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breweries

St Mars of the Desert: an oasis in the industrial hinterlands

A set of gates leading to an industrial yard. Handpainted signs indicate that this is the location of the Brewery of Saint Mars of the Desert.

Brewery taprooms often feel in conflict with their industrial surroundings, but few so much as The Brewery of St Mars of the Desert (SMOD).

This is partly because Sheffield’s industrial hinterlands still feel wonderfully undeveloped and somewhat wild.

Similar landscapes in Bristol are now broken up with blocks of student flats, climbing centres, gyms, and hipsterish food and drink businesses.

Walking the route of the Sheffield and Tinsley canal, however, we saw the charmingly ugly backsides of many small factories and workshops that are still in use. 

When we were diverted off the towpath, we walked streets lined with colossal sheds in various states of disrepair. The gutters were thick with litter and piles of fly-tipped waste covered muddy verges. The odd chunky rat scurried past.

The final approach to the brewery tap took us past busy car repair and tyre reconditioning firms whose business was spilling out onto oil-stained pavements. It felt like a part of the city that was hard at work.

The first sign that we were actually in the right place at all was the brewery gate which is decorated with various cute hand painted signs such as one that read: “SMOD is… open (hooray)”.

Taprooms exist on a spectrum. Some, like the one with the ducks in Bradford-on-Avon, feel temporary and makeshift, as if you’re drinking on a factory floor. Others feel more polished and permanent.

Crossing the yard at SMOD, we weren’t sure which we were about to get. It’s in an old industrial workshop and there aren’t many clues to be seen from outside, among the clutter of a working brewery.

Stepping through the red door (with more cute hand lettering) inevitably brings to mind the Tardis or the wardrobe that leads to Narnia. Wonders have been worked inside with light, paint, quirky ornamentation and something we’ve never seen in a taproom before: a wood burning stove.

As we said in our Golden Pints post, where we named this our favourite taproom of 2025 based on a single visit, we couldn’t decide if it made us feel as if we were in Belgium, or Bavaria, or some magical blend of the two.

Everywhere we looked there were Continental beer crates, tin plaques, posters or (unusual but effective) stripes of brewery-branded packing tape.

Old leatherbound books, dangling lamps, stacked beer crates, and other clutter, against painted brick walls.

A table near the bar had an enormous standing sign declaring it a Stammtisch – that is, a table reserved for regulars. Other tables were marked as reserved from 4 or 5 pm.

We were initially a little disappointed by this, which felt at odds with the informal village pub vibe, but we needn’t have worried. At least one long table was designated as reserved for sharing and the co-founder of the brewery, Dann Paquette, was buzzing around helping people find seats. Why doesn’t this happen in more pubs?

We knew we’d be stuck there for a while when we saw the beer list which included ten or so beers in a range of styles from Rauchbier to grisette. Each was served in a stylish glass with considerable pride and ceremony. The Czech-style lager Laska, for example, came in a rotund handled mug with a thick head of smooth foam which, even before we’d tasted the beer, told us to expect something special.

The beer was delightful. Even those that were less to our taste (Urchin) were clearly well made, characterful, and interesting. And those we did like we really liked. Jess, who is not given to emotional hyperbole, said that Rotkäppchen, an homage to the red beers of Nuremberg, nearly made her cry.

How often does a taproom really have any kind of personality? Even the best of them are usually rather blank, minimalist spaces. They tend to feel cold, literally and figuratively, with acres of whitewash, bare concrete, or bare brick.

By contrast, every surface and corner of SMOD tells you that it is run by human beings. Even the toilet is covered with yet more handwritten signs pleading with customers not to steal the decorative plaques, and arguing for a reduction in beer duty.

It must help that the owners and founders of the brewery are both present and hands-on with the running of the place. With Martha Holley-Paquette greeting us and serving us at the bar, and her husband managing the floor, it felt as if we were guests in something close to a family home.

Perhaps this all sounds a bit gushing but we’re not prone to falling in line with hype or groupthink. If anything, miserable sods that we are, we resisted visiting SMOD for this long because everyone else seemed so excited about it.

