But is it beer?

One of the many things that irritates me these days - as an increasingly irritable middle-aged man who finds lots of stuff irritating as he gets older - is going into a pub and being confronted with lots of beers that are very similar to one another.

Sometimes I'll go for a long session consisting entirely of beers I've technically never had before, but which seem suspiciously familiar.

Drinking mostly cask, as I do, this will typically take the form of a 4.2% pale golden ale, moderately hopped with New World varieties. Accessible, easy to drink, and, to borrow a phrase from my late Grandmother, common as muck.

I don't dislike them - they're generally good beers from good brewers. But they really are hard to tell apart at times. Given a choice between sticking to a formula or taking bold risks, the brewers chose the option that involved minor tweaks to an existing recipe and possibly having to come up with a quirky name!

 

The case for low-alcohol cask

Last week, I drank a cask beer from Downton brewery at the Ealing Beer Festival. Secret Sobriety was the name.

There's nothing unusual about that in itself. I go to Ealing most years and drink a lot of cask ale when I'm there. Downton are a fairly well-established brewery and I've drunk 63 different cask beers from them. However...

It was a good beer. Dry. Hoppy. Easy to drink. What makes this beer so remarkably unusual is that it was only 0.5% ABV. And cask beers at that strength are incredibly rare.  

We are told that the Low Alcohol / Alcohol Free beer sector is absolutely booming. Apparently it has grown 870% since 2013, which is quite astonishing growth, given that the overall beer market has been in long-term gradual decline. AF Guinness has become one of the most popular beers in the country in next to no time (I find it too sweet and malty personally) and lots of big brands now have a low- or zero-alcohol variant available.

Heinekin, Becks, Peroni - all the mainstream lagers are at it, and Adnams has managed to take the alcohol out of Ghost Ship without losing too much else. A success story, definitely, and possibly even some sort of victory for the nation's health and wellbeing. And these beers are genuinely a world apart from the non-alcoholic beers of the past. Kaliber, anyone?

But it's always a bottle, a can, or sometimes keg. The one thing that LA/AF beer hasn't traditionally offered us is that authentic cask experience. The unique quality and mouthfeel of a cask beer is what marketing wankers might call a 'key product differentiator' or something. There's something about it that you don't get when you drink beer that comes out of a keg, can or bottle.

So why is Low Alcohol cask still so incredibly uncommon?

Golden Pints: BV's best beers of 2025

Well, that's another year done and dusted. How was it for you? Did you drink some good beer? Excellent.

Personally, I was sat there all contendedly like, thinking that 2025 was probably fairly decent, ale-wise, but delving a tad more deeply into me records (for the purpose of this post) the past year actually appears far more underwhelming. Certainly less whelming. Quite disappointing, even, which is just what I needed at this time of year. Fuck you, you stupid year!

Unless the spreadsheets are telling lies, I managed 597 new cask beers during the year (about 100 down on 2024) and only five of them scored the 'effective maximum' of 8/9, which, I suppose, means they can all be detailed here without any need to shortlist them, so at least I won't have to remember which were slightly better than the others and perform tie-breakers in my head!

This takes my overall total up to 12,890 since I first starting keeping track, exactly 30 years ago. (Happy beer-ticking anniversary to me! Do I get a Pearl tankard or something?) 

I'll try and work out my absolute 'beer of the year' in a moment, but firstly, a few mentions of the - ahem - 'other' stuff...

Great pubs are killing good pubs. Discuss.

I love the Hope in Carshalton.

It just won my London Pub of the Year award for the fourth time, and a few days later CAMRA turned out to be in full agreement with me, naming the Hope as the best pub in Greater London. A big achievement and an entirely deserved one, I think.

But this isn't about how absolutely fucking awesome this pub is. I'm going to say something controversial; something I'm not completely believe to be true, but I reckon it's worth floating the idea for debate at least:

Great pubs are killing good pubs. Maybe. 

I'd better explain exactly what I mean by this...

GBBF - but not as we know it?

My relationship with the Great British Beer Festival goes back a long way - I've been attending it for over 30 years and have never missed one - so it was with a little trepidation that I attended GBBF 2025 last week.

Trepidation, because it was always going to be just that bit different this year; the first GBBF to be held outside London since 1990, and, consequently, my first GBBF not at Olympia (or its deceased sibling, Earl's Court) so I was prepared for unfamiliarity. And I don't always like unfamiliarity. 

But let's be thankful for small mercies; in three of the last five years, there hasn't been a GBBF at all, and the future of the festival was in doubt (maybe it still is?) Additionally, it's a huge undertaking involving a lot of wonderful volunteers (of which I wasn't one this year, but I feel like I probably should've been), so brilliant work from everyone involved in making it happen. Anything is better than GBBF not taking place, like last year.

