Bill Bell, owner of Bell’s Hotel, Melbourne’s only brewpub, inherited the place from his parents, who purchased the pub in 1933. He vividly remembers the bad old days of Australian drinking—when pubs (until the early 1960s) were forced to close at 6:00 p.m. and customers would chug four or five pints before being required to... View Article
Blair Hayden, managing director of Sydney’s Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel, can talk elegantly on all sorts of topics, but what gets him fired up is if you ask him whether or not he’s running Sydney’s oldest pub. At least two other pubs—the Fortune of War and the Hero of Waterloo—have licenses that predate the Lord... View Article
Lachlie McOmish, co-owner of Canberra’s Wig and Pen, has one of the more unusual job combinations in the brewing world. When not running a brewpub, he’s an adviser to the Australian Country Party (a rural political party) on transportation issues, including drunk driving. The Wig and Pen is named after an ancient British club, and... View Article
In American cities, it seems that every time you turn around, someone has opened a new Irish bar. So many authentic bar fittings have been shipped from Ireland to equip the new bars that you might be forgiven for wondering if any pubs are left intact back home. Riding the same wave of popularity that... View Article
Geoff Scharer likes to call himself “the son of a son of a son of a son of a publican.” But he discovered his life’s work in 1950, when he was about 10. His father had a meeting with Edmund Resch, owner of Resch’s Brewery, whose beer was at the time preferred by discerning beer... View Article
The regional independents occupy the healthiest niche in the brewing industry today. While micros and brewpubs are folding almost as fast today as they popped up in the early and mid-1990’s, and while big commercial breweries scramble for gimmicks to boost flat sales, the regional independents continue to grow, though carefully.
What’s better than a great beer at the beach? Not much, provided you can get a hold of the beer. Many beaches don’t allow alcohol at all. Or if they do, they ban bottles. And as we all know⎯despite experiments by a couple of craft breweries and a range of imports⎯many of the beers we... View Article
