Category: Shakespeare’s Local

| Beer By Design, Book Club, Books, Craft - An Argument, Hops & Glory, Man Walks into a Pub, Miracle Brew, Pie Fidelity, Shakespeare’s Local, The Apple Orchard, The Pub: A Cultural Institution, Three Sheets to the Wind

Introducing the Pete Brown Online Beer Book Club!

Most people who follow me online do so because they enjoy my books. So I thought I’d organise a beer book club on Zoom to revisit my backlist.

I’ve largely enjoyed Zoom events – I’m lucky, I haven’t had to do too many during the day at work, so they’ve remained a bit of a treat. I’ve also spoken to people at online beer events who actually prefer these chats to meeting up in real life – either because they can get to them more easily and cheaply, or because they feel more comfortable attending from the safe space of their home. I can’t wait to do physical events again, but even when we’re back at pub gigs and festivals, I still plan to both attend and run events online in addition to IRL.

Last week, I pushed an idea out on social media – what if I do a Zoom book club?  Each session, we focus on one book from my backlist. I do a talk or presentation about it, then open it up to a Q&A. After we get to the end of the formal bit, if anyone wants to stay on and chat longer, we can. It got a great response, so here we go.

I’ll be going through the books in chronological order, starting with Man Walks into a Pub on 28th April. I’m charging a small ticket price of £3.50, and tickets are on sale now.

Obviously, we thought it might be nice idea to do this with a drink in hand. You don’t have to drink through the talk, but you may well want to.

My intention is to link up with an online retailer and try to come up with some kind of offer for event attendees. I want to try to make these, in an idea world, bespoke cases that fit with the theme of the book. 

For Man Walks into a Pub, I have the perfect case ready to go, with a special offer for event attendees that’s a bit complicated, but very good. I’ve done a series of cases with Beer52 for a Master Beer Taster qualification. There are four cases in total, covering the classic beer styles associated with four great brewing powerhouses: the UK and Ireland, Germany, Belgium, and the USA. Each case comes with a short book covering the history, beer styles, quirks and trivia of brewing in that country. The UK case makes the perfect accompaniment to Man Walks into a Pub and is available here.

Beer52 would like to support this project but are not set up to give a discount on this case specifically. However, if you buy a ticket for any Book Club event, you’ll be given codes for some great discounts on other Beer52 stuff.

Here’s my provisional schedule for all the events. I’ll update details on this blog post as we go, and also post them on the events page of this website. In case you’re not familiar with my full backlist, the links on the book titles below take you to more information on each of my books.

Man Walks into a Pub – Wednesday 28th April, 7pm. Beers in association with Beer52. Tickets on sale now.

Three Sheets to the Wind – Wednesday 5th May, 7pm. Beers in association with Hop Hideout. Tickets on sale now.

Hops & Glory – Wednesday 12th May, 7pm. Specially curated range of IPAs available from Best of British Beer, available to everyone, but with a discount for ticket holders. Tickets on sale now.

Shakespeare’s Local – Wednesday 19th May, 8pm. (later start tome due to another event.) The story of the George Inn, Southwark. Ticket holders can claim 10% off a specially curated range of London craft beers, put together in association with Best of British Beer. Event tickets on sale now.

World’s Best Cider – Wednesday 26th May, 7pm. With special guest, my co-author and ace cider photographer Bill Bradshaw. We’ve put together a range of ciders to accompany the event with Hop Hideout. Event tickets on sale now.

The Pub – A Cultural Institution – Wednesday 2nd June, 7pm. 250 pubs lovingly reviewed, chiefly in terms of their atmosphere. For this, we’ve put together a range that evoke a typical (but good) pub bar, with Best of British Beer. Tickets on sale now.

The Apple Orchard – Wednesday 9th June, 7pm. My celebration of this overlooks, magical fruit.

Miracle Brew – Wednesday 16th June, 7pm. The natural history astonishing stories behind the four main ingredients of beer. There’s a range of beers put together with Bath Road Beers. Tickets on sale now.

Pie Fidelity – Wednesday 23rd June, 7pm. My exploration of nine different classic British dishes, and why they deserve two be celebrated. Tickets on sale now. Accompanying range of beers put together by Bath Rd Beers, with a 10% discount for ticket-holders.

Craft: An Argument – Wednesday 30th June, 7pm. My lockdown book about why the term ‘craft beer’ is completely undefinable, hopelessly misunderstood, and absolutely essential. Tickets on sale now. Accompanying range of beers put together by Bath Rd Beers, with a 10% discount for ticket-holders.

Beer By Design – Wednesday 6th July, details TBC. My visual celebration of the evolution of and recent revolution in how beer is sold to us on the shelf. Drinks offer still being finalised. Tickets on sale now.

I’ll probably play around with the format, maybe invite guests, and will always intend to have some kind of special offer on a beer or cider tie-up. Hope to see you there!

