Stress and confusion: the concept of cognitive load in the world of beer

Whether we realise it or not, most of us seek pubs (and beers) which require us to use less brain power, and to do less on-the-fly risk assessment.

“You just like pubs where everyone is like you,” said a narky comment on the blog a few months ago.

And, yes, that’s probably true at a basic level – because those pubs require less effort on a weary Wednesday night, or lazy Sunday afternoon.

Which is to say, they come with a lower ‘cognitive load’.

We’ve stopped using Substack and have moved this piece to our blog. You can read the rest of it there, with some 2026 updates, if you’re interested.

Two pubs in Dracula

We’ve spent the past week or so in Transylvania which prompted us both to re-read Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.

There’s a lot of slightly tacky Dracula tourism with several castles and other locations trading on their associations with the historic figure of Vlad Țepeș (the Impaler), AKA Vlad Drăculea.

There’s lots of interesting stuff in the novel but one thing we noticed this time is that a couple of important visitors actually visit a famous London pub, Jack Straw’s Castle, in Hampstead. It’s pictured above in a period postcard via Michael Jefferies on Flickr.

In a passage supposedly written in his diary Dr. Jack Seward mentions that he and Professor Van Helsing, the vampire hunter…

dined at “Jack Straw’s Castle” along with a little crowd of bicyclists and others who were genially noisy. About ten o’clock we started from the inn. It was then very dark, and the scattered lamps made the darkness greater when we were once outside their individual radius.

They then go to the tomb of Lucy Westenra, who Dracula has turned into a vampire, and prevent her from abducting and feeding upon a child. Once this macabre business is done, they briefly visit another famous pub: “By good chance we got a cab near the “Spaniards,” and drove to town…”

On the blog

In the run up to this big trip across Europe we were, let’s be honest, running low on energy, and our blogging had become a bit less frequent. Still, we managed to write a few bits and pieces.

First, looking ahead to the Continent, we wrote about the difficulty of finding good Czech beer, in good condition, in good glassware, in Bristol.

Then, still on the subject of lager in Bristol, we wrote about Zero Degrees for The Session #145. With Matthew Curtis’s prompting, we tried to practice “critique, not criticism” – thinking about why it is that what doesn’t work, doesn’t work.

Finally, most recently, we wrote some almost-live notes on our experience of drinking beer in Timișoara, Romania, where there’s both an important historic brewery and some upstart craft brewers.

We also wrote weekly round-ups of news, nuggets and longreads, with accompanying footnotes and bonus links on Patreon.

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That’s your lot for this month. Will there be a newsletter next month? Maybe, depending on where we are on our travels, and whether we have Wi-Fi, power, time…

Ray & Jess