Are you feeling Christmassy yet?
It's the time of year for reflecting, making plans for next year, and bonding in the mead hall by eating and drinking far too much.
Are you feeling Christmassy yet?
When you're a child, feeling Christmassy starts in about August when the new Argos catalogue drops.
As an adult, it's when the load starts to lighten at work (unless you work in retail or hospitality) and big decisions can suddenly wait until next year.
The staff party rolls round (there's still a tax break attached) and you're reminded to have fun, but not too much fun, and fun of the right type, with a free bar, but don't take the piss.
What we haven't seen much of this year is Christmas beer – those with Santa on the pump clip, or promising to replicate the taste of a turkey dinner. It feels like a dying trend.
In a discussion with strangers in a pub recently, opinions were divided on Christmas beers.
They're bad, said one lobby. They’re usually thin, brown, boring beers further compromised by the addition of too much clove and/or too much cinnamon and/or too much of something else.
They're great fun, said another, all part of the pleasure of the season.
Everyone agreed that it's better when they're strong and rich, leaning into flavours of figgy pudding and port.
An old acquaintance of ours used to talk about building up her “pissed fitness” in the run up to a holiday – gradually drinking a little more every week, or every day, so she’d be ready to handle it. It can feel as if that’s the primary mission in December.
But what about Christmas Day? What's the plan? Start with a gueuze at breakfast and work your way up to an imperial stout before bed, with 18 other beers between?
It depends whether you want to remember Christmas Day, we suppose, and whether you want those memories to be fond, or regretful.
A bit of extra booze, at times when you wouldn't usually drink it, is a key indicator of Christmas, and one way to distinguish The Big Day apart from any other drizzly Sunday.
Then there's the beer that might be under the tree – the wildcard bottles that make it so hard to plan. There might be ten bottles, there might be none. You might run out of beer by teatime, or be drinking it until March.
Hmm. Best get another few bottles, just to be on the safe side.
(You are now drinking it until April.)
Everything is boozy, suddenly: chocolates ooze liqueur, pies and puddings are saturated with sherry, there's wine in the gravy, cider in the cabbage, and Bailey's in the coffee. Even the crisps are Prosecco flavoured these days.
The local is open for a couple of hours only because, after all, “I've got my own Christmas dinner to eat, and haven’t you all got homes to go to?” It's chaos as people attempt a day's drinking in the allotted time, including people who only go to the pub once a year as a little treat.
Back at base, you soak up the booze with food, and cut the richness of the food with booze, and repeat. Thank god for Rennies.
How about now? Are you feeling Christmassy yet?
The best of our blogging from the past year
We often berate ourselves for neglecting the blog, and for posting less than we used to, so it’s good to look back and think: “Blimey! Actually, we did some good stuff this year.”
It’s heartening, in fact, that the list below could have been twice as long, if we’ve included various pub crawl write ups, episodic musings on Bass, and so on.
Anyway, as much for our own morale as for you, here are our highlights of 2024.
New ways of drinking: the board game cafe (January)
“Chance & Counters isn’t a pub, or even a bar. It’s a board game cafe. And on Friday night, it was remarkably busy…” We’ve been back since and either been turned away because it’s full, or found ourselves surrounded by crowds. Once we’d noticed this phenomenon we began to see it everywhere, including coastal West Wales. Definitely a trend to watch.
The Iron Duke and the battle for a union for bar staff (February)
“For an ambitious politician in 1930s Liverpool, wealthy brewers were a tempting target, and underpaid bar staff a potential source of power…” This was inspired, as our posts often are, by a dig through our library of books about pubs, beer, and local history. It feels especially topical as we discuss the challenges of working in hospitality in the holiday season.
What is the evolutionary advantage of booze? (March)
“A fun question to ask of any apparently irrational human behaviour is ‘What’s the evolutionary advantage?’ Consider drunkenness, for example…” This post about early humans and their relationship with booze prompted some interesting discussion and certainly made us think in the sense that it prompted a mild existential crisis.
London’s best pubs in 1968: mini-skirts and toasties (March)
“The January 1968 edition of Town magazine (‘For men’) includes a guide to pubs in London and the surrounding area. How many are still there, and still good?” Posts like this are motivated by a desire to make sure potentially useful print sources are, in some sense, findable by other researchers. But also, it’s pure nostalgic time travel.
