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When my local pub, The Roebuck, sadly announced the untimely death of landlord Michael Robinson this summer, the tributes poured in. He was a kind and warm man who made anyone who worked or visited the Victorian pub in SE1 feel at home. During his wake at the pub, which he and his Parched co-owners had called theirs since 2003, there were so many mourners that they spilled out of doorways and onto the pavements.
“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.
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.
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.
Communal brewhouses with gear-and-pully mash tuns. Brewing rights that stretch back to the Middle Ages. Wood-fired brew kettles and coolships. All this alone is enough to make Zoigl utterly unique. But there’s something more, the essential ingredient that ties everything together: the Zoiglstube. It’s in these traditional taverns that the magical transformation of communal brewhouses and coolships into Zoigl takes place. Without the Zoiglstube, Zoigl is just another Kellerbier.
