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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.
There’s something magical about reaching for a style of beer you rarely gravitate towards before it blows all expectations completely out of the water. This was my introduction to Heaney Brewery in County Derry.
Malty, and caramel-sweet with a light, peppery note, I instantly declared to my friends that it was the nicest red ale I’d ever tasted.
I’d tried a few beers from Heaney over the years, having long admired their stylish, bookish yet sleek branding, but this revelation of a red placed them on higher ground. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely adverse to an Irish red ale, it’s just not my go to, more of a “once in a while”.
On a clear day in Glynde, staff at The Trevor Arms can look to the peak of nearby Mount Caburn—the crowning point of a well-trodden path for South Downs walkers setting off from the town of Lewes—and predict how busy they’ll be that afternoon.
Since the pub reopened in the summer of 2025, after standing empty for eight years, the answer to that question has usually been the same: very busy indeed.
The glimmering edifice of McMullen’s Victorian tower brewery catches the evening sunlight like a gilded dovecote. Like other breweries of similar design, its structure allows for a gravity-fed production line: malt and liquor making their way down successive floors to be mashed, sparged, boiled, bittered, knocked-out, chilled, and fermented. Today, however, the building houses luxury apartments, and the beer cellar below contains nothing but underground parking.
“This is Tommy, he had his own brewery in France,” said Lee, the deputy head of brewing at St Austell.
A gang of seven or eight hard Cornish brewers lying around the processing room on the piles of hops and malt, black St Austell outfits faded by years of hard graft, stained by acid and caustic, stared at me with a sort of amused disapproval.
“Hi guys!” I chimed, like an absolute cockhead.
While tourists flock to the Llyn Peninsula in the summer for its seaside charms, Porthmadog retains its industrial heritage, based on slate, shipbuilding, and railways. The town is still home to the world’s oldest-surviving railway company, the Ffestiniog Railway. Its steam locomotives puff up densely wooded mountain slopes, and past small patches of Celtic rainforest, before emerging into the slate-strewn, moon-like landscapes of the old mining centre, Blaenau Ffestiniog.
Coming out of a six-month winter is disorientating. The Isle of Man stands against the Irish Sea’s worst, proud in the spray like a prow, and while its storms are destructive, the heaviest toll is the grey and the fog. “I feel like we haven’t seen the sun in forever,” says Elizabeth Townsend, one half of Kerroo Brewing Company, which she runs with her partner, brewer Nick Scarffe.