On paper the NEC (which is technically in the Borough of Solihull, not Birmingham, but hey...) has long felt like a good potential festival location. The site is massive, it's more central (to the rest of the country) than London, and it has the necessary supporting infrastructure (so I'm told by an HGV driver!)

So, how was it?

BV London Pub of the Year 2024-25 - part two

Welcome to the second half of the 2024-25 London Pub of the Year award. 

In the first installment we revisited last years top five, and now we're going to check out five brand new entries. (Well, two of them are brand new, the other three are, in Top-of-the-Pops parlance, re-entries, but what the fucky hey.)

Let's chuffing well crack on, shall we?

BV London Pub of the Year 2024-25 - part one

Like the proverbial Renegade Master, we are 'back once again'. It's time to pick a London Pub of the Year, and I feel like a very old hand at this lark nowadays.

Will there be a surprise winner? Has the Greater London pub scene dramatically changed in the last 12 months? Am I still deeply frustrated with the quality and choice of cask ale in the capital? 

All these questions and more will be answered over the next few days and soon enough a winner will be crowned.  If you're not familiar with how the contest works (because even I have some rules to stick to!) check out the previous years. 

Now we'll crack on by revisiting each of last year's Top Five, and in a few days time we'll have the five newcomers/retreads. One of these ten pubs is going to be announced as my London Pub of the Year 2024-25. Ooh goody. Whoop-de-bloody-do. Can't fucking wait. And so on.

Drink for Victory: BV's favourite cask beers of all time!

The VE Day celebrations last month, fairly subdued as they were, got me thinking about VE Day 1995, which was much more of 'a thing'. Perhaps understandably, because 50 years is a 'bigger' anniversary than 80 and, more poignantly, there were many more people alive back then for whom it actually meant something tangibly memorable.

Me being me, it got me thinking about Young's Victory Ale, and that, in turn, got me wondering if it would be possible to come up with a definitive list of my favourite cask beers ever. 

People do occasionally ask me 'which one was your favourite?' when they find out out many pints I've had, and it's really not a straightforward question to answer, precisely because I've had over 12,500 cask beers since I started keeping records in January 1996. 

I was drinking for a few years before that too, though the only beer from my 'bibens juvenilia' period that still stands out as a contender for this list would be the aforemented Victory Ale. That's how good it was.

World Heritage Pints

Obviously I'm a pretty big fan of cask beer. 

It accounts for about 96-97% of the beer I drink, I spend way too much time seeking out new and interesting pints to tick off, and it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that drinking cask, in pubs, is a huge part of my life. 

I'm also well aware that I exist in a beer bubble of my own creation, that my drinking habits are far from universal and that cask beer is in serious decline. 

OK, it may not exactly be dying - yet - but it has increasingly become a niche product, as I vaguely predicted some years ago. 

Most of the beers I'd want to drink can only really be found in a relatively small number of specialist pubs, and the fact that I do almost my drinking in such places doesn't change the fact that as a mainstream product, cask is on the endangered list. Which should, and does, worry me.

The boys from the Craft Beer Channel on YouTube are concerned too. And, unlike me, are a whole lot more proactive when it comes to actually doing something about it!

Their long-running 'Keep Cask Alive' campaign is to be taken up a level as they seek to secure UNESCO 'Intangible Cultural Heritage' status for cask beer. Which is interesting for a number of reasons.

BV London Pub of the Year 2023-2024 - part two

Here we go then, the second part of this year's BV London Pub of the Year contest. Check out part one first if you need to, then read on. This time it's five new or returning hostelries that weren't in last years competition, so let's keep things fresh with these beertastic beauties. 

You won't want to miss this! (If you do want to miss this then feel free to miss this, obviously.)

BV London Pub of the Year 2023-24 - part one

Unbelievable though it seems, the BV London Pub of the Year award has now been going for 12 years!

It seems to come around quicker every time, with the sort of overfamiliarity that can only breed the deepest of contempt, but I keep at it, and it's now time for the latest installment.

You probably know the drill: This time we revisit the Top Five from last year's competition, and next time there will be five 'new' contenders, then finally an overall winner will be announced.

Check out some previous years contests if you need to get a handle on the scoring system. Otherwise, let's crack the fuck on...

Pull the other one!

In recent weeks there has been considerable debate about Carlsberg-Marston's launch of 'Fresh Beer', a controversial product that has garnered mostly negative coverage before it has even found its way onto the bar.

And I have to admit, I find myself feeling not unduly concerned about this. Yes, it's misleading and arguably the latest in a very long line of wrongs committed by wrong-un brewing conglomerates. But I don't think it's going to be a fundamental threat to the (cask) beers I like to drink.

It's controversial because it's essentially a keg beer, dispensed via a handpump - presumably a full-size one that looks more authentic than the miniature faux handpumps already used for keg dispense, and maybe even one that actually gets pulled rather than simply 'flicked' into the 'on' position. I get all that. But it's just not causing my hackles to rise in a visceral surge of physical disgust.

