Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got drink driving, Dublin and drippins.

First, some news from close to home, here in Bristol: Justin Hawke, owner of Moor Beer, has stepped away from the brewery.

This comes after months of difficulty for the brewery prompted by comments he made on social media in support of the Israel Defence Forces, which triggered a boycott of Moor products across Bristol and beyond.

The brewery’s new owners are Callum Bickers and Bruce Gray, who also own Left Handed Giant. We first read about this at local outlet Bristol 24/7 and shared some thoughts of our own in a thread on BlueSky.

Here’s something heartwarming to wrap up the year: one of our favourite pubs, The Star Inn at Crowlas, near Penzance in Cornwall, has reopened to the delight of its former regulars. The Star really was a magical pub and we loved the beer Pete Elvin brewed in the back yard. Local beer writer Darren Norbury, who edits and writes Beer Today, was both a regular at The Star and, for a while, worked behind the bar. So when he says that the new Star still has that magic, we trust him:

Much-needed paint has been applied, and forbidding net curtains, a synthesis of man-made fibres held together by nicotine dating back into last century, have been replaced by elegant cream coloured louvre shutters. The last remnants of the nets have been framed, however, lest we forget… The brewery is the realm of brewers Lewis and Rich. To the right of the bar they proudly display the trophy for CAMRA’s Champion Beer of Britain, awarded back in August to Penzance Mild. The duo are carrying on the fine work begun by Pete back in 2008… Lewis and Rich are pushing the boundaries of Pete’s brewing legacy in a way that I know he would approve of, even though he wouldn’t have considered doing it himself. The beers also fly out to a dozen or more pubs in mid- and west Cornwall these days, boosting the profile of the brand, while also keeping it very firmly rooted. And the beers still have that indefinable ‘Penzance-ness’ about them.

For Pellicle Robyn Gilmour has written about Irish brewery Changing Times, digging into the complexities of brewing and selling craft beer in a country dominated by Guinness and other multinationals:

As Ronan and I chat, the pub opens and a regular comes in on the dot… I expect him to order a Guinness, but instead he takes a Clockwork… Faced with the choice between Guinness and an independent stout in another bar, and I’m unsure whether a gentleman such as him would have made the same choice; instinct tells me it’s trust in The Swan that lends credibility to the Clockwork tap, and it’s the quality of the beer that keeps drinkers coming back for more. Earlier on, in my conversation with Willie, he mentioned that Guinness drinkers who swap over to Clockwork one week might be back on the Black Stuff the next, and continue to flit between the two. While this might sound like non-linear progress, in a market of life-long, brand-loyal, mainstream drinkers, even this kind of change is a remarkable achievement.

(Beer people based in Dublin had thoughts about this piece. Or pointedly didn’t.)

Oh no: we’ve just learned about another unattainable beer that we’ll never get to try. At Hugging the Bar Courtney Iseman has written about Celly Drippins, a beer produced in very limited amounts by Sierra Nevada:

Essentially, an unimaginable amount of work goes into hopping Celebration with freshly picked Cascade, Centennial, and Chinook hops… But when all is said and done, those hop bags that steep in the beer still have liquid in them that continues to drip even after, productivity- and efficiency-wise, the team has to pull the beer off for filtration and packaging. Those “drippins’,” about as concentrated with hop aromas as can possibly be… The anticipation was palpable as the small group of invited media members I was lucky enough to be a part of was led into the brewery’s second-floor taproom… Craft beer enthusiasm was alive and well in North Carolina that weekend, I promise you that… And most importantly, the beer was—no hyperbole—the best I’ve ever had? Yes, I do believe it was the best beer I’ve ever had. I’ve never experienced hops’ geraniol expressed so intensely. It was more floral than I knew a beer could be…

Surely some British brewery could steal this idea?

At Real Ale, Real Music Chris Dyson has shared his list of the best pubs he visited in 2025, and it forms a hell of a to-do list for anyone touring or visiting the UK in 2026:

I have tried a lot of different beers and visited a lot of new pubs this year, many in areas I have not visited before or not for a long time. Trips with FC Halifax Town to several new grounds have helped along the way, with my first ever visit to Cornwall in October a highlight, although beer-wise it wasn’t the best place we visited all year. I have visited London more often this year than I have since my days working as a buyer, and for only the second time a pub from the capital has made it into the list of my top pubs… 

This is a great format and we’d like to see other bloggers’ takes.

