The Ups and Downs of Supermarket Beer
Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Writing about beer and pubs since 2007 In 1989, Roger Protz provided The Guardian with a round-up of the best beers available from the high street for drinking at home....
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Golden Pint Awards 1993
Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Writing about beer and pubs since 2007 By 1993, Boak & Bailey’s beer newsletter was no longer a few stapled sheets. The December edition of that year was printed on...
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Embracing Keg, Rejecting CAMRA, 1995
Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Writing about beer and pubs since 2007 In 1995, a handful of Brits were beginning to get excited about American beer and, at the same time, rather irritated by the...
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The Arrival of Aroma
Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Writing about beer and pubs since 2007 The fundamental shift in thinking around hops which took place at some point after the 1970s was reflected in a mid-nineties UK...
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Where Did Christmas Ales Come From?
For a long time, Britain had beers associated with Christmas that weren’t explicitly billed as Christmas beers. If Frank Baillie’s 1973 Beer Drinker’s Companion is anything to go by, there were...
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Pubs of London E17, 1991
CAMRA’s East London & City Beer Guide is a fascinating document which, across three editions from 1983 to 1991, charts changes to the drinking landscape. We’ve had the 1986 edition for a while, and...
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Artyfacts from the Nyneties #1: Lemon Ale
In Chapter 10 of Brew Britannia we wrote about the craze in the mid-1990s for interesting one-off seasonals. Some were single-hopped, others were spiced and/or infused with fruit beers. This beauty...
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Artyfacts from the Nyneties #2: World Beer Menu, 1993
The front cover. “Welcome to the most exotic bar in the whole festival… This year’s star feature has to be the USA. Thanks to months of work by Jonathan Tuttle… Rick’s American Bar has probably the...
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Artyfacts from the Nyneties #4: Meet Pete
Click to enlarge. The advertisement above appeared in the Campaign for Real Ale’s monthly What’s Brewing in November 1994. The year before, ‘Pete’s’ had sponsored the Bieres Sans Frontieres programme...
View ArticleHELP US: Gastropubs in the 1990s
Did you drink, eat, work at or run a gastropub between 1990-1998? If so, we’d love to hear from you. We’re especially interested in diary entries, letters, articles, emails or other records you might...
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HELP: Wetherspoon’s, Manchester, August 1995
Stained glass at the Moon Under Water, taken on our visit in February 2016. This is very specific: we want to talk to anyone who recalls attending the opening of The Moon Under Water on Deansgate,...
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Was Meantime the First UK Craft Brewery?
In a Tweet Meantime Brewing stated their claim to be (paraphrasing): ‘The only craft brewer in the UK when it was founded in 1999.’ It’s paraphrased because, after prodding from disgruntled beer...
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The Most Important British Craft Beers?
In response to an article listing ‘The 25 Most Important American Craft Beers’ Michael Lally at Bush Craft Beer has challenged his readers to think about what might be on a Brit-centric version of...
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Session #123: The Cyber Is Huge
For this edition of the international beer blogging jamboree Josh Weikert at Beer Simple asks us to consider whether the internet is hurting or helping craft beer. SOURCE: Dodgy animated GIFS website....
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BOOK EXTRACT: The Birth of the Gastropub, 1990
In the summer of 1991 The Times’s food critic, Jonathan Meades, took a break from visiting upmarket restaurants to investigate a new eatery that was generating a strange amount of buzz. He found it...
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Artyfacts from the Nyneties #6: Beers of ’94
SOURCE: JS Journal Online (PDF). Yesterday we stumbled upon a 2006 ‘top ten bottled British ales’ listicle by Pete Brown which we shared on Twitter, and which reminded us of something we found during...
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Crunching the Numbers on British Beer Styles
Rather than relying on interpretations of tasting notes and faulty memories, wouldn’t it be good to know for sure if and how British beer has changed in the past 20 years? Well, there is a way. In the...
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The evolution of ‘pale’n’hoppy’ ale in the UK
This piece first appeared online at the now defunct All About Beer in 2015. It’s collected in our book Balmy Nectar but, as there’s been some chat lately about when and how the UK got the taste for...
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