luka
Well-known member
My point about wetherspoons was more that the pub is not primarily a place you go to drink delicious beer. It is a point of contact between people, a communal space, a secular church and drunkeness is the sacrament.
Beer And Beer Drinking
- Thread starter luka
- Start date
My point about wetherspoons was more that the pub is not primarily a place you go to drink delicious beer. It is a point of contact between people, a communal space, a secular church and drunkeness is the sacrament.
comelately
Wild Horses
Leo asked a specific question about what to get in Spoons tho.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Yeah, of course that does make a lot of sense for pubs that rely upon alcohol sales alone for revenue. But in trendy places that serve food too and have shedloads of taps, it does seem a bit weird in 2020.
You could always jack the price up to compensate, as well
Anyways, I'm going to a Thornbridge pub tongiht, so hopefully they won't follow suit
jenks
thread death
I was at a cycling event upstairs at Brewdog just off Charing Cross Road - it was like a hipster version of Spoons - and most of the beers had that trying too hard to be off the wall - marshmallow/mocha coffee/cocoa nibs stuff - it put me off and i'm so clearly their type - middle class/beardy
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
I had my first ever box of craft beer as a recent present. I felt slightly embarrassed putting the cardboard holder in the recycling bin, disguising it with more socially acceptable products. Am I really that person? Yes, yes I am.
Craft beer and social stratification is a thing, but there are definitely places that avoid that dead end, too. true here in the West Midlands, anyways - proper boozers that happen to have a better than average selection of beer. Hipster food seems to be an even bigger driver of stratification - I don't think I've been anywhere with 'street food' or similar that didn't have an overwhelmingly middle class or demographic-inside-different-from-demographic-outside vibe
Craft beer and social stratification is a thing, but there are definitely places that avoid that dead end, too. true here in the West Midlands, anyways - proper boozers that happen to have a better than average selection of beer. Hipster food seems to be an even bigger driver of stratification - I don't think I've been anywhere with 'street food' or similar that didn't have an overwhelmingly middle class or demographic-inside-different-from-demographic-outside vibe
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Slothrop
Tight but Polite
I'm not sure it's even that complex - what I've heard (mostly at second hand) is basically landlords saying that if they put a porter on the bar then they don't get through it before it turns and they end up chucking most of it. If a place has loads of cask lines, that often just means it'll get drunk even slower because there's more choice so the throughput gets spread more thinly.
luka
Well-known member
pre craft beer gastropubs were the way pubs were managing to shed their working class customers. Craft beer didn't invent it. Im not saying that it started it or that it's the main driver of it. I just think it's an accelerating trend and a regrettable one. Given the choice I would rather drink good beer than bad beer.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
At least craft beer offers in my opinion a better product than the standard beer fare available 15 years ago. So often street food or whatever is massively underwhelming (not always, there are glowing exceptions), and the innovation is in the imaginative description, not what is being sold. Low-level conspicuous consumption at its worst
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baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
At £8 or £9 a pop to subsidise rent. It's possibly the worst trend of all time.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
It's because it's done like the Epcot Center - no aesthetic cohesion, rubbish imitations of stuff from all over the place in sanitised food arenas. Like an 'eclectic' dj set
luka
Well-known member
Yeah but when I lived in Auckland in '99-01 they had a massive shopping mall type thing with just kiosks of Thai, Indonesian whatever and also a cheap bar and it was amazing and beautiful and utopian and I e been waiting to see that replicated here for the last 20 years and for some reason we just can't do it.
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
I'm generally more positive about the street food thing, which is probably down to living in Cambridge. There was fuck all food culture here to start with, so eating an alright bocata in a car park seems like a better deal. And the only way that most of Cambridge could get more gentrified is if we get invaded by aliens from a much posher planet. I'd guess that it feels different somewhere like Brixton or Hackney...
comelately
Wild Horses
That's probably fair. That syndrome may affect places with lots of taps more than ones with just a few. In the latter you might get 'ok let's try the Porter then'.
For whatever reason, I've never found myself in one of those 'porter doesn't sell' type places.
comelately
Wild Horses
In Manchester it was surprisingly difficult to actually buy a Manchester Tart in the City Centre. It was actually foodie culture that changed that.
I mean this Street Food stuff.....a lot of it is shite but it's like anything else really innit? You still have a choice that's pretty much unrivalled in Western Europe (especially, as Slothrop points out, in smaller cities like Cambridge, compared with their French equivalents). Judicious use of online reviews can usually help you sort out the wheat from the chaff. When it's replacing chain restaurants that insist having tapped beer is too much like hard work (weirdly, this doesn't seem to be a problem anywhere else), I can personally deal with it.