There’s been some spicy stuff from CAMRA’s What’s Brewing recently. Two pieces in the past week share a common thread, which is to challenge accepted positions when it comes to ‘supporting pubs’.

In the first David Jesudason challenges the idea that to support pubs we need to take a permissive attitude to drinking and driving: “I am very pro-pubs as community spaces and I yearn for them to thrive. But I don’t believe this should ever be at the cost of endangering lives.”

And, in the second, Matthew Curtis dares to suggest that if the hospitality industry can’t cope with paying people the minimum wage or living wage, that’s not pub workers’ problem:

I witnessed several influential figures within the UK hospitality industry decrying how this increase would be bad for business, especially as the increase to the minimum wage was above the rate of inflation. This echoed the reaction to last year’s increase to National Insurance contributions, which also increased the per-employee cost for UK businesses… As this piece is merely my own opinion, I’ll give these individuals the benefit of anonymity, but among them was the managing director of a brewery and pub chain that in 2025 posted pre-tax profits of £7.1m…

Finally, from BlueSky, something bafflingly 21st century…

This week our malt supplier told us malt will be cheaper next year because of Ozempic and it really felt like the point where we realised we don’t understand anything anymore.

— Pilot (@pilotbeer.co.uk) 13 December 2025 at 09:55

For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got news of the passing of a beer blogger, among other things.

First, some sad news: Peter Edwardson, AKA the Pub Curmudgeon, has died.

His posts featured in these round-ups many times over the years and we corresponded with him many times. He was one of those people who’d been around a long time and seemed to remember everything. Pick up any old edition of CAMRA’s What’s Brewing and you’ll probably find a challenging correspondence from Peter on the letters page.

Politically, Peter was on the right, and you’ll see variations on “We may not have agreed on everything but…” in many of the tributes being paid. Some of his arguments, especially away from beer and pubs, could sometimes be pretty extreme and, frankly, quite maddening. But he was also capable of great lucidity on the subject of what made pubs tick and the challenges they face in the 21st century. 

Once again, we find ourselves hoping that his blog – a valuable resource with almost 20 years of posts – is somehow preserved.

As it happens, a debate broke out this week into which the Pub Curmudgeon would have no doubt enjoyed wading. Why don’t young people like cask ale? Does it matter? And, wait, is that actually true?

It started with a somewhat melancholy piece by Anthony Gladman at his newsletter, The Glass, in which he wonders why we spend so much time fretting about how to get young people into cask ale:

The kid wasn’t wrong, he just liked different things to me. His tastes had nothing to do with me just as mine had nothing to do with him. The only real difference between us, when it came down to it, was that his preferences represented the coming world and mine did not… It made me think of cask ale — that glorious, valuable, unique drink to which we in its homeland fail to pay proper heed. It is subtle, delicious, delicate, and increasingly ignored. I am in my 50s now and count myself among its confirmed lifelong fans. Even I think of it partly as an old man’s drink. The kid would think it most assuredly so. If he stopped to think about it at all.

This prompted a response by Matthew Curtis on BlueSky, arguing that, actually, there’s plenty of evidence that young people do like cask ale and are interested in it. The short thread starts here:

Sales of cask Bass have grown nearly 20% this year, and its now sold in over 1000 outlets as opposed to 400 12 months ago. Landlord is #1 by value. Boddington's was relaunched. Other breweries I speak to are in cask growth: Theakston, Thornbridge, Abbeydale, Siren, Five points…

— Matthew Curtis (@totalcurtis.bsky.social) 11 December 2025 at 11:00

And publican Hazel Southwell also chipped in:

Black Sheep is in the top ten sellers by cask ale and has the administrators in pulling it apart… the biggest threat to cask ale isn’t a lack of demand, it’s fear from publicans who don’t understand how to handle it and big beer companies killing brands (many built on real ale!)

For what it’s worth, our impression is that Matthew is right – cask ale is doing relatively well in 2025, at least in terms of prominence in the better pubs. It’s just that, per Anthony’s first point above, the youngest people drinking it aren’t “kids”, but people in their late twenties or thirties, with jobs and kids. It’s something you mature into, we reckon, and maybe that’s fine.

