The Great Outdoors?

Pubs reopened in Scotland last week. If you count reopening as only being able to drink alcohol outside that is, though you can have soft and hot drinks inside if the pub is open indoors. There is also the matter of a supposed maximum two hour permitted stay. It’s a bonkers rule that encourages the……

Good Beer Guide Histories No 1: Bedfordshire

Your Good Beer Guide to Bedfordshire. With added chocolate toothpaste.

Arlesey: Bricks, Beer and Bedlam

Despite the homogenisation and ongoing obliteration of our high streets, much of Britain wears its history well. Look up and you can see buildings from different eras, often dated. Look down and the paths, tracks and water courses define where you are. The dents, hollows and bings of a landscape act as a guidebook to……

Magic Numbers: Mapping the CAMRA Good Beer Guide

A while ago I mentioned that a crack team of analysts were mapping every pub ever to have appeared in the CAMRA Good Beer Guide. For those at the back who haven’t kept up, CAMRA was founded in 1971 to fight the keg beer tide, producing a prototype Good Beer Guide the following year on……

Good Beer Guide Exclusive comes to Pub Tickers’ Rescue

What do pub bloggers write about when the pubs are closed? Some have been in hibernation whilst others have been very inventive. Blackpool Jane makes up her virtual itinerary based on the Tangerines’ away games and has helpfully renamed swathes of the country. Retired Martin – furloughed from his full time employment as an influencer……

The Last Pub

Four weeks have passed since my last pub visit. I am not sure why it’s taken that long to write about, perhaps holding onto the memory before it entirely recedes, with no other in prospect. The virus has floored us just like one of those er…vindictive steps. Let’s keep things in perspective. Not being able……

Your Guide to Upton-upon-Severn

Said to be Worcestershire’s smallest town, Upton-upon-Severn has a quietly majestic Georgian high street that runs down to the wide expanse of the River Severn. Unfortunately the tidal Severn often runs back up the High Street. Game in doubt subject to pitch inspection It has the distinctive Pepperpot, the cupola being the surviving part of……

How many substantial meals can you eat in a day?

Pub ticking is a demanding activity in normal circumstances, requiring the sure-footedness of a mountain goat, the hand-eye co-ordination of Roger Federer and the self-belief of an ageing hedgehog crossing the M6 at rush hour. In the abnormal circumstances that prevailed last year, the government’s requirement to binge eat was simply another component in an……

Devilled Faggots, Black Dogs and Pickled Squirrels

I left you after a surprisingly productive October but we’ll need to gloss over the pub wasteland days of November. Then it was December- different month, different rules. If you were in a tier 2 area you could get alcohol in a pub only if you ate a substantial meal. If you were in tier……

Shropshire Lads

A few more pubs to bring you before it all ended in tiers. Shropshire served up a few new ones in this year’s Good Beer Guide, which is turning out to be the least thumbed edition since 1973 (when there wasn’t one). Ludlow had been gnawing at me like a persistent rodent for a year……