Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got shipwrecks, dive bars and Japan.
First, by way of news, there’s a glimmer of hope in the latest stats from SIBA on UK brewery numbers:
The rate of brewery closures has slowed in the first half of 2026 compared to 2025 according to the SIBA UK Brewery Tracker, published today… For the first six months of 2026, net closures have averaged less than one brewery a week compared to nearly three [per] week in 2025… Taking into account all brewery openings and closures in the UK the net brewery closure rate from January to June 2026 was -16, compared to a total loss of -137 breweries in 2025.
So, what’s changed? Or, to put it another way, what made 2025 so much more challenging than 2026?
For The Oaklandside Azucena Rasilla spent a full day hanging out at a bar in Oakland, California, recording the comings, the goings and the conversation. There’s something about the immersiveness of this 16-hour observation, with photos by Sarahbeth Maney, that makes this more than the usual superficial ‘dive bar’ nostalgia piece:
“As a woman, I feel safe here,” [Nicole] Wooden says. “If for some reason I’m here without him, or, he’s coming later or I come later, or whatever, I feel protected. As a woman, you don’t always feel that way when you’re out and about, especially drinking.” … Nearby, a man named Rene Contreras takes a seat. I recognize him from earlier; he walked by the bar when [Rich] Perez was arriving, just before 8 a.m., and he stopped by again later in the morning before heading to the doctor. Now, he’s settling in to spend the afternoon chatting with Perez and his other friends, and eventually, to play some pool… Folks sometimes mistake Contreras for Perez, he tells me, something that’s not helped by their similar taste in clothes. One time, they showed up wearing the exact same outfit: black kicks, khaki shorts, and a black T-shirt.
A story about an antique bottle of Guinness found on a shipwreck has roused Liam K prompting him to write an in-depth piece that tells the full story and challenges the idea that the beer can be reproduced, Jurassic Park style:
Cameron & Saunders operated from 7 Hart Street, Mark Lane in London at this time and were primarily Bass bottlers and exporters. The site, which is now a high-rise modern building, would have been conveniently located close to both Fenchurch Street train station and the Thames for easy shipping of goods by sea or rail… This stout would have been brewed in Dublin before being matured for 2 years in huge vats and it would have then been transferred to wooden casks and shipped to London where it would have been left to settle for weeks before being bottled, corked, caged and encapsulated. Then it was labelled and packed most likely into barrels/casks, or perhaps crates, with dry straw before being loaded onto a vessel. So that recently salvaged stout is unlikely to date from 1864, and more likely to be from 1862 or before – it’s even older than has been reported!
For All About Beer Don Tse has written about why saison isn’t really a beer style, drawing on brewing conference talk by Yvan De Baets:
After writing the chapter on the history of saison in Phil Markowski’s book Farmhouse Ales, De Baets discovered a passion for one of his country’s most famous beer styles. “As many Belgians, I thought that just because I’m Belgium, I knew everything about saisons,” said De Baets. “And then by starting the research, I realized that basically I knew almost nothing about it. And I realized that the subject is extremely complex, and I really fell in love with that complexity and I really wanted to know everything.”… The first thing De Baets discovered is that saison is just one style of a family of beers that were meant to be kept for a very long time. “Now, when you say something tastes of an old beer, it doesn’t seem very sexy,” says De Baets, “But at the time, ‘old’ was a very positive word. It was super, super positive to talk about an old sour beer–a well kept, well-aged sour beer.”
At Ben Viveur Benjamin Nunn grapples with the tension between his desire to drink something different and his suspicion that, once a beer becomes too different, it arguably ceases to be beer:
Last week at Le Gothique’s Summer Beer Festival I got to sample Chorus from Baynham’s brewery, apparently based in the New Forest. They don’t appear to have brewed anything else, ever, at least not under that name, so there’s no ‘core range’ to compare it against. Perhaps this is deliberate… And it’s undoubtedly interesting stuff. Comes in a champagne-style bottle. 12%. Served in champagne flute glasses. Drinks like an English sparkling wine or perhaps a high-end Prosecco but a little more complex. Made with ‘Chardonnay yeast’, apparently. (I know, I know. Chardonnay is a grape.) I detected a hint of the sort of funky rustic fruit that one might expect from a spontaneous fermentation, but I was assured that no Brett was involved in the production… If it was served to me blind and I was told it wasn’t a wine, my second guess would be one of those strong, over-sophisticated sparkling bottled ciders or perries that were briefly in fashion in the late 1980s. Merrydown. Country Manor. Remember those?
Alex at Pub Vignettes has been travelling and found three notably characterful bars in Kanazawa, Japan:
Life stories tend not to be short. They’re longer still when relayed via Google Translate. No matter, the whiskey selection’s here for the long haul. The owner’s narrative arc, from corporate ladder climbing induced burnout to emotional rehabilitation as the proud owner of his one-man-band bar, felt indicative of countless places across the country. Why must you scale? Why always crave more? Why jeopardise losing your love for the craft? Our new pal puts on his favourite bossa nova compilation CD and fetches an oversized children’s picture atlas from a bookshelf, asking us to show him where we’re from. We pass half an hour pointing at various pages, tracking the cartography of our lives, embracing the stilted pace of realtime app translation. Some things don’t need scaling.
Finally, from Instagram (via BlueSky), insight into the culture of ‘way’…
For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.
