselves an important question: will getting on public transport at this time in the evening to go to a completely different beer garden make us happier? We gambled that it would, and it did.<\/p>\n Our less organised, less thoroughly researched approach doesn\u2019t stop us finding good bars and beers. In fact, we\u2019re often surprised to find that places we thought we\u2019d stumbled upon are, in fact, in all the guides. But feeling as if we\u2019ve discovered them ourselves increases the pleasure enormously.<\/p>\n When we do get into ticking mode these days, it tends to be more about gaining a more complete understanding of the multiple dimensions of the local beer culture. It\u2019s easy to spend time chasing all the craft breweries and taprooms but neglect to drink a pint of the local family brewery bitter in a Victorian pub.<\/p>\n Sometimes, this even extends to wanting to drink the local boring lager, if it\u2019s particularly beloved or historically interesting. It felt important to drink Meteor in Strasbourg and Tennents in Glasgow, for example.<\/p>\n The same goes for visiting whatever the local version of a \u2018normal\u2019 boozer might be.<\/p>\n The other thing is that it\u2019s not all about beer. If we\u2019re in a strange, interesting city, we also want to visit museums, go for walks and look at buildings. Pubs and breweries are one way into understanding the culture of a place but they\u2019ll only get you so far.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing wrong with ticking, though, or with aiming to be comprehensive. If you enjoy it \u2013 or have decided it\u2019s your mission, which might not necessarily be the same thing \u2013 then good for you.<\/p>\n For us, though, there\u2019s a great sense of relief in looking at a list of must-visit venues and saying, \u201cIt\u2019s fine, not this time.\u201d<\/p>\n Ray is always on the lookout for interesting things that are actually old and\/or obscure in charity shops and bookshops and recently came across something interesting in Oxfam Books on Park Street in Bristol.<\/p>\n It was a stack of about 50 copies of Wine and Food: a gastronomical quarterly<\/em> edited by Andr\u00e9 L. Simon.<\/p>\n Ray went through every copy and bought three that had articles or essays about beer or pubs.<\/p>\n The issue for summer 1940 includes a piece by Kenneth Hare called \u2018A Tour of the \u201cLocals\u201d\u2019 which opens like this:<\/p>\n The slogan \u2018Careless Talk May Give Away Vital Secrets\u2019 hangs prominently in our Gloucestershire bar parlours, and the war is not discussed amongst us. This was not formerly so. I remember old Rackham\u2019s reply when, looking up from an alarmist newspaper, a youth observed: \u2018It says here that, with his latest type of \u2019plane, Hitler could reach London in fifteen minutes\u2019. The sturdy old man put down his pint. \u2018And so,\u2019 said he, \u2018a burglar might get into Mr. Hare\u2019s house. But there he meets that bloody bull-dog, and if ever he gets out, he leaves his guts behind him!\u2019 The spirit of the Gloucestershire men is still that of their famous \u2018Die-hards\u2019. But to-day, as we can\u2019t talk of the present, our thoughts revert to the past\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n At the other end of World War II, the issue for winter 1945 includes a piece called \u2018Cake and Ale\u2019 by Reginald Hargreaves which includes this judgement on the quality of cheese, bread and beer in wartime:<\/p>\n \u2026acrid \u2018mousetrap\u2019, self-rationing sawdust and the sort of water-bewitched-and-hops-begrudged swipes that insults the tankard into which it is poured!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The real prize, though, is from the spring 1946 issue. It\u2019s called \u2018Building the New Public House\u2019 and is by Brendan Bernard Williams. It praises the True Temperance League, of which the author\u2019s father was a founder, which promoted moderate drinking rather than total abstinence, and played a significant part in the promotion of the idea of the improved public house:<\/p>\n \u2026those who in the new age will meet and enjoy good drinks and good food in the public house of the future will very largely have to thank (though they probably won\u2019t know it) those public-spirited men and women who a generation ago laid the foundations of the improved public house in days when the idea that a pub need not be and should not be a haunt of dingy depravity was regarded as next door to social heresy. Let us, remembering them, build places for public refreshment that shall be a memorial to their work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n If we ever sort out getting the rights to 20th Century Pub<\/em> back (ugh, admin) and do a revised, expanded edition, this is the kind of thing we might be able to use.<\/p>\n Despite being away for more than two weeks we\u2019ve actually had a fairly productive time on the blog, partly because the holiday gave us fresh stimulus and made us want to write.<\/p>\n We reported on Pult, a particularly interesting bar in Prague<\/a>; we gave our impressions of Brno<\/a>, Czechia\u2019s second city; and of Rosenheim in Upper Bavaria<\/a>. And, finally, last week, we wrote about exploring beer gardens in Munich<\/a>.<\/p>\n Before we went on holiday, we tried to explain why it\u2019s not quite as easy as people might think to \u201cJust open a new pub, then.\u201d<\/a> This was a follow up to an earlier post \u2013 or, rather, to the conversation that rose up around it \u2013 on how people outside the beer and pub bubble don\u2019t believe pubs deserve special treatment<\/a>.<\/p>\n We found a few historical references to the \u201csuper pub\u201d<\/a> and decided to pull on that thread, finding many more uses of that phrase, but with slightly different meanings at different times.<\/p>\n There were also the usual Saturday morning round-ups of good writing about beer and pubs<\/a>, two of them dialled in from hotels on the Continent.<\/p>\n On Patreon, we wrote bonus notes on the beer we drank in Rosenheim<\/a> and why we call those posts \u201cImpressions of\u2026\u201d<\/a>, along with our weekly \u2018Footnotes\u2019 posts<\/a> to accompany news, nuggets and longreads, plus weekly-ish tasting notes<\/a> on the best beers we drank each weekend. You can now sign up for our Patreon for a whole year for about \u00a320 at the lowest tier, if you want to support and encourage what we do.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s it, that\u2019s your lot, until next month.<\/em><\/p>\n Cheers!<\/em><\/p>\n Jess & Ray<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One thing our recent holiday brought home is that we\u2019re definitely over the urge to visit every brewery or important pub in any given city. In the early days of this blog (it turns 20 next year) we very much had a ticking mentality. This was especially true of Jess who, as you might know, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7061981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99734,97133],"tags":[45528,2468,19131,4968],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7061980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletter","category-opinion","tag-45528","tag-catch","tag-newsletter","tag-september"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
![\"Three](\"https:\/\/boakandbailey.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/wine_food_1940s.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nSome recent acquisitions for the library<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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![\"An](\"https:\/\/boakandbailey.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/typewriter-1024x335.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nOn the blog<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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