Welcome to The Weekender, a round-up of items from around the web which have caught my eye, outside of the day-to-day beer business.
How Jimmy Carter changed US brewing
Remembered popularly as a peanut farmer, former US president Jimmy Carter, who died this week, aged 100, played his part in the craft beer boom in America.
In 1978, he signed legislation that exempted beer brewed at home, for personal or family consumption, from taxation. This effectively repealed regulations which dated back to the prohibition years.
His work is celebrated by the Homebrewers Association of America, but their blog post also highlights modern problems still facing members in different states. Read more here…
What future for estate pubs?
I grew up in Andover, in Hampshire, which, until the 1960s, was a quiet market town. Then, as part of the post-war plan, it became a London overspill town, with concrete, some might say brutalist estates on its outskirts.
To create a sense of community in these bleak landscapes, estate pubs were built, and some survive to this day, not just in Andover but it towns and cities around the country.
The pubs are looked at in The Mirror by architectural investigators Matthew Bristow and Emily Cole,who argue that these venues could be lost to future generations.
For the past four years, they have been working at Historic England to record the history of these pubs and hundreds of others like them, for the Vulnerable Urban Building Types — The Post-War Public House project. Although it has not been published yet, already six of the pubs they archived have been listed, thanks to their work. Read more here…
Compulsory purchase of shuttered pubs?
Just before Christmas, I carried the story of the Miners Arms Community Pub Ltd, in Nenthead, which drew attention to the closure of the government’s Community Ownership Fund. This was money ringfenced for projects including the funding of community pubs. The villagers were, of course, very disappointed.
A correspondent to The Guardian letters page references a recent lengthy article on the Samuel Smith estate and the company’s policy of ‘shuttering’ pubs to suggest the government establishes a compulsory order scheme of such venues, to get them open again.
“Provision could be made for these pubs to be marketed and this would include reinstating the community ownership funding scheme Labour closed this week,” suggests Mike Stein.
If you haven’t read the article on Humphrey Smith and his pub estate — and it’s an excellent long read by Mark Blacklock — click here.
Stories you may have missed this week
Beer news returned after a Christmas break. Brew York have been particularly active, announcing the arrival of their annual Empress Tonkoko release and their acquisition of the Old Grey Mare pub, in Clifton Green, York. While there was a small, but significant sales boost for hospitality groups nationally, pubs fared poorly. In London, voucher scheme operator CityStack is doing its best to boost the new year fortunes of the capital’s independent pubs. On the beer front, Thornbridge unveiled a new logo marking its 20th anniversary, and Glasgow’s Overtone collaborated with podcast Ale & Audio. Finally, as a new year in British beer gets under way, there’s a chance to review the bigger stories from 2024 in a new ebook published by Beer Today. Get your copy here for just £1.49.