They were right. We are idiots. You should go as soon as you get the chance.

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News

News, nuggets and longreads 10 January 2026: A Perfect Spy

The dark interior of a cosy pub with a frosted window and warm lamps.

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got trademarks, ironworks and brown sugar.

First, some news that might be of interest to British publicans: the not-for-profit organisation Pub is the Hub is offering grants of up to £6,000 to “pubs in rural, remote or deprived areas… who want to offer additional services and/or activities”. The examples it gives are a village store at The Duck in Stanhoe and a community cafe at The George, Bethersden. In a longer press release reproduced at Beer Today they also cite the example of The Halfway, Tal-Y-Coed, Wales, which used a grant to set up a marquee where meetings and classes are held.

A sign for a pub called The Crown.

On a related note, for What’s Brewing, the newspaper of the Campaign for Real Ale, Laura Hadland argues that pubs should be treated as pieces of “community infrastructure”:

Shortly before Christmas, I read a letter to the editor of the Irish Times written by Dr Kathy McLoughlin… She decried the decline of the Irish rural pub and her words affected me profoundly… “When the pub shuts,” Dr McLoughlin wrote, “so too does the informal welfare system that has quietly operated for generations.” She goes on to say that if it is considered important to sustain rural Ireland, it will be necessary “to stop treating pubs solely as private businesses and start seeing them as pieces of community infrastructure”… I worked in museums and galleries for a decade and a half and not one of them made any significant money. Certainly not enough to be entirely self-sustaining. That doesn’t mean that they lack worth… As Dr McLoughlin wrote in her letter, “we should examine whether every rural resident is entitled to a local social hub within reasonable reach, in the same way they are entitled to broadband or public transport.”

A version of the Bass logo.

Various articles and posts have been written to mark the 150th anniversary of the registration of the Bass red triangle as Trademark No. 1 on 1 January 1876. The one that particularly grabbed our attention was by Gavin Blackmore for the blog of the UK Government’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO):

London, 31 December, 1875. Midnight approaches. Outside a modest office, a queue forms – not for concert tickets or Boxing Day bargains, but for something far more valuable: a place in history… As the clock edges towards midnight, the Trade Marks Registration Act 1875 is about to come into force, allowing businesses to officially register and protect their brands for the very first time… Bass & Co. is determined to be first. Legend has it their representative camped outside through the freezing winter night, wrapped in blankets and clutching the company’s application papers, waiting for the doors of the new registration office to open… The clock strikes twelve. The doors swing open. Bass steps forward… Despite a scuffle in the hall with other eager company representatives, Bass secures trade marks 1, 2 and 3. Their iconic beer label, featuring a red triangle – becomes UK trade mark No. 1, securing its place at the very top of the register forever.

A photo of an industrial town in black and white.
Merthyr. SOURCE: The Melting Pot – Merthyr Tydfil’s History and Culture

For a blog associated with the Merthyr Tydfil & District Historical Society Brian Jones has written about the pubs and breweries of Merthyr, once the iron capital of the world. It reveals the part played by industrial manufacturers in the establishment and running of breweries in the 19th century:

From the mid 18th century there was a race to build new iron works and  four were established in Merthyr with others at Hirwaun, Tredegar, Rhymney and Blaenavon. Many  of the men and women worked in the open air, mining ironstone, limestone, clay and coal in adits and comparatively small drift mines. In the summer this proved to be thirsty work. Those in the iron works faced hot conditions all year round and sought drink in the many pubs  and publicans began to brew alcohol for their customers. The Brewers Arms and the Clarence Hotel in Dowlais were small scale brewers, however some iron companies saw the potential to make safe and consistent quality beers in substantial quantities. A classic example was the Rhymney Iron Company which morphed from the Union Iron Company in Rhymney Bridge, and the Bute Ironworks. In 1838 it was decided to build a brewery for its workers and a year later a Scotsman, Andrew Buchan, became the brewery manager. For some decades the beers were sold as Buchan’s beers brewed and bottled at the brewery in the centre of Rhymney.