Real ale as folk horror (March)
“It’s a standing joke amongst horror fans that you can make the case for almost anything to be part of the ‘folk horror’ sub-genre. But what about real ale?” This solo post by Ray broke out of the bubble, grabbing the attention of horror fans and folkies via Bluesky, and prompting much interesting conversation. And we’ve continued to collect evidence.
When did video games appear in pubs – and where did they go? (April)
“In the 1970s and 80s pubs added video game arcade machines to their roster of attractions, in pursuit of younger customers and additional revenue…” This was great fun to research and to write. We hope it’s going to linger in search results for years to come answering this question when it comes up, naturally, in pub conversations.
The danger of being a quite good brewery (May)
“Buxton calling in administrators got us thinking about breweries that are merely quite good – and how that’s a tricky space to occupy…” We’re including this not because it’s an epic, or took tons of research, but because we’ve found ourselves referring back to it constantly. The idea of the doomed ‘quite good brewery’ feels useful.
Graffiti and ale: 3 alternative pubs in East Bristol (May)
“I’m a bit of a hippy and I like hippy pubs. There – I’ve said it. It’s just a shame Ray doesn’t…” This is part of our ongoing taxonomy of pubs. If our book 20th Century Pub covers the main categories, the blog is where we get to dig into cultural and geographical sub-types. The comments on this were good, too.
The Square and Compass: a pub on the edge of reality (May)
“The Square & Compass at Worth Matravers in Dorset has a reputation as one of the best pubs in the country. And guess what? It is.” We wrote up a few pub visits and crawls this year but this was our best attempt to evoke the atmosphere of a particular place. We indulged ourselves a little. And we’d like to be back in a summer beer garden now.
What is the Watney’s font? (June)
“Watney’s brewery might have disappeared but its brand lives on in the collective memory and people often ask ‘What is that font?’” This was a joint effort but mostly driven by Ray’s research and connections in the world of design. It’s never going to go viral but will be the best answer anyone finds to this specific question. And that’s enough for us.
Smooth and creamy: the story of nitrokeg beer in the UK (June)
“In the 1990s a new type of beer arrived on the UK scene and caused serious disruption to the market. It came to be known as nitrokeg…” In many ways, this feels like a lost chapter of Brew Britannia – or perhaps of a companion volume we might have written about beers that weren’t ‘craft’ or ‘real’, like lager and Guinness.
Brew Britannia 10 years on: progress in a pint glass? (June)
“It’s been 10 years since our book Brew Britannia was published, and 7 since the follow-up 20th Century Pub. What did we get right? What did we get wrong? And where is British beer today?” The main event, you might say – a 10,000-word post that took a huge amount of effort to write. If you didn’t get round to reading it then, please do read it now!
Impressions of Gdańsk: piwo, pierogi, the past in the present (November)
“‘We must go back to Poland some time soon,’ we’ve been saying for about 20 years. In our late teens and early twenties we spent a lot of time there…” This is another attempt by us to write a wot-we-done-on-our-holidays post without being too tedious about it. It mixes reporting on the beer scene with efforts to evoke the feel of the place.
The slow death of a Bristol estate pub (November)
“We never knew, or never noticed, The Mayors Arms, one of Bristol’s few surviving post war buildings. And now it’s set for demolition…” This is the type of post that blogging is made for. No editor would ever commission it but for the sake of a few hours research, we can memorialise something that is, in a small way, significant.
Brand codes and beer packaging (November)
“How is it possible to see an own-brand beer and know which mainstream product it is intended to replace in your basket? That’s the power of ‘brand codes’...” It’s always interesting to bring ideas from outside the beer bubble into the discussion – to offer a different lens through which to view the scene. Here, it’s marketing and branding.
On the brief lives of beer brands (December)
“How long can any beer brand expect to remain on the market? And what are the oldest cask ale brands in the UK today?” It was almost thrilling to write a ‘hot take’ after being out of the game for so long. This was inspired by the news that Carlsberg-Marstons is killing off a bunch of cask ale brands, and the conversation that arose around that decision.
Here’s to more pub crawls, more archive digging, and more writing about beer and pubs in 2025.
Until then, cheers!
Jess & Ray