One thing our recent holiday brought home is that we’re definitely over the urge to visit every brewery or important pub in any given city.
In the early days of this blog (it turns 20 next year) we very much had a ticking mentality. This was especially true of Jess who, as you might know, plans and organises most of our expeditions.
With a bit of effort, it was usually possible to track down the beers from every brewery in a given city. Sure, we might have to dash from place to place, and drink slightly more than we wanted to.
And yes, our acquaintance with each brewery might be brief and superficial.
But we could say we’d done them.
Of course it was generally easier to do this c.2009 there weren’t three, five, fifteen, twenty new breweries in every town you turned up in. In fact, you’d sometimes be lucky to find one or two.
When we visited Bristol as capital B Beer Bloggers for the first time it was, as we recall, Bath Ales, Bristol Beer Factory, Zero Degrees and… that was about it.
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We often took a similar approach to pubs, drawing up a list of the must-visit venues and whizzing between them.
The problem is, after a while, you start to wonder if you’re actually enjoying yourself. What if the third pub is great but you have to leave it to visit four more, none of which is anywhere near as good?
In recent years, though, we’ve got better at saying: it’s nice here, let’s settle, and let’s throw the wish list on the open fire.
We’ve also got better at:
- letting go of the fear of missing out (FOMO)
- accepting that being comprehensive isn’t our thing
- letting people with more energy and dedication produce guides
As we explained on Patreon the other day our ‘Impressions of…’ format is a deliberate attempt to downplay the completeness and importance of what we write. When we’re in, say, Antwerp for a couple of nights, all we can do is scratch the surface.
Even with multiple trips to some places over the course of decades, our knowledge is still partial and superficial – and that’s fine. In fact, we like it. Knowing that there are always new-to-us places to drink is part of what keeps us going back to, say, Cologne. Leave yourself wanting more and all that.
In Munich the other day, in search of Augustiner Helles, we asked ourselves an important question: will getting on public transport at this time in the evening to go to a completely different beer garden make us happier? We gambled that it would, and it did.
Our less organised, less thoroughly researched approach doesn’t stop us finding good bars and beers. In fact, we’re often surprised to find that places we thought we’d stumbled upon are, in fact, in all the guides. But feeling as if we’ve discovered them ourselves increases the pleasure enormously.
When we do get into ticking mode these days, it tends to be more about gaining a more complete understanding of the multiple dimensions of the local beer culture. It’s easy to spend time chasing all the craft breweries and taprooms but neglect to drink a pint of the local family brewery bitter in a Victorian pub.
Sometimes, this even extends to wanting to drink the local boring lager, if it’s particularly beloved or historically interesting. It felt important to drink Meteor in Strasbourg and Tennents in Glasgow, for example.
The same goes for visiting whatever the local version of a ‘normal’ boozer might be.
The other thing is that it’s not all about beer. If we’re in a strange, interesting city, we also want to visit museums, go for walks and look at buildings. Pubs and breweries are one way into understanding the culture of a place but they’ll only get you so far.
There’s nothing wrong with ticking, though, or with aiming to be comprehensive. If you enjoy it – or have decided it’s your mission, which might not necessarily be the same thing – then good for you.
For us, though, there’s a great sense of relief in looking at a list of must-visit venues and saying, “It’s fine, not this time.”
Some recent acquisitions for the library
Ray is always on the lookout for interesting things that are actually old and/or obscure in charity shops and bookshops and recently came across something interesting in Oxfam Books on Park Street in Bristol.
It was a stack of about 50 copies of Wine and Food: a gastronomical quarterly edited by André L. Simon.
Ray went through every copy and bought three that had articles or essays about beer or pubs.
The issue for summer 1940 includes a piece by Kenneth Hare called ‘A Tour of the “Locals”’ which opens like this:
The slogan ‘Careless Talk May Give Away Vital Secrets’ hangs prominently in our Gloucestershire bar parlours, and the war is not discussed amongst us. This was not formerly so. I remember old Rackham’s reply when, looking up from an alarmist newspaper, a youth observed: ‘It says here that, with his latest type of ’plane, Hitler could reach London in fifteen minutes’. The sturdy old man put down his pint. ‘And so,’ said he, ‘a burglar might get into Mr. Hare’s house. But there he meets that bloody bull-dog, and if ever he gets out, he leaves his guts behind him!’ The spirit of the Gloucestershire men is still that of their famous ‘Die-hards’. But to-day, as we can’t talk of the present, our thoughts revert to the past…
At the other end of World War II, the issue for winter 1945 includes a piece called ‘Cake and Ale’ by Reginald Hargreaves which includes this judgement on the quality of cheese, bread and beer in wartime:
…acrid ‘mousetrap’, self-rationing sawdust and the sort of water-bewitched-and-hops-begrudged swipes that insults the tankard into which it is poured!
The real prize, though, is from the spring 1946 issue. It’s called ‘Building the New Public House’ and is by Brendan Bernard Williams. It praises the True Temperance League, of which the author’s father was a founder, which promoted moderate drinking rather than total abstinence, and played a significant part in the promotion of the idea of the improved public house:
…those who in the new age will meet and enjoy good drinks and good food in the public house of the future will very largely have to thank (though they probably won’t know it) those public-spirited men and women who a generation ago laid the foundations of the improved public house in days when the idea that a pub need not be and should not be a haunt of dingy depravity was regarded as next door to social heresy. Let us, remembering them, build places for public refreshment that shall be a memorial to their work.
If we ever sort out getting the rights to 20th Century Pub back (ugh, admin) and do a revised, expanded edition, this is the kind of thing we might be able to use.
On the blog
Despite being away for more than two weeks we’ve actually had a fairly productive time on the blog, partly because the holiday gave us fresh stimulus and made us want to write.
We reported on Pult, a particularly interesting bar in Prague; we gave our impressions of Brno, Czechia’s second city; and of Rosenheim in Upper Bavaria. And, finally, last week, we wrote about exploring beer gardens in Munich.
Before we went on holiday, we tried to explain why it’s not quite as easy as people might think to “Just open a new pub, then.” This was a follow up to an earlier post – or, rather, to the conversation that rose up around it – on how people outside the beer and pub bubble don’t believe pubs deserve special treatment.
We found a few historical references to the “super pub” and decided to pull on that thread, finding many more uses of that phrase, but with slightly different meanings at different times.
There were also the usual Saturday morning round-ups of good writing about beer and pubs, two of them dialled in from hotels on the Continent.
On Patreon, we wrote bonus notes on the beer we drank in Rosenheim and why we call those posts “Impressions of…”, along with our weekly ‘Footnotes’ posts to accompany news, nuggets and longreads, plus weekly-ish tasting notes on the best beers we drank each weekend. You can now sign up for our Patreon for a whole year for about £20 at the lowest tier, if you want to support and encourage what we do.
And that’s it, that’s your lot, until next month.
Cheers!
Jess & Ray
