Category: The Pub: A Cultural Institution

| 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.

| Pubs, The Pub: A Cultural Institution

An Ode to the Pub

Today I was asked by BBC Radio 4 to write and record a short piece for the World At One about pubs, and the news that they are due to reopen on 4th July. If you missed it, or you enjoyed it and want to read over it again, here’s what I said, with an extra intro that was cut for length.

I loved pubs before I could even say the word. 

One of my earliest memories is of being held in someone’s arms in a space that glowed with polished brass. It was also red and green with Christmas decorations, and everyone around me was laughing so hard their cheeks shone too. 

I didn’t know why, but I understood that these people – my parents and their friends – were happier here than I’d seen them anywhere else.  

The British pub is so much more than a place to buy drinks. For a nation that’s famously awkward socially, every aspect of pub life is designed to break down social barriers and bring us together. For much of the last thousand years, the pub is where we’ve socialised with friends, met spouses, celebrated birthdays and weddings, and said goodbye to loved ones.   

The pub is where we play – darts, dominoes, board games, quizzes – and most of the sports we love originated either in the pub or on the village green just outside. 

George Orwell celebrated the pub as part of the informal cultural network that we choose for ourselves rather than having our leisure pursuits chosen from above. 

His 1946 essay, The Moon Under Water, remains the best thing I’ve ever read about pubs, despite spending twenty years trying to write something better. Orwell’s pink china mugs, liver sausage sandwiches and barmaids who call you ‘dear’ may sound archaic now, but the congenial spirit they create – where as a punter you feel not just like a customer, but a stakeholder in the establishment – is still present in ways Orwell would recognise. 

So when pubs were ordered to close on the 20th of March, it felt like Coronavirus was attacking not just our bodies, but our very culture and the bonds that tie us together. We knew it was coming, and on my last visits to the pub, I drank in their everyday routine, their pace and rhythm, as lovingly as I sipped my beer. 

I’ve enjoyed many great beers under lockdown, supporting my local breweries by buying from them direct. But nothing is quite like a freshly poured pint. The weight of the glass, cooling your skin. The bubbles rising. And the first hit at the back of your throat, clearing the dust and cobwebs of the day. 

The only thing that makes this better is being somewhere with others enjoying the same experience, a silent moment of communion with friends you’ve known for years, or even friends you’ve only ever met in your local, knowing that you’re sharing a moment that is simultaneously normal and banal, yet also marvellous to a degree where you might just remember it for the rest of your lives.

You can hear the programme here. I’m on at 42 mins…

| 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.

| Beer, Beer Books, Beer Writing, Books, British Guild of Beer Writers, Journalism, The Pub: A Cultural Institution

Beer Writer of the Year

On Thursday night the British Guild of Beer Writers named me their Beer Writer of the Year, for the third time.

 

I even bought a suit.

It caps an incredible year for me and I’m obviously delighted. But I still wouldn’t recommend three simultaneous book contracts to anyone, and won’t be repeating this trick any time soon.

I won two categories before picking up the overall award. First was Best Writing in Trade Media, for my columns in the Morning Advertiser. Luck always plays a big part in any success, and I think this year I was particularly lucky to have some great stories fall into my lap. The rediscovery by Carlsberg of the earliest generation of modern brewing yeast, and their successful attempt to ‘re-brew’ with it, was a unique event. And my chance to interview the man who invented nitro dispense – the technology that makes Guinness so distinctive and is now being explored by forward-thinking craft brewers – just weeks before his passing was something I’ll always remember. The research for my forthcoming book on beer ingredients also led me to some stories that I could write up as columns without taking anything away from the book.

In case you’re interested, here are links to the pieces wot won it:

 

I also won Best Writing in National Media mainly, I think, for my new book The Pub: A Cultural Institution (which is currently being sold insanely cheaply on Amazon), but I also entered pieces I’ve written for Ferment and Belgian Beer and Food magazines. I’m not the only decent writer in these excellent magazines – if you haven’t done so already, you should do yourself a favour and check them out.

As I said on the night, I owe the success of The Pub to Jo Copestick, a long-standing editor and publisher who specialise in food and drink and design, who has worked with and encouraged most good beer writers out there. We first spoke about the idea for The Pub ten years ago. She plays the long game, and she made this book finally happen. Even though it’s my name on the front I’m only a third of the team. People’s first reaction to it is that it’s a very beautiful book, and that is nothing to do with me and everything to do with Jo and designer Paul Palmer-Edwards at Grade Design. Sitting around the table with these two and being perfectionist about layout after layout was a wonderful working experience.

Having won these two categories, the judges then decided that overall, I was their Beer Writer of the Year.

It’s a trick of the order in which these awards are presented that my two awards were near the end of the evening. Earlier, it had looked like Mark Dredge was going to walk away with the big gong after sweeping Best Food and Drink Writing for his book, Cooking With Beer, and Best Beer and Travel Writing for his book The Best Beer in the World. I really hope this isn’t the start of a trend of publishing multiple books in a year because that way madness lies, but hearty congratulations to Mark for running me so close, and to the winners and runners-up in all the other categories.