On a related note, Jeff Alworth at Beervana has been pondering taprooms and how what many of us still think of as the new-fangled coming thing are, in fact, old hat:

It is becoming clear that a lot of the “lessons” the industry absorbed during the Great Expansion were wrong. Flagships were not dead. Hazy IPAs were not going to supplant clear hoppy beers. Erstwhile craft breweries, fueled by national distribution and big beer ownership were not going to become the new Budweisers. And for the purposes of this post, taprooms were not always going attract large audiences merely because they sold beer… Part of this is a trend thing. During that great expansion, a bunch of related fixtures of craft brewing got white-hot: hazy IPAs packaged in four-packs with bright, geometric designs; ultra-fruity, sweet beers that would attract huge lines; and spare, industrial taprooms. At the time, those taprooms seemed cool and futuristic in their minimalism and were full of 20- and 30-somethings. They were highly specific in the way that white-hot trends get, and that means they perfectly captured a moment. Unfortunately for an industry trying to capture young drinkers today, that moment happened a decade back, when Gen Z were kids on dad’s expeditions to tick off a few more beers on Untappd. And now, for a lot of 20-somethings, taprooms don’t seem cool and futuristic; they have the vaguely cringe feel of dad’s old passions.

At Beer Diary Phil Cook has a typically thoughtful analysis of how breweries approach brewing awards as part of their wider marketing strategies, by presenting themselves as underdogs:

Whatever Mountain Culture are now, “underdog” ain’t it. They have earned their successes and I’m still a big fan of a lot of what they do, but this side of them — continuing to downplay how they’ve changed and claiming the mantle of the brave battler to rally support in a survey of beer drinkers — is getting ridiculous… But this kind of campaign is the “new normal” for the Hottest 100: make a pitch about the general worthiness of your “team” and direct sympathetic voters towards a specific one of your beers, to maximise its chances; asking some flagship beer to stand in for your support of its brewery, essentially… “Vote for this beer because we’re the longest-surviving indie in the running” or “because no local brewery has made the podium before” or “to put this small town on the map (while we awkwardly riff on what its name sounds like in English)” or just plainly “because it’s tough being a small brewery and we could use the boost.

We don’t often include academic papers here (they’re often locked behind paywalls and, when they’re not, they can be heavy going) but one caught our attention this week. It’s about the Spanish craft beer market and, between the tables and formulas, there’s a story about what ‘drink local’ means in practice:

The results described above show a profile (Table 2) of Spanish craft and industrial beers as having a slightly high price (4.08 euros) and price-litre (10.21 euros), as well as a moderate alcohol content (6.21°), packaged either in a bottle or can, in 33 cl or 44 cl format, with an overwhelming majority of Pale Ale style beers (48.30 %) and labelling unrelated to real elements (71.55 %)… Among these results, it is striking that, despite the existing previous literature that relates the importance of the narrative of craft beers in their local context to increase the sense of place (Ikäheimo, 2021) and the need to link craft beer to place, creating labels that represent it and are unique (Mathews & Patton, 2016), the sample collected barely identifies 5.96 % (n = 70) of beers whose labelling has some representative and identifiable element of the place of production.

In other words, craft beer in Spain is unanchored from the places where it is brewed; beers tend to have wacky, abstract labelling and names; and most of the production is some form of pale ale. This feels to us like a valid description of the craft beer scenes in quite a few countries – including, at times, the UK.

It’s interesting partly because that sense of being placeless used to be the complaint levelled at ‘macro’ beer.

At British Beer Breaks Phil Mellows has been reflecting on what ‘Christmas beer’ means in 2025, and how the market has changed:

You’ll see quite a few Christmas cask ales in pubs, though it seems to me not as many as there used to be. Often, they’ll have an ABV of little more than 4%, which isn’t a problem as long as they’ve got the flavour. But some of them fail to distinguish themselves from the kind of ales you might drink all year round. The festive tag is just a marketing thing… This is the danger. Sticking a bit on tinsel on it and calling it Christmas. The beers we’re looking for here require substance. They need to be special. They have to match the smells and flavours of the season.

Finally, from BlueSky, a public service announcement…

I drank (probably too many) pints of London Porter at the Coach and Horses in Greek Street yesterday, it was absolutely perfect. It might still be on so why not get down there?

[image or embed]

— Will Hawkes (@willhawkes.bsky.social) 11 December 2025 at 20:24

For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday. In a controlled way, Stan Hieronymus is also back in the ‘featured links’ game, highlighting one link and one quote, the most recent of which was a corker.