Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got news of the passing of a beer blogger, among other things.
First, some sad news: Peter Edwardson, AKA the Pub Curmudgeon, has died.
His posts featured in these round-ups many times over the years and we corresponded with him many times. He was one of those people who’d been around a long time and seemed to remember everything. Pick up any old edition of CAMRA’s What’s Brewing and you’ll probably find a challenging correspondence from Peter on the letters page.
Politically, Peter was on the right, and you’ll see variations on “We may not have agreed on everything but…” in many of the tributes being paid. Some of his arguments, especially away from beer and pubs, could sometimes be pretty extreme and, frankly, quite maddening. But he was also capable of great lucidity on the subject of what made pubs tick and the challenges they face in the 21st century.
Once again, we find ourselves hoping that his blog – a valuable resource with almost 20 years of posts – is somehow preserved.
As it happens, a debate broke out this week into which the Pub Curmudgeon would have no doubt enjoyed wading. Why don’t young people like cask ale? Does it matter? And, wait, is that actually true?
It started with a somewhat melancholy piece by Anthony Gladman at his newsletter, The Glass, in which he wonders why we spend so much time fretting about how to get young people into cask ale:
The kid wasn’t wrong, he just liked different things to me. His tastes had nothing to do with me just as mine had nothing to do with him. The only real difference between us, when it came down to it, was that his preferences represented the coming world and mine did not… It made me think of cask ale — that glorious, valuable, unique drink to which we in its homeland fail to pay proper heed. It is subtle, delicious, delicate, and increasingly ignored. I am in my 50s now and count myself among its confirmed lifelong fans. Even I think of it partly as an old man’s drink. The kid would think it most assuredly so. If he stopped to think about it at all.
This prompted a response by Matthew Curtis on BlueSky, arguing that, actually, there’s plenty of evidence that young people do like cask ale and are interested in it. The short thread starts here:
Sales of cask Bass have grown nearly 20% this year, and its now sold in over 1000 outlets as opposed to 400 12 months ago. Landlord is #1 by value. Boddington’s was relaunched. Other breweries I speak to are in cask growth: Theakston, Thornbridge, Abbeydale, Siren, Five points…
— Matthew Curtis (@totalcurtis.bsky.social) 11 December 2025 at 11:00
And publican Hazel Southwell also chipped in:
Black Sheep is in the top ten sellers by cask ale and has the administrators in pulling it apart… the biggest threat to cask ale isn’t a lack of demand, it’s fear from publicans who don’t understand how to handle it and big beer companies killing brands (many built on real ale!)
For what it’s worth, our impression is that Matthew is right – cask ale is doing relatively well in 2025, at least in terms of prominence in the better pubs. It’s just that, per Anthony’s first point above, the youngest people drinking it aren’t “kids”, but people in their late twenties or thirties, with jobs and kids. It’s something you mature into, we reckon, and maybe that’s fine.
On a related note, Jeff Alworth at Beervana has been pondering taprooms and how what many of us still think of as the new-fangled coming thing are, in fact, old hat:
It is becoming clear that a lot of the “lessons” the industry absorbed during the Great Expansion were wrong. Flagships were not dead. Hazy IPAs were not going to supplant clear hoppy beers. Erstwhile craft breweries, fueled by national distribution and big beer ownership were not going to become the new Budweisers. And for the purposes of this post, taprooms were not always going attract large audiences merely because they sold beer… Part of this is a trend thing. During that great expansion, a bunch of related fixtures of craft brewing got white-hot: hazy IPAs packaged in four-packs with bright, geometric designs; ultra-fruity, sweet beers that would attract huge lines; and spare, industrial taprooms. At the time, those taprooms seemed cool and futuristic in their minimalism and were full of 20- and 30-somethings. They were highly specific in the way that white-hot trends get, and that means they perfectly captured a moment. Unfortunately for an industry trying to capture young drinkers today, that moment happened a decade back, when Gen Z were kids on dad’s expeditions to tick off a few more beers on Untappd. And now, for a lot of 20-somethings, taprooms don’t seem cool and futuristic; they have the vaguely cringe feel of dad’s old passions.
At Beer Diary Phil Cook has a typically thoughtful analysis of how breweries approach brewing awards as part of their wider marketing strategies, by presenting themselves as underdogs:
Whatever Mountain Culture are now, “underdog” ain’t it. They have earned their successes and I’m still a big fan of a lot of what they do, but this side of them — continuing to downplay how they’ve changed and claiming the mantle of the brave battler to rally support in a survey of beer drinkers — is getting ridiculous… But this kind of campaign is the “new normal” for the Hottest 100: make a pitch about the general worthiness of your “team” and direct sympathetic voters towards a specific one of your beers, to maximise its chances; asking some flagship beer to stand in for your support of its brewery, essentially… “Vote for this beer because we’re the longest-surviving indie in the running” or “because no local brewery has made the podium before” or “to put this small town on the map (while we awkwardly riff on what its name sounds like in English)” or just plainly “because it’s tough being a small brewery and we could use the boost.
We don’t often include academic papers here (they’re often locked behind paywalls and, when they’re not, they can be heavy going) but one caught our attention this week. It’s about the Spanish craft beer market and, between the tables and formulas, there’s a story about what ‘drink local’ means in practice:
The results described above show a profile (Table 2) of Spanish craft and industrial beers as having a slightly high price (4.08 euros) and price-litre (10.21 euros), as well as a moderate alcohol content (6.21°), packaged either in a bottle or can, in 33 cl or 44 cl format, with an overwhelming majority of Pale Ale style beers (48.30 %) and labelling unrelated to real elements (71.55 %)… Among these results, it is striking that, despite the existing previous literature that relates the importance of the narrative of craft beers in their local context to increase the sense of place (Ikäheimo, 2021) and the need to link craft beer to place, creating labels that represent it and are unique (Mathews & Patton, 2016), the sample collected barely identifies 5.96 % (n = 70) of beers whose labelling has some representative and identifiable element of the place of production.
In other words, craft beer in Spain is unanchored from the places where it is brewed; beers tend to have wacky, abstract labelling and names; and most of the production is some form of pale ale. This feels to us like a valid description of the craft beer scenes in quite a few countries – including, at times, the UK.
It’s interesting partly because that sense of being placeless used to be the complaint levelled at ‘macro’ beer.
At British Beer Breaks Phil Mellows has been reflecting on what ‘Christmas beer’ means in 2025, and how the market has changed:
You’ll see quite a few Christmas cask ales in pubs, though it seems to me not as many as there used to be. Often, they’ll have an ABV of little more than 4%, which isn’t a problem as long as they’ve got the flavour. But some of them fail to distinguish themselves from the kind of ales you might drink all year round. The festive tag is just a marketing thing… This is the danger. Sticking a bit on tinsel on it and calling it Christmas. The beers we’re looking for here require substance. They need to be special. They have to match the smells and flavours of the season.
Finally, from BlueSky, a public service announcement…
I drank (probably too many) pints of London Porter at the Coach and Horses in Greek Street yesterday, it was absolutely perfect. It might still be on so why not get down there?
— Will Hawkes (@willhawkes.bsky.social) 11 December 2025 at 20:24
For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday. In a controlled way, Stan Hieronymus is also back in the ‘featured links’ game, highlighting one link and one quote, the most recent of which was a corker.
