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I’m frantically searching the internet, flipping between Instagram profiles of local pubs and beer review app Untappd. Why? Well. The release of Colbier Brew Co.’s first white stout, Falsetto, has just been announced, and it’s quickly running out in the local pubs around Liverpool.
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.
A “bodger” today means someone who does a shoddy job, cuts all available corners, takes the money and runs. But centuries ago, in rural Buckinghamshire, it meant something quite different. It referred to craftsmen who built chain-link fences for farmers to safeguard their crops and animals. Bodger’s, a barley wine from The Chiltern Brewery, celebrates that tradition.
Hopleaf Bar—referred to most commonly as just “Hopleaf” or, sometimes locally, “the Hopleaf”—is a loosely Belgian-inspired pub that has played an outsized role in the development of the city’s, and the country’s, beer scenes over the last 30-plus years. Even still, it has never lost its identity as a community meeting place. It’s both a local for many Chicagoans and a destination for pilgrims seeking this holy land of beer.
