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Pete Brown

Treating beer with the respect and irreverence it deserves since 2003. Beer writer of the year 2009. Dubbed the "Beer drinkers Bill Bryson".

16-Feb-2012 - I’ve done another collaborative brew. It’s becoming quite common now for writers and bloggers to be invited to be a guest brewer for the day, and it’s a thrilling prospect: in the past, I’ve likened it to being a music journalist and getting invited on stage to jam with your favourite band.

I’ve ad a laugh with Foster’s

03-Feb-2012 - I don’t often write about mainstream standard lagers. That’s because I don’t often drink them. In most cases (but not quite all) I don’t have any ideological opposition to their existence; I just don’t like the taste.

Call time on barstaff dabbling in telepathy

20-Jan-2012 - There’s a fascinating new development happening in our hostelries late at night. In a bold, ground-breaking experiment, a rising number of pubs are experimenting with telepathy as a way of communicating with customers.

Positive trends prevailing

13-Dec-2011 - This is my last column of the year, and I find myself looking back on 2011 as an unexpectedly good year in many ways for the beer and pub world, and feel ing curiously optimistic about 2012. No, don’t laugh.

A mighty drop of excellence

28-Nov-2011 - One of the things I love most about this job is the little pockets of beer and pub excellence you discover around the country, developing relationships with people and links to places that transcend the initial contact to become something much more life-enriching.

A pivotal change is brewing

11-Nov-2011 - In my last column, I talked about how the cask ale message – that cask is on the up, that it’s a real boon to publicans — has finally got through. I said that this was a good thing, and that we perhaps need to stop repeating ourselves.

What lies beyond the ale?

31-Oct-2011 - At the start of this month we launched the latest Cask Report. You may have noticed it — the page after page of coverage it received in this magazine was hard to miss.

Smooth criminals: my love affair with pub's founders after laptop theft

18-Oct-2011 - I’ve written a great deal over the past eight years about how much I love pubs, about how I see the pub as the crucible of everything that’s good about humanity: the warmth, good cheer and democracy, the benign anarchy, the hint of surrealism, the tradition, the freedom, the flexibility, the comfort, and, of course, the beer.

Pumpclips: some big boobs

30-Sep-2011 - Fancy an Old Slapper? No, me neither. Neither does Jeff Pickthall. Jeff is an excellent beer judge and taster, and saviour of my quest to recreate the original sea route of India Pale Ale. (You’ll have to buy the book. Please.)

The thirst for ale knowledge

21-Sep-2011 - If there’s one drawback to the current explosion in the number of breweries creating a seemingly endless variety of interesting cask ales (I know — my wife is always telling me I’m a ‘glass half empty’ kind of guy) then it’s the snowblindness of knowing what beers are on where, and the lottery of trying pubs to see if your favourite beers are on tap.

First big bite of the apple

05-Sep-2011 - It’s wet. It’s dull. Dreams of summer have disappeared on the wind like the smoke from a rained out barbecue. This can only mean one thing: it’s festival season.