Have you checked out my Patreon? Among other benefits, all Patrons at £3 or above receive 25% off any tickets I sell via Eventbrite. Subscription starts from just £1. Sign up here.

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| Books, Hops & Glory, Man Walks into a Pub, Miracle Brew, Pie Fidelity, Shakespeare’s Local, The Apple Orchard, The Pub: A Cultural Institution, Three Sheets to the Wind

Father’s Day Presents for People Who Like Beer

Many of my books were originally published around this time of year specifically because publishers thought people would buy them for Father’s Day. They weren’t wrong. If you’re stuck for a small gift, here’s a brief recap.

Every edition of every book so far. Gonna need a bigger shelf…

I’ve always tried to write for a general audience rather than an audience of fellow beer geeks (though I hope they enjoy my books too.) I use beer as a jumping-off point, a vehicle, to explore wider themes. When I do signing events, I’d say at least half of the books I’m asked to sign are for the dads, brothers and husbands of the people buying them. I must stress that the women who have read them have really enjoyed them too, but I’m definitely a bit typecast as someone who writes for blokes who are difficult to buy for and don’t read all that much, but enjoy a beer-based yarn.

So with Father’s Day approaching on Sunday, here’s a recap. The links go to my individual pages about each book that give more detail, a bit of background and some quotes from reviews.

For the Dad who enjoys starting conversations with “I bet you didn’t know…”

Man Walks into a Pub is still my best-selling book. I called it a “sociable history” of beer because I wanted to write it like a long conversation in the pub and so it is, in the words of one reviewer, “full of bar-room bet-winning facts”. Miracle Brew is similarly full of insane facts but with a more specialised focus on what beer is made from. The title happened because of the sheer number of times I thought, “Whaaaat? No way!” as I was researching it.

For the Dad who prefers cider to beer

Bill Bradshaw and I wrote the first ever world guide to cider, and as far as I’m aware it’s still the only one. We put so much creativity into the book – Bill’s photos are utterly gorgeous – that we had none left for the title. So it’s called World’s Best Cider. There’s also quite a bit about cider in The Apple Orchard, which is not really book about cider even though some people think it is, because if I’m going to write about apples…

For the Dad who’s into British history

The history of beer and pubs is the history of Britain itself. Man Walks into a Pub got me into way more historical research than I had realised, and I wrote not just about how beer and pubs developed, but why – in order to understand them, I needed to know the context surrounding them. The same goes for IPA specifically – why did beer go on a six-month sea voyage to India? Why were the British in India in the first place? That’s what I explored in Hops & Glory. Finally for the history buff, if you’re watching A House Through Time at the moment, fancy seeing the same idea for a pub? Shakespeare’s Local is six centuries of history seen through one South London pub, in which in all likelihood Shakespeare used to drink.

For the Dad who loves a bit of natural history

The nature writing section of your local bookshop, the bit I like to all “bees and trees,” is big business right now, and I realised it is also a big part of the story of beer and cider. The Apple Orchard and Miracle Brew are very similar books: one about apples and how and where they grow, which covers how they are made into cider, and the other about hops, barley, water and yeast, and the incredible story behind each one before they even get to the brewery.

For the Dad who loves a good fry-up or fish and chips

Pie Fidelity is essentially the same idea as Man Walks into a Pub, but written about overlooked and unfairly maligned classic British dishes rather than beer. It’s my most personal book, full of memoir, food history and eating. It also happens to be my wife Liz’s favourite book of mine, and not just because it’s the one with the least stuff about beer in it.

For the Dad who enjoys a laugh

Most of my books have a good degree of humour in them, even if they aren’t ‘comedy’ books. Man Walks into a Pub has some good gags in among the history, but without doubt Three Sheets to the Wind is the funniest book I’ve written. Mainly because lots of funny stuff happened while I was researching it, and I succeeded in getting most of it down.

For the Dad who’s simply missing propping up the bar

The Pub: A Cultural Institution is a guide to 250 of the best pubs in Britain. It’s a coffee table book, and as such it’s full of gorgeous pictures. It looks incredibly vogueish just now, because the convention around these things is that you take photos of empty pubs, so the pictures have never looked more like pubs do at the time I’m writing this. But as well as being a coffee table book, I’ve also tried to provide little vignettes of what makes each pub, and pubs in general, so special.

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| Pubs, Shakespeare’s Local, Southwark, The George Inn, The Tabard

Shakespeare’s Real Local?

A tantalising new scrap of evidence about the bard’s drinking habits has emerged.

The Tabard Inn, Borough High Street

When I wrote Shakespeare’s Local I upset some readers because I failed to prove the contention in the title of the book – that William Shakespeare drank in the George Inn in Borough High Street.

At a time when most people were illiterate, very little got written down. Information about Shakespeare’s life is so scant there’s not even really any evidence of where he lived when he was in London, let alone where he enjoyed a pint. When I wrote the book, there was not one single mention of Shakespeare ever having been recorded as being in any pub, ever.

