Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got West Wales, South Wales, Belfast and Edinburgh.
First, news of an immediate change announced by the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, which is intended to help pubs:
Pubs, social clubs and live music venues in England will be given a 20% cut to business rates from April, with new Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling it a “first step” to help the industry… It is his third policy announcement since entering No 10, and the government estimates the plan will save firms around £1,100 next year… With a cost of £100m, it will be funded by a review of tax relief on firms such as vape shops which “do not make a positive contribution to local communities”, the government said.
And, for the first time since we can remember, CAMRA is happy with a government announcement, rather than saying “It’s too little, too late.” We’ll have more thoughts on this in the footnotes on Patreon but, in brief, it seems pretty canny – especially that bit about vape shops, which have yet to inspire a preservation society.
For Pellicle William Ham Bevan has written about the Mumbles Mile, a legendary pub crawl in South Wales which is under threat:
I grew up on the Mumbles Road, a few hundred yards from where the Mile starts. Around 30 years ago, during a trip home from university, I photographed all 12 of the pubs. It was partly prompted by homesickness, but also a nagging feeling that they wouldn’t be there much longer. The Mermaid Hotel had just burnt down (definitively, after two earlier blazes didn’t quite do the job) and there were rumbles about a new bar quarter in Swansea that would suck up all the trade… Today, just five of those pubs are in operation. A Guardian feature last year presented Mumbles as an example of “the UK’s dying booze industry.” The story I’d heard was as much about resilience and reinvention as decline and loss.
Sticking with Wales, at Beer-Aeth Gwenllian Montgomery-John has thoughts about the pubs of Borth in a piece which we’re including here partly because it is so fiery on the subject of English second-homers, and so blunt about the quality of the pubs:
Well there’s no point in beating around the bush here – The Railway Inn is fucking shit. Utterly nondescript. It’s mostly patronised by people who own caravans in the vicinity. The impression I have of these people from my visits is that they quite like having a caravan in Wales, but they would much prefer that there was a beach in Dudley. The one thing you can absolutely guarantee about these cunts is that at some point in their lives they have all been into a pub in Wales where the second they stepped in through the door, everyone started speaking Welsh… Because the world revolves around them.
He’s been teasing it for weeks and now The Beer Nut has written up his visit to The Middle Ale, the pub owned by German supermarket chain Lidl in Belfast, Northern Ireland:
Knowing, presumably, how much of a curiosity The Middle Ale would be, and the potential for positive publicity, the chain has gone to more effort than it strictly needed to. Although there’s nothing distinctive about the exterior, the inside has been designed to a definite theme, based on the old-fashioned Irish pub-grocer, as befits a kind of modern day equivalent. The shelves are lined with decorative versions of Lidl food and homewares, not to advertise them seriously, but to fit the theme. With that goes shiplap-style painted-wood walls and ceiling, lighting in the style of early electrification, and even little vestigial drawers behind the counter, as though for storing loose produce. That it’s all garishly coloured in the company’s red, yellow and blue, rather than more realistic earthy ochre or olive green, takes away from the effect and reminds one that it’s all a bit of set dressing. But it’s fun, like drinking in the on-stage pub from a pantomime.
Laura Hadland keeps a close eye on sustainability practices in British brewing and has written something of a state-of-the-nation post for CAMRA’s What’s Brewing:
The Bluestone Brewing Co, in a beautiful part of Pembrokeshire, has really had environmental welfare baked into its activities since its inception in 2013. Based on a working family farm, it uses water from its own well to brew and powers the process through solar. Bluestone’s efforts were recognised in 2018 as it became the first brewery in the world to receive Green Key Accreditation… Now, Bluestone’s sustainability initiatives have gone well beyond the everyday, as it collaborates with Swansea University in a project that captures by-products of the brewing process and turns the waste into something useful. Carbon dioxide generated by the brewery is piped into a nearby polytunnel where there is a 400-litre photobioreactor and raceway tank. Within it, there is spirulina growing – a blue-green algae that uses carbon to fuel its photosynthesis… When grown, the algae culture is harvested and studies are underway to find potential commercial applications for it – perhaps in the food, cosmetics, health or pharmaceutical industries.
If you’ve got kids and live in Edinburgh, or plan to spend time there, you’ll want to bookmark Imran Rahman-Jones’s list of more than 100 pubs there that welcome children. Even if you don’t have children, however, and/or don’t ever intend to visit Edinburgh, it’s still an interesting exercise, purely for the small print:
Norhet Bar, 45 Main St, Davidson’s Mains, EH4 5BZ. No under-5s. Children 5 and over until 8pm. No children allowed at bar. In the function hall, kids allowed until midnight… Starbank Inn, 64 Laverockbank Rd, Newhaven, EH5 3BZ. Until 8:30pm (8pm on Sundays) for a main meal. Must sit in a designated area away from the bar. Children’s menu available. In busy times, the kitchen will stop taking orders… Milnes Bar, 35 Hanover St, EH2 2PJ. No under-5s. Families permitted while the kitchen is open (generally 12-9pm)…
(Please, do not bother to comment “Well, that’s a list of pubs to avoid then.”)
Finally, from YouTube, here’s another instalment in Nicola’s series on Bristol pubs. (Everyone here loved the last one.)
For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.
News, nuggets and longreads 25 July 2026: Grimscribe originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog
