When it gets too hot even for a refreshing beer: how heatwaves hit pubs

There's summer, when you want to hang out in a beer garden and drink lager. And there are heatwaves, when you want to hide and chew ice cubes.

It’s been hard to think about much other than staying cool for the past few weeks as the UK has gone through a series of heatwaves. But what do heatwaves mean for beer and pubs?

When it’s sunny beer in the broadest sense gets a boost. People want a refreshing pint and they want to sit in a beer garden, even on a weekday evening when they might usually be dry.

But heatwaves… Heatwaves are different.

As people keep pointing out, neither this country nor its buildings are built for extreme weather. After a couple of days of it the brick and stone starts to retain the heat and their interiors get stuck at uncomfortable levels.

Some pubs feel cool and shady, perfect places to hide out. Others become unbearable pretty quickly, however many doors are propped open, or industrial fans are rented.

Even if the customers are reasonably comfortable, sitting on their arses drinking cold lager, it can be hard to relax when the bar staff look fit to drop.

Then there’s the challenge of getting to the pub. We usually go to the pub on Saturday afternoon or evening but last weekend couldn’t face leaving the house. We spent the afternoon hiding with curtains drawn and fans blowing.

If there was a pub next door, or just round the corner, we might have been tempted. But we live in a neighbourhood that’s had all its pubs taken away.

The nearest places we like drinking are at least quarter of an hour away, along shadeless industrial desertways cutting through an urban heat island.

Kirsty Walker on BlueSky said:

The pub I work at has its strategic closures, e.g. for refurbishment, in the summer, because its a residential area corner pub with no beer garden. Numbers definitely fall when it's hot, especially as every house in the area has at least a yard to sit in.

Still, we had some beer at home, so it wouldn’t be too bad, right? Except however much we chilled it, it never quite seemed to refresh us.

After a couple of lagers we gave up and switched to iced water. Apparently our bodies were telling us to hydrate and beer, unfortunately, has very much the opposite effect.

When we have made it to the pub during heatwaves, we’ve often found cask ale to be a write off. Partly because not all pub cellars are capable of withstanding extreme heat, and partly because people switch to lager leaving ale to lose its sparkle.

Some hospitality professionals we chatted to agree. Michael Deakin, who has worked in various pubs over the course of many years, said:

[Heatwaves are generally] bad for city centre pubs. We find that people escape to the country or the seaside when the weather is like this, so your weekdays don't change much, but your weekends fall off a cliff. A decent outside space tempers that slightly. Cask sales also slow to a crawl unfortunately.

Kelly Sidgwick of Bristol brewery Good Chemistry, which also runs several pubs, told us that…

..it's not great for cask… Last week our best sellers [at The Kings Head] in order were sommat like: pint of lager, pint of a diff lager, pint of Thornbridge 5.5% delicious dark mild, pint of cider, pint of cask, pint of cask, pint of casks, half of lager.

Even lager struggles when it’s really, really hot, though.

As with the cans we drank at home, lager in the pub during a heatwave never seems quite as cold as you want it to be, at least after the first few sips.

Some pubs, such as The Llandoger Trow here in Bristol, address this with the theatrical flourish of frozen glasses.

Beer geeks might scoff but it’s remarkably effective at (a) knocking a degree or two off the temperature of your pint; (b) sending signals to your brain about the icy chill it’s about to experience; and (c) giving you something to press against your neck, to feel a moment’s blessed relief.

Others give up on beer altogether, wheeling out their alcoholic slushie machines, frozen margaritas, and ice-cube laden cider.

Heatwaves in history

Researching the history of lager, as we do from time to time, we came across the hypothesis that the heatwave of the summer of 1976 kickstarted Britain’s embrace of lager.

Digging around in the numbers back in 2012 we thought we could see a correlation between bumps in sales of lager and notable heatwaves, in 1959, in 1969, and again in 1976.

In the 1970s, Guinness reckoned that Harp lager picked up new drinkers every summer who then stuck with lager when the cooler weather returned.

Now, with easier access to newspaper archives, we can find plenty of evidence to suggest that demand for lager did indeed surge during the summer of 1976.

The Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail for 9 July 1976 reported, for example, that:

Lager is particularly popular and some breweries admit to being stretched to meet the demand… And sales of mineral waters have also soared with the temperature gauges.

Now, what we were saying above about hydration?

LAGER DROUGHT shouted the The Coventry Evening Telegraph for 9 August 1976, reporting that pubs in the Midlands had run out of lager leaving them unable to capitalise on increased demand.

What about more recently, though? The summer of 2022 was pretty scary with people’s bins spontaneously catching on fire and temperatures creeping above 40°C at points.

