Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin (Good health, a long life, a wet mouth, and death in Mann) When I raised my plastic pint glass in celebration outside The Railway Inn in Union Mills, there were plenty of reasons why. For one thing, we’d made it: our four hour early-am ferry […]
Pub Culture Songs: Same Old Thing
If there’s one thing I love, it’s music that tells a story. As a kid, I always loved songs that put me in a totally different place and made me think about things – things like lust and nightclubs and fit girls and something hiding in the woodshed – I’d never heard of before. This […]
What was the first beer you drank?
It’s a simple question, unless you’re being asked it point blank on live radio. There should be a simple answer – some small glint laying there in the past that points towards the moment you decide, “this is mine.” Well, sometimes you don’t want to share that moment. Maybe it’s private. But then maybe you […]
The Session #133 Hometown Glories – The John O’ Gaunt, Lancaster
The John O’Gaunt is a pub I measure all others against. Modestly squatted between high-street shops and the Sally Army on Market Street, Lancaster, its pot-bellied, stained glass window gives only a glimpse at what lies within. On most Friday, Saturday and Sundays, you’ll find a band tuning up in the bay window at the […]
Pub Culture Songs: The Copper Top
Music is hugely important to me and so I thought this new series of blog posts could reflect that passion from a pub culture point of view. The thing is, most legendary songs are written in pubs. On the back of beermats, on torn up cigarette packets, noted in a phone, or just half-thought of […]
You’re answering the wrong questions about craft beer
If you follow me on Twitter, you might already know that I successfully completed my first bar shift in more than 7 years recently. No mean feat, considering my customer service and mental arithmetic skills have been made slow and lazy by desks. I’d been tentatively excited about it. Working behind a bar is something […]
Pubs of Dublin
Visiting Dublin was a revelation to me. The city breaks I normally take are in places where the sun shines and impromptu fiestas block roads and rouse plaza drinkers to take their tiny saucers of cubed snacks into the streets. To visit somewhere less than 200 miles away midwinter seems counter-productive – what for? Why […]
A refuge
What’s in a pub that makes it a pub? There are hundreds of odes to the warm, inviting local, a shelter from the tumultuous skies of life, a welcoming place to anchor yourself to in the aftermath of a bad day. There are pubs as worn as your oldest pair of docs and there are […]
Beer Nemesis
Boak & Bailey wrote a piece on their beer nemesis last week and I wanted them to do a series on the types of nemesis you meet in pubs, beer festivals, bottle shops and online. They graciously declined. I kept thinking about it though, wondering who mine might be, and the answer came to me […]