Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got German porter, more steam beer, and beer ties.
First, some news. Robbie Pickering, AKA ‘Rob Sterowski’, has started posting on his blog I Might Have a Refreshing Beer again after a long hiatus. As a German speaker, and a Germanophile, he’s long had an eye on that country’s beer scene and beer history. This week, he brought us news of ownership shenanigans in Cologne:
I was surprised and rather puzzled to read that one of the last remaining family-owned Kölsch breweries, Malzmühle, is to sell its brand and brewing business to one of the others, Gaffel… The puzzling thing about all this is that Malzmühle, just a couple of years ago, itself took over another of the remaining independent breweries, Sünner. And that is staying open – so they say at the moment, at least. So they still have a brewery where they could produce Mühlen Kölsch…
As Robbie makes clear in the post, there are a dwindling number of actual breweries in Cologne, and a lot of orphan/zombie Kölsch brands. It’s just got a bit harder again for drinkers to know who made the beer they’re drinking and where it was brewed.
We’ll stick with Robbie whose second piece this week is a lengthy exploration of Germany and its relationship with porter in the early 19th century:
For a while, I had been trying to research Schwarzbier, the black lager from Thuringia, and the trail led back to Haldensleben, a small town near Magdeburg. It was from here in 1875 that a young brewer called Rudolf Zersch left his parents’ imposing, though run-down, half-timbered home and brewery, and travelled south to take over the royal brewery in tiny Köstritz near Gera, which is now, due in no small part to Zersch’ efforts, the home of the world’s best-known Schwarzbier… But then I found out that the Zersch family brewery, interesting though it was (they brewed Broihan there), was not the most exciting thing about Haldensleben… For it was here in the second decade of the nineteenth century that one of the first attempts was made to bring the British industrial revolution to Germany. And part of that operation was a much bigger brewery, brewing the beer that stood like no other for the industrial age: Porter.
At Beervana Jeff Alworth has provided a footnote to his recent article about California Common reflecting on what’s happening, or not happening, with the much-anticipated resurrection of Anchor Brewing in San Francisco:
I wrote [Craft Beer & Brewing] the article after Chobani-founder and rich guy Hamdi Ulukaya purchased Anchor, seemingly saving it from history’s dustbin. But even then, the old plant had been sitting derelict in San Francisco for months. Instead of putting the brewery and its workers, many of whom were available, back to work, the building remains vacant. It’s a mysterious situation: zero appears to have happened since the sale, and no one even knows who to ask about its progress (I tried!)… Then, less than a week ago, the San Francisco Standard published a follow-up confirming that, nope, nothing seems to be happening and nope, it’s impossible to find anyone close enough to Ulukaya who knows what’s going on. One year since Ulukaya’s purchase, Anchor is further from making beer than ever…
In the latest edition of her newsletter Under the Jenfluence Jen Blair has written about craft breweries and gentrification. Her perspective is American but British readers will recognise many of the same drivers and problems:
Breweries became a cornerstone of community redevelopment and revitalization projects in the 2010s… no neighborhood is properly gentrified unless and until a brewery opens up in it. Gleaming stainless, chalkboard beer menus, pothos and spider plants abound, and lumbar-destroying Lancaster chairs… But are those breweries actually part of the community? … Does the ownership/leadership get in their cars at the end of the day and drive home to the suburbs or across town? … I can continue to ask a bunch of hypothetical questions, but I think you get the point. Many breweries opened in areas targeted by cities and other local governments for revitalization. Because breweries are “cool” and can act as anchors to attract other small businesses that exist for a very narrow slice of the population.
The Pub Curmudgeon asks a fair and challenging question: what exactly is the utopia that campaigners want to get to by abolishing the beer tie? And how will the economics of that utopia work in practice?
The idea that tied leases could be scrapped is entirely fanciful. The raison d’être of pubcos is operating pubs, so, as with the Big Six before them, they are not going to hold on to estates of free-of-tie properties. They would convert the best of them to direct management, or the franchise models that are becoming increasingly common, and sell the rest off. A few might go to sitting tenants, but most would be snapped up by true property companies who would milk them for all they were worth and have no interest in maintaining them as pubs. And independent free houses are only guaranteed survival as long as their owner wants to stay in the business. Whenever they want to retire or move on, the pub is put “into play” and its future is at risk.
It’s worth reading that alongside John Porter’s overview of the SIBA-CAMRA ‘indie beer’ campaign in which a SIBA spokesperson explicitly says “SIBA isn’t arguing for abolition of the beer tie per se…”
We suspect it’s another situation where campaigners pull hard in one direction, the industry pulls hard in the other, and we end up somewhere in the middle – but perhaps, hopefully, a little closer to the ideal than when we started. But, as the Pub Curmudgeon’s post sets out, it’s all too easy for these disruptions to have effects other than those intended, and for those effects to ripple out for years or decades to come.
The other big news this week, at least for those within the world of beer writing, was the death of Martyn Cornell. As his peers and disciples process the news various tributes have begun to emerge, each telling similar stories about how supportive, knowledgeable and generous he was:
- Jeff Alworth – “the work Martyn did was singular, literally transforming the way we understand beer”
- Darren Norbury – “It was two years later that I last saw him, at the launch of Norwich’s City of Ale event. Being journalists of a certain vintage, we were able to reflect on today’s sad excuses for newsrooms and reporting standards, pint in hand, with the River Wensum flowing by.”
- Roger Protz – “He collaborated with this writer on the beer styles section of the Good Beer Guide. I felt it best to leave the porter and stout description to him…”
- And here’s what we had to say: “He was our involuntary course supervisor and our tutor. Fear of incurring his withering rebukes kept us on course.”
Finally, from BlueSky, ghostly stirrings in a South London pub…
the refurb on my pub starts on Monday and suddenly the building I have never seen anything remotely weird happen in (except when we changed the back door lock and it threw glasses off the racks at us for a week) has started having that “movement just on the edge of vision” shit
— Hazel Southwell (@hazelsouthwell.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 2:50 AM
For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.