Some of the stuff you hear around all awards ceremonies gets so repetitive it sounds platitudinous, but when you’re in the thick of it, phrases like ‘the standard was really high this year’ and ‘the quality of entries continues to improve’ get repeated because they are true. Having won this year, I’ll be chair of the judges next year. I’ve done this twice before. It’s always an interesting task, but the quality of work, often from writers I’ve never previously come across, scares me even as it delights me. No doubt this time next year, I’ll be here writing ‘the standard of entries was very high this year’ and ‘the judge’s decision was an extremely difficult one.’

I already know this will be true. As beer continues to excite greater numbers of people in all walks of life, many who fall in love with beer want to communicate their passion, and more and more of them are very good at it.

For a full list of winners in all categories, and comments from the judges, see the full press release here.

| Books, Events, The Pub: A Cultural Institution, Writing

The Pub – On Tour

My new book on pubs spans the whole of the UK. So it only seems fair to take it back to the places where it was researched.

Still need that elusive Christmas present for that difficult-to-buy-for person? Looking for an evening to kick off Christmas party season? I’m taking my new book (well, one of them) on tour.

 

The Pub is a coffee table, illustrated book that celebrates the unique cultural institution of the British pub. But it’s more than that. The main reason most people choose a pub is because of its atmosphere, but atmosphere is very tricky to write about. I’ve given it the best shot I can.

In these events, I’ll be reading a selection from the fifty short essays in the book that seek to evoke the atmosphere of the best pubs I came across – best in that respect anyway. These are not the best beer pubs or food pubs, nor the most historic or architecturally stunning (though many of them do score highly in these attributes.) They’re the pubs that feel special when you walk in, that feel like home, even if you can’t immediately figure out why.

But it would get dull if I just read out lots of short essays.

So I’ll also be illustrating my talk with a selection of the stunning photography from the book, giving you what I’m told is a fiendishly hard pub quiz to do, holding the Great Crisp Flavour Challenge, and contravening intellectual property rights with my travesty of Bullseye.

These are the dates we managed to fit in before Christmas. There are some glaringly obvious gaps here which I aim to fill in the New Year. (Norwich, Leeds and London being among the main candidates.)

 

These events are in association with Waterstones, who will be selling books at the events, and each pub is, obviously, one that features in the book. Admission is free but tickets need to be booked in advance, and are available from eventbrite.

I had such great times in these places while I was researching the book. Hoping to repeat the experience. See you there.

| Books, Pubs, The Pub: A Cultural Institution

The Pub: A Cultural Institution

The first of three new books from me is out now. Sort of.

My book on pubs is officially released on 18 August, but it’s already been spotted in Foyles and Blackwells.

I was asked to do this book by the publisher – it was a scenario where they came up with the idea and had a shortlist of authors in mind for it. If I’d said no, they would have asked someone else. But I couldn’t say no.

We all know the format of this kind of ‘coffee table’ book. It looks beautiful. It’s not the kind of book you read from cover to cover. You pick it up and flip through it, lingering over the pictures. In some, the text is just there to put gaps between the pictures.

Like my and Bill’s book on cider, I wanted to make this book more than that. It had to be beautiful, it had to be a book you want to buy as a present for anyone who loves pubs. But I also wanted the text to mean something, for it also to be a book you did want to read cover to cover.

So it’s not a book that reviews pubs by the range of beers they have, what the food is like or whether they allow dogs. The internet is a far better place for that. The centre of this book for me are the fifty double page spread reviews of my favourite pubs.

It’s seventy years ago this year since George Orwell wrote The Moon Under Water and said that the single thing that defines a great pub is its atmosphere. So I set myself the task of trying to review pubs by their atmosphere. It’s a difficult task, because atmosphere is intangible, which is why few pub reviewers talk about what remains the single most important criterion by which we judge pubs.

 

I certainly didn’t succeed in reviewing every pub by its atmosphere – some of the reviews lapse into talking about history, location or beer range, although all these factors do contribute to atmosphere. But where I have succeeded, the reviews are short essays on what makes pubs pubs, little stories that pick up on and celebrate the legendary landlord, the role in the community, the eccentricities and legends that separate great pubs from other retail outlets.

As well as these top fifty, there are shorter listings of a further 250 pubs all across the UK, plus sections on pub history and pub culture. It’s pub porn, basically. Researching the book last year was an absolute delight. Sometimes we spent all day driving to a particular pub that had been recommended, and we’d get there and it would be worth every minute of the journey. It was brilliant going to places like Liverpool, having tweeted that I’d be there, and finding a posse of people waiting for me so they could show me their favourite haunts. Five days with a list of recommendations across Somerset, Devon and Cornwall was utterly magical, and the comedown at the end, when we visited  pub that was merely good as opposed to legendary, was startling.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom talked about pubs at the moment, with good reason. For the last decade pubs have been put through the wringer. This book doesn’t address that – it seeks to remind the reader why pubs matter so much in the first place.

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon and I imagine they’ll be shipping in the next couple off days. If you’re at the Great British Beer Festival today, I’m signing copies – unofficially – at the CAMRA bookstall at 3pm and 6pm.