And yet we know he did live in London for many years, even if we don’t know exactly where. And we know that unless he was a very unusual man for his time, if he lived in London he went to the pub in London. Because everyone did. Beer was safer to drink than water, and you had to go to the pub and get it. And if you wanted to sit back and relax with friends, there was nowhere else for most people to do that other than the pub.

In the absence of evidence, you can only make informed guesses – just because there’s no proof of something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, so you have to construct the most likely scenario based on the soundest possible assumptions.

My argument in the book was that Shakespeare definitely worked in Southwark, where the Globe Theatre was, so it’s likely he lived close by – most historians believe he did. If he lived and worked in Southwark, he would have visited Southwark’s pubs. We know he was aware of the White Hart pub on Borough High Street, because he set a scene in one of his plays there. The White Hart stood next to the George, so he must have been aware of the George too. The George and its immediate neighbours were the most famous pubs in London at the time, which we know thanks to the meticulous work of John Stow, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. It’s thought Shakespeare lived in the area for ten years. If he was going to pubs most days, it’s far more likely that he did drink in the George at least occasionally than that he didn’t.

On this, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (and the 452nd anniversary of his birth) I would love to be able to announce that new evidence has come to light that Shakespeare really did drink in the George. But in all my research on the place, it never quite works out like that.

I was indebted to an American academic called Martha Carlin when I was writing my book. She’s done more research on medieval Southwark than anyone else, and she recently contacted me to tell me that she’s found the first and so far only record of someone claiming to see Shakespeare in a specific pub.

Of course, it’s not the George. It’s the George’s next door neighbour. It always bloody is.

The White Hart stood to the left of the George on Borough High Street. Not only did Shakespeare write about it, Dickens used it as the location of a crucial scene in the Pickwick Papers. To the right of the George stood the Tabard. This was the inn which Chaucer used as the starting point for the Canterbury Tales. At the time he wrote those stories, he could have picked any of several inns lining Borough High Street. He could have chosen the George. Instead he chose its next door neighbour, immortalising the Tabard for ever as the birthplace of English literature.

The three greatest names in English letters, then, each of them associated strongly with the old inns of Borough High Street, each of them making their strongest link with the inns either side of the George.

Now, Martha writes, the words of an anonymous actuary writing in 1643 have been unearthed, describing “Some notes for my Perambulation in and round ye Citye of London for six miles and Remnants of divers worthie things and men”.

The author announces that his survey is intended “only to notice those places and things that have been passed by or littled [sic] mentiond [sic] by those greate Antiquaries that have written of this noble Citye and ye which places are fast ruining as the Tabard Inne and ye many houses of Priesthood old Monuments Halls Palaces and Houses of its greate Citizens and Lords and may be useful to searchers of Antiquitye in time to come.”

The Tabard Inn, like many of London’s great landmarks, is by now falling into ruin – so we learn that the lamenting the passing of great pubs is nothing new.When he gets to the Tabard, our anonymous correspondent writes, “Ye Tabard I find to have been ye resort Mastere Will Shakspear Sir Sander Duncombe Lawrence Fletcher Richard Burbage Ben Jonson and ye rest of their roystering associates in King Jameses time as in ye lange room they have cut their names on ye Pannels.”

So graffiting the pub was nothing new either!
Unfortunately, Shakespeare’s vandalism of the Tabard was lost when the inn burnt down along with the George and the White Hart, in the great fire of Southwark in 1676. All three were rebuilt the following year. The George is the only one that has survived until today.
So the Tabard – already already famous as Chaucer’s Local – now has a far better claim to be Shakespeare’s Local than its neighbour.
But thanks to this find, we now know that Shakespeare really did go to the pub in Borough High Street. Did he and his fellow ‘roysterers’ ever do a crawl of the great inns? Did he graffiti the George as well as the Tabard? Most likely, we’ll never know. The idea of the group of players carving their names into the panels suggests, to me at any rate, that they were regular visitors who wanted to leave their mark. It makes perfect sense that Shakespeare would choose the Tabard because of its associations with Chaucer, placing himself in a great literary tradition. But did he only ever go to the Tabard, and never to the pub next door? I find that hard to believe.
The point is, the George is the only one of those great inns to have survived the coming of the railways. The Tabard, as well as the White Hart, fell into ruin because they were up for sale for years and no one wanted to buy them. By the time the Tabard was finally demolished, it looked like this:
The Tabard, 1870s
The George was the only one of the great inns to escape this fate, the only one that’s still there to write about and to visit. The main reason it did so was thanks to an extraordinary landlady who used every means at her disposal to keep it going as the inns either side were being pulled down – including telling outrageous lies and exaggerations about its associations with Dickens and Shakespeare to attract tourists and build fascination with this last survivor.
Let’s just say I make no apologies for having sympathy with her aim.

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