Clik here to view.
JW Lees, at last
We’ve been wanting to try some or any of Manchester brewery JW Lees’ beers for a while now, but they don’t turn up in London much. This week, I (Bailey…) finally got the chance, taking Tandleman’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shameless Fictional Beer
The brilliant Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester has an area put aside for displays about specific communities in the city. When we visited (this weekend — we’ve just got back) it was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Marble Madness
After reading various people raving about Marble for the last couple of years, a visit to their brewpub was always going to be a top priority for our visit to Manchester. First up were, pints of, er,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beer festivals are growing on us
At a loose end, we decided to pop to Manchester for the weekend, taking in the National Winter Ales Festival, of which Tandleman was one of the organisers. After startling him with our unannounced...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A really soulless pub
Rain Bar is J W Lees flagship Manchester pub. It’s on the canalside in a former umbrella factory, hence the name. (Or is it a reference to Liam Gallagher’s first band?) You get the impression from...
View ArticleManchester Jazz Pubs, 1950s
“When I lived in Manchester in the 1950s, the pubs were bursting at the seams on Saturday evenings as fans got their weekly ration of jazz… In the Napoleon Inn, you had to ask the landlady to leave...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reflections on our Northern Tour
Last week’s visit to the north of England (Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield) was actually as near as we’re getting to a holiday this year. We figured that, even if we didn’t get chance to plug Brew...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where the Boddies is Buried
In its heyday, Boddington’s Bitter was among the most highly-regarded of British beers, and the pride of its home city of Manchester. These days, it is rather unloved and rootless. Where did it all go...
View ArticleCarter’s Lunch, Manchester, c.1904
“Our local carters working the [Manchester] warehouses seldom took food with them. Public houses, avid for trade, put on some kind of a free snack with their 1½d ‘carters’ pints’. Certain pubs went...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lager Beer in 19th Century Manchester
Manchester seems to have got a supply of Dreher’s Vienna Beer only a few months after it first arrived in London, in 1868, but it doesn’t seem to have quite taken. Though the focus of our short e-book...
View ArticleClik here to view.
GALLERY: Not Always About the Beer
We spent the last week and a bit flying round the north west of England looking at (a) brewery records and (b) pubs. We needed dinner near our hotel in Liverpool and stumbled upon Thomas Rigby’s, an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Boddington’s Pump Clips, 1963
Here’s a little detail that caught our eye in the Boddington’s Brewery board minute books, from August 1963: an order for pump clips. Advertising — Pump Clips. It was decided to place an order with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
HELP: Wetherspoon’s, Manchester, August 1995
Stained glass at the Moon Under Water, taken on our visit in February 2016. This is very specific: we want to talk to anyone who recalls attending the opening of The Moon Under Water on Deansgate,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Colour Should a Pub Be?
Yesterday Tandleman (@tandleman) posted a load of pictures on Twitter from a 1960s Wilson’s brewery calendar. They’re great because (a) they show pub interiors, which is rare; and (b) they’re in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
News, Nuggets & Longreads 12 November 2016: Mexico, Manchester & Mad Science
Before we get into the links a quick heads-up: Gambrinus Waltz, our short e-book about how lager came to London in the 19th Century, is free this weekend for Amazon Kindle (UK | US | Germany |...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Mild in Manchester
It turns out to be difficult to stumble upon cask mild in Manchester these days — you need a few clues as to where to look. We have a theory that we’ve been testing for a few years now that there’s a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Post-War Estate Pubs 1951-1954
As promised, we’re scanning and sharing pictures from the various magazines and books we’ve picked up over the years. This particular set tells a bit of a story. During and after World War II, until...
View ArticleClik here to view.
News, Nuggets & Longreads 25 March 2017: Morse, Ma Pardoe, Mild
Here’s all the writing on beer and pubs that’s stood out in the last seven days, from Inspector Morse to the provocative nature of lists on the Internet. The crime novelist Colin Dexter died this week...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Alpine Gasthof: Let’s Crack This
We’ve been working on an article about German Bierkellers in English towns in the 1970s and as a side quest found ourselves looking into one of the UK’s weirdest pubs: The Alpine Gasthof, Rochdale....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Changing Scene: Watney’s Pubs of 1964
In 1964-64 Watney Mann and its subsidiaries were on a spree of pub building in towns, New Towns and on housing estates up and down the country. Here are photographs of and notes on those new pubs from...
View Article