BV London Pub of the Year 2022-23 - part two

Whenever there's a part one, there's always a part two. The second course. The revenge of the killer sequel, if you will.

And this is it - the second half of the 2022-23 London Pub of the Year contest, where five new contenders join the competition and go up against last year's Top Five.

This year sees a mix of complete newcomers and pubs that have been absent from the contest for a few years, so let's crack on...

BV London Pub of the Year 2022-23 - part one

It's that time of year again when I think about whether I should give up doing a London Pub of the Year award, and then go ahead and do it anyway. 

With another full year of no lockdowns and freedom-of-drinking under our belt, this year's contest should be a cracker. God only knows I've made enough visits to 'That London', as I'm now obligated to call it, in search of the capitals best pub. 

So here we go. This post will cover last years top five and part two will reveal five brand new challengers. Well, 'new' in the sense that they weren't in the 2021-22 contest.

Enjoy. Or don't.

BV London Pub of the Year 2021-22 - the results

As the returning officer for the constituency of London Pub of the Year 2021-22 I hereby declare the top five pubs in this years competition are as follows:

(If you haven't yet familiarised yourselves with the eight contenders - the 'ballot paper', if you will, you may possibly want read parts one and two where I review the pubs. And avert your eyes because the results are coming up.)

After an enforced three-year break, this years competition has been a fascinating one. It's Truss vs Sunak all over again, only this time Badenoch wins. Or something.

Anyhow, let's crack the fuck on...

BV London Pub of the Year 2021-22 - part two

What's hotter than the current ambient temperature and more competitive than the race to be Prime Minister?

Why, yes, it's the second part of the long-overdue Return of the Revenge of the Pub of the Year!

If you haven't already read part one, you might want to so so first. Otherwise, here we go with the remainder of this year's contest. Let's find the best pub in London, shall we?

And, not unexcitingly, we happen to begin with two former winners!

BV London Pub of the Year 2021-22 - part one

It might not feel like it, but it was fully ten years ago that I launched my London Pub of the Year award. 

And now, at last, it's back!

Yep, after a long wait it's time to once again pick my favourite pub in the Greater London area from the past 12 months. God I've missed doing this.

Counting down to the end of lockdown!

The last couple of years have been a bit, well, disrupted, and you'll probably know that for the 2019-21 period I decided upon a 'special award' for the Kentish Belle in Bexleyheath who went above and beyond the call of duty during the first lockdown as well as being a damn good pub the rest of the time. (Well, it was originally only going to be for 2019-20, but further lockdowns meant that this effectively held true for an additional year!)

Anyway, because I wasn't able to run the contest and do full pub surveys for the past two years, we're going to have a completely fresh start, and then - fingers crossed, no more fucking lockdowns please! - return to normal this time next year.

So, this year's competition will consist of eight pubs, including previous winners, returning old favourites and a couple of new entries, and the top five will automatically come back next year, alongside five new ones to keep things fresh.

Shut up and float!

Some disappointing news this week, with Brewdog putting off their long-rumoured flotation until 2023.

Hopes had been raised when they appointed a new Chairman last month, reportedly with the very specific intention of getting them listed, but - and they have plenty of previous in this department - the company decided to change tack.

Given that the only other opportunity to trade shares only happens once a year, and gets cancelled most years, the chances of being able to sell Brewdog shares at a fair price any time soon would appear to be low.

Which pisses me off massively as I've been wanting to rid myself of 99% of my 'shares' for some time now. 

Every ABV: 8.5 to 10.5%

And so we reach the fourth (and, for now, final) part of the 'Every ABV' series. I know you're all eager to find out my favourite cask beers at higher strengths, so let's crack right on with it.

8.5% -  Big Smoke The Judge

So many breweries have appeared in Greater London over the past decade that some are often overlooked. The Antelope in Surbiton - former home of Big Smoke brewery - won my 2017-2018 London Pub of the Year award which hopefully went some small way to putting them on the map, even if the name 'Big Smoke' is possibly a tad misleading. Surbiton is a long way from the square mile; Esher even further! And as for the beer, well it's a big, juicy DIPA with plenty of Citra and Simcoe hops, just the way I like 'em.

Every ABV: 6.5 to 8.4%

So, what are we all going to do now that the footie is over and before the Olympics begins? 

We shall do what every good English patriot does: We shall go to the pub and drink beer. 

And from Monday we'll even be able to walk up to the bar to order, and visit the toilet facilities without wearing a mask - in some places at least. I'm looking forward to doing both of these things.

(If you only watched Euro 2020 because you wanted to see what my 'Final Meal' would be and were disappointed when I didn't post one, the truth is that I forsaw the England-Italy final ten years before it happened and came up with Full English Breakfast Linguine in anticipation of the match!)

Anyway, here's the latest part of my 'Every ABV' series, where I move onto the stronger stuff...