Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got production value, community, and inclusive beer festivals.
First, news of the closure of one of Ireland’s pioneering craft breweries, Franciscan Well, which was taken over by Molson Coors in 2013: “The brewery said it has not been able to grow the brands to the level needed to sustain the brewery as part of the Molson Coors UK and Ireland production network.” Or, as The Beer Nut put it, “big breweries fuck things up when they buy small breweries”.
At St John’s Wort Jordan St. John puts forward a thesis that almost reads like a manifesto: punters can tell when pubs and bars are taking shortcuts, and the best ones… don’t. Or, as he puts it, ‘You can’t fake production value’:
Production value could mean a lot of things, but essentially it comes down to providing an authentic, enjoyable experience. This could be investing your products with meaning, brewing well enough that the beer speaks for itself, employing staff that will engage with the customers, or just providing an ambiance and experience that is memorable… Sadly, it’s one of the things that Craft Beer in general is not very good at, and the difficulty is that this is largely partitive in your perception. That is to say, you only notice that the production value is missing. If they’re doing it right, you might not notice it at all.
He provides plenty of examples of ‘production value’ in practice at least one of which is bound to have you nodding along. (And British cask ale nerds will also enjoy bristling at “a small tank of gas that exists simply to create head pressure rather than push the beer”.)
Speaking of which… For Pellicle Joey Leskin has profiled Lucy Do and her West London micropub The Dodo, which may or may not be a cult:
The beer offering at The Dodo is robust, featuring six rotating cask and keg taps. Lucy’s commitment to independent breweries might seem expensive, but the audience it draws reveals the benefits of the decision. Curation can pose a dilemma when a given beer doesn’t appeal to drinkers, however… “When I want to support women-owned breweries, for example, but know certain styles won’t sell – there’s constant tension between emotional connections and business necessities,” she says. “But if I’m not making the right decision for the business, it doesn’t succeed, and everyone loses anyway.”
For CAMRA’s What’s Brewing Matthew Curtis highlights a ‘best pubs’ list we’d missed from Time Out and observes that one particular trend defines it:
As a former Londoner, I was puzzled by the inclusion of a lot of the pubs on the list, the majority of which appeared to follow two particular trends – that they were proper, no frills, spit-and-sawdust boozers, or they were Irish pubs. Along with the remainder of the list there was a common thread running through the overall list – that their reputations are built on the quality of a specific beer, Guinness… To anyone paying attention, it should come as no surprise that this particular beer is driving the popularity of certain hostelries. According to data published in the Morning Advertiser stout is proving to be increasingly popular, with the category seeing 10.6 per cent growth year-on-year. Stout now accounts for 9.5 per cent of all beer volumes, among which Guinness – now the best-selling beer in the UK (by value) – is the most popular.
American commentators are processing the news of Rogue Ales closing in various ways. Jeff Alworth has found himself not only writing an obituary for the brewery but also looking at modern beers through a pre-emptively nostalgic lens:
I poured out a can of Pure Project’s Fresh West… Perhaps because of the recent Rogue news, I was especially alive to the experience of drinking that beer. Even as the scent reached my nostrils, I was struck by its almost luminous modernity. The scent was intense in the way some candy is when you tear open the package – sweet with fruitiness but also sharp in its sheer magnitude. The brewery describes it as “grapefruit, pine, and apricot [aromas] and bold flavors of resin, grapefruit rind, and lemon,” and those are accurate as far as they go. But they also seem inadequate to the task of conveying the radical way hops present themselves when compared to early eras of brewing. Fresh West is made with Simcoe and Citra Fresh Frozen Cryo hops layered on top of their flagship West Coast IPA recipe, which produces flavors and aromas that just weren’t possible—what, five years ago?… The thought occurred to me: what would a drinker have made of this beer twenty or thirty years ago?
Stan Hieronymus, meanwhile, has been digging out stats which show Rogue’s production volumes compared to (a) New Glarus and (b) American craft beer as a whole. There’s a clear drop after about 2021, which might lead us to point a finger at the pandemic.
At WeirdBeerGirl.com Lisa Grimm has notes on what sounds like a beer festival with ‘production value’ in Antwerp:
Beer festivals aren’t to everyone’s taste, especially the very large ones. And while there are many similarities to these bigger festivals wherever you go – larger blokes with beards, queues for the hype beers, crowds – there’s one way they do things differently in Antwerp. I speak, of course, of cheese and charcuterie… Billie’s Craft Beer Fest itself is held in a former dockside warehouse that is now a modern events space, and in comparison to most beer festivals, the setup is very sophisticated… There are also SEPARATE GLASS-RINSING STATIONS – another concept that our local festival would do well to learn from; as-is, there is only a sort of trough with water taps that serves both purposes and well…that’s not great. Another ‘best practice’ at Billie’s is the all-inclusive nature of the event – you get a reasonably-sized small glass and can try anything that’s tapped, while in Dublin, you pay separately for a pint or half-pint…which is already too much for a festival…
Finally, from BlueSky, a portent of things to come…
Early festive pub, Cambridge
— Kevin Gibson (@gslug1.bsky.social) November 16, 2025 at 9:55 AM
For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.
