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When Nathan Vickers was a student, he lived in what he describes as a “horrid” student flat in Edinburgh. Its only saving grace was that he could go downstairs in his slippers and walk directly into the Athletic Arms—one of the finest pubs in the city.
“I remember looking around, not really knowing anything about beer,” he says, before running through the conflicting thoughts which entered his head as he encountered the bar for the first time.
“Have you seen a man dressed as a chicken?”
I’m sitting at the bar of the Red Herring, enjoying a pint of Oakham’s Jeffrey Hudson Bitter, when four men on a stag do burst through the front door. The group begins to check the radiators. The Red Herring is a fairly spacious Victorian pub, with room for a pool table and a dartboard, but their search is completed quickly. By way of explanation, they share a photo of a pub radiator; apparently, they’re following visual clues to hunt down the stag, or man-chicken. Afterwards, they each down a shot of something pink before jumping back into their waiting cab—but not before apologising for interrupting our conversation.
Standing among 10 acres of grapevines at the edge of Enfield in North London, it’s hard to believe the M25 is so close. A herd of Red Poll cows moo in the neighbouring field; feral parakeets raucously chatter overhead and into the green expanse of ancient woodland beyond. Welcome to Forty Hall Vineyard.
Today, Café Beermoth is known and loved as a venue that sources exciting beers from independent breweries. But before Beermoth became a café, it was a shop. In February 2013—when its original location opened its doors at 70 Tib Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter—Beermoth was, remarkably, the city centre’s first specialist, off-premise beer retailer. It arrived at the beginning of what would become an exciting period of development for the Manchester beer scene.
A group of mice is known as a mischief. This fact strikes me as appropriate as I stare at the line-drawn mouse on a can of Off Color Brewing’s Beer for Lounging. The mouse is one in a menagerie of characters that decorate the Chicago, Illinois–based brewery’s labels, including a capybara, a lion, and a number of cats. All of them are playfully engaged in a variety of anthropomorphic activities. They’re deceptively simple drawings—the kind of art you could imagine doodling on a bartop napkin—but are really the expression of a great deal of time and talent.
On a cold Tuesday night in 2011 in Wellington, New Zealand, a crowd of beer geeks gathered in a subterranean bar on Taranaki Street. They had come to Hashigo Zake—a cult beer bar housed in the former cellblock of an old police station, sadly no longer with us—to sample the first beers from Garage Project.
Just a few decades ago, Nottingham’s skyline was punctuated by iconic brewery buildings producing beers that were part of the city’s DNA. The famous Shipstone’s star, and the Robin Hood silhouette of Home Ales, proudly adorned those buildings. Streets hummed with the pungent scents of malt and hops, and hundreds of pubs carried their names.
Bright buttercup yellow, it catches the eye, even through the shop window. A woman digs into the generous, fluffy mound of butter and scoops a piece onto the scale. With the help of two notched wooden paddles, she forms it into a perfectly rectangular pat while a studious, delighted audience watches. The butter is then carefully folded and wrapped in a sheet of white paper, like a gift.
In the 1980s beer culture went hand-in-hand with mining here in the East Midlands. Back then, the brewing industry in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was thriving, and many of the collieries were yet to experience peak production. A pint of mild or bitter wasn’t a curated lifestyle choice; it was a hard-earned punctuation mark at the end of every laborious day. Best enjoyed in jam-packed, smoky welfare halls where the air was thick with chatter, and the drink was unmistakably familiar.
Krishan Rajput takes an emerald Budvar bottle from a shelf and tells me how this is where his beer journey began in 1989. He explains how his family shop, Stirchley Wines & Spirits began selling a range of beers a world apart from other off-licences. This was a decade after his father, Amrik, opened the family business, Stirchley Wines & Spirits, in the south Birmingham suburb of the same name, near where the Cadbury’s factory still looms large. This is what initially drew the Rajputs to the area—Amrik worked as an engineer for the chocolate maker.
In a warehouse building on The Shore in Leith there is a natural wine bar called Haze. Its name is appropriate, both for the unfiltered wines it sells and the haar—sea fog—that rumbles inland on warm days. To get to Haze, you have to cross the threshold of an old merchant’s warehouse, now called Brown’s of Leith, and when your eyes adjust to the mood lighting there’s a pleasant surprise of stainless steel and softly melting church candles inside. Not a lick of beige. Within, there’s pét-nat by the glass, good coffee, ice cream sandos, and the fancy tinned fish people from the New Town go crazy for.
Upon arriving at Maisel’s Brauerei in Bayreuth, Franconia, it becomes immediately clear that this is not your typical Bavarian brewery. A huge steel sculpture of Mother Earth, wearing a crown of hops and extending a single hand holding a seedling, stands guard at the entrance. Within, a Pop Art–style mural fills one wall of the brewery building. A succession of graffiti-inspired pieces climb the red-brick chimney, transforming it into a vertical art installation.
I have a thirst to quench. It’s just as well, then, that I’ve arrived at Birrificio Italiano’s brewery in Limido Comasco, a village 20 miles northwest of Milan, in the far north of Italy. A keen northerly wind whips across the forecourt, though bright sunlight mitigates its harshness. Once inside, the brewery’s founder, Agostino Arioli—whom I first met in 2008—asks me if I would like a beer. I plump for a Tipopils, the beer that launched the brewery 30 years ago. Having drunk deeply of many glorious examples of the pils style across Europe from Brasserie de la Senne’s pristine Zenne Pils to Fässla’s crisp and sprightly example, I still believe that this is still one of the best on the continent, if not the world.
Across the road from the White Rose, a pair of neatly dressed women hand us a phone. “Could we be cheeky and get a picture?” It strikes me as an unremarkable request: a quick souvenir of the first pub on the Mumbles Mile, to be followed by messier selfies as the night goes on. But I’ve misread things completely.
Five hours north of Tokyo and twenty degrees colder, I climb into a taxi in Hakodate City. My driver furrows his brow as I clumsily explain to him where I need to go. “No,” he says firmly. “There is no winery in Hakodate.”
Panic sets in. My Japanese peaks at restaurant level and is certainly not sufficient for a pantomime of “oh no there isn't/oh yes there is” with a stubborn taxi driver. As I frantically scroll through emails, maps and screenshots in search of supporting evidence, he shrugs and starts the engine. Perhaps he's decided that, even if this proves a waste of both our time, he'll at least earn the smug satisfaction of being right.