Stats and commentary from that time, via our pal Darren at Beer Today, suggest that the heatwave did indeed create drag on sales:

CGA by NielsenIQ’s latest Drinks Recovery Tracker shows average sales by value in managed venues in the seven days to Saturday, 16th July [2022], were 0.4% ahead of the same week in 2019… But as the heatwave reached a peak, sales dipped by between 10% and 14% every day from Tuesday to Friday (19th to 22nd July)... “It’s not often that we see sunny weather have a detrimental effect on drinks sales, but the recent heatwave was just too much for some consumers and operators,” says Jonathan Jones, CGA’s managing director, UK and Ireland.

Our hypothesis here is that warm weather is good for beer sales but really hot weather cancels out that effect.

And the fact is that we can expect more frequent spells of more extreme weather from here on.

How pubs can adapt to heatwave summers

If we accept that heatwaves are different to “a bit of lovely warm weather” it might be time for us to lighten up when it comes to keeping cool.

Frosted glasses? You know what, bring ‘em on.

Ice cubes in your beer? Ah, why not, just for a day or two, while it’s like this.

The big change, though, will probably need to be the temperature in pubs and their cellars. If we know we are going to end up somewhere cool, and get a decent cool pint of cask, we might brave the desertway to get there.

Is air conditioning the answer? That’s easier said than done when many UK pubs are Victorian and not built to be sealed boxes. There’s also an environmental, ethical consideration to take into account.

Personally, we could live with Victorian pub buildings getting solar panels on the roof to power air con, and better insulated modern windows, if it made them sustainable for another century or so.

Why are we such suckers for Vault City?

Every now and then Jess decides it’s time to visit Pat’s News & Booze because we can’t maintain a beer blog if all we ever drink is endless pints of Lost & Grounded Keller Pils.

And we always come away with ludicrously expensive cans of Vault City beer – even though the tasting notes always end up being a variation on: “Didn’t live up the promise of the name or description, far too sickly.”

Most recently, it was a peach and apricot pastel de nata beer at 4.5%, in which a beguiling aroma of vanilla custard led into a sweet, thin beer that we couldn’t even finish.

Just to double down on our gullibility, we also bought a small can of ‘Dubai style’ chocolate pistachio imperial pastry stout. In Turkey earlier this year, everything was ‘Dubai’, from ice cream to chocolate bars. It’s the daftest social media led influencer nonsense you can imagine, driven more by the visual appeal of bright green pistachio goop than the actual flavour. And yet, there we were, handing over (from memory) about £9 for 330ml of something in an admittedly very pretty green can.

Guess what? Jess called it “Instant headache juice” and abandoned it after a couple of sips. Ray persevered, having a sweeter tooth, and quite enjoyed it, even if the primary connection to Dubai seemed to be the design of the can.

We really have nobody to blame but ourselves. Vault City beers don’t pretend to be anything other than novelties and if you buy a beer that names itself after a custard pastry and you find it too sweet… Yeah, that’s on you.

For more on this check out our newsletter from March in which we connected the popularity of dessert beers with the rise of vaping.

On the blog

For the June edition of The Session, hosted by Laura Hadland, we rambled about pub quizzes. Thinking about them for this hardened our opinion that, actually, Steve Dunkley is right – they’re a bit crap. Especially when you just want a pint and some bloke starts handing out biros and one-two-three-ing into a microphone. Laura’s round up of all the contributions is at The Extreme Housewife.

Out of nowhere, really, we found ourselves with a string of related thoughts about how pubs are often run by couples. It started with an old pub guide we were given as a gift and that connected with some stuff we already had in our library. Anyway, we thought this was rather a good piece that got a bit overlooked because, social media strategy geniuses that we are, we published it quite late one evening when there were more interesting things going on. Do check it out.

Our most read post this month was one we were a bit nervous about writing because we didn’t particularly want to end up being quoted in The Daily Mail or wherever. Anyway, we wrote it as clearly, soberly and honestly as we could, and seem to have avoided too much flak. It’s a matter-of-fact bit of reporting about how Bristol’s pubs have responded to the founder of Moor Beer declaring his support for the Israeli armed forces on social media.

Last week we wrote about our disappointing visit to The George Inn, one of the most important historic pubs in England, which has had most of its charm knocked out of it by gastro-chainification.

There were also regular Saturday round-ups of news, nuggets and longreads and, for Patreon subscribers, footnotes for each of those posts with extra links. Patreon supporters also got weekly notes on the best beers we drank each weekend.

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And that’s it, that’s your lot. Until next month,

Cheers!

Ray & Jess