(You might want to skip the section on how beer is made, though. Malted from hops!)

A vintage bock beer label from Peoples brewery of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It has a worried looking goat and two slogans: "Hits the spot! Brewed to please you!"
SOURCE: Lee Reiherzer/Oshkosh Beer

For Craft Beer & Brewing Michael Stein makes the case for American Bock as a unique and interesting style of beer that has relatively little to do with German Bock, and was historically defined by the use of corn and dark brewing syrups:

Peoples Brewing of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, first brewed its American bock in 1914… Lee Reiherzer, author of The Breweries of Oshkosh: Their Rise and Fall… collected some oral history from a brewer at Peoples – a man named Wilhelm Kohlhoff, who brewed there from 1953 to 1968. In the unique case of Peoples Bock, the adjuncts were corn grits and brown sugar… When Kohlhoff started working at Peoples in 1953, Peoples Bock was in retirement. The brewery discontinued it from 1940 until 1959, when it made its glorious comeback. Some drinkers remember Peoples Bock as “strong,” though it was only about 1 percent ABV higher than Peoples Beer—the brewery’s flagship pale lager, which was about 4.5 percent ABV… “Oshkosh was crazy about Bock,” Kohlhoff says. “Everyone saw it as this high-powered beer – strong beer, you know. Dark is associated with strength. So, people would pre-order. … And I heard this from someone else who had worked there: When the Bock would come out, they would just all day long be selling it off that back dock of the brewery in cases, you know. It was an event.”

A busy city street with neon signs advertising bars and restaurants.
The French Quarter, New Orleans. SOURCE: Aric Cheng at Unsplash

The first Pellicle article of the year is by Courtney Iseman whose newsletter we’ve been reading and linking to frequently in these round-ups for several years. In her Pellicle piece she’s written about the craft breweries of New Orleans and what she argues is their uniquely collaborative nature:

The closeness of the New Orleans beer community extends beyond quality hangouts. Craft-beer-at-large hangs its hat on being collaborative, but the local scene here gives that identity new meaning. Connor cites Shawna coming to help bartend at Care Forgot during a mad Mardi Gras rush, as Care Forgot is on the parade route. Urban South lets Care Forgot use its lab, and Care Forgot, Ecology, and Courtyard, because of their equidistant locations, have dubbed themselves the ‘Beermuda Triangle’ and collaborate often… Ingredients are shared like neighbours borrowing cups of sugar, and because many of these breweries are small, they team up to access larger orders and share shipping costs. Before the pandemic, Brieux Carré and Parleaux co-purchased a canning line they’d shuttle back and forth between breweries in a trailer.

Finally, from BlueSky, a neat summary of a complex issue…

I feel like a lot of analysis on the Death of Pubs overlooks or downplays the impact of the attacks on the finances of the working classes. There are much broader economic factors at play than taxes etc.

— Steve (@steveuntilnextyear.bsky.social) 8 January 2026 at 12:28

…which prompted a rare thread from us:

A short thread on The Death of Pubs inspired by that post from @steveuntilnextyear.bsky.social 1. One of our early blog posts, back in 2009, was about *why* people stopped going to the pubboakandbailey.com/2009/03/pubs…“Working class homes are nicer now than they were in the 60s and 70s…”

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— Boak & Bailey (Jess & Ray) (@boakandbailey.bsky.social) 9 January 2026 at 08:20

For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.

Categories
pubs

I’ll put you on speaker, mate

An illustration of a phone with soundwaves coming from a shouting mouth.

Why on earth do people in pubs keep using their phones in speaker mode? And how do we stop it happening?

On a recent trip to an otherwise peaceful pub we were treated to squawking phones by two separate groups.

First, a pair of men in their forties decided to share some ‘funny videos’ they’d found, at full volume. This sent scratchy, distorted noises and bursts of music echoing through the pub, which they further enhanced with their own loud live commentary.

Then, a little later, a party of couples in their sixties took the table next to ours. When a friend phoned one of them, he immediately said: “I’ll put you on speaker, mate.”

For a full five minutes, the phone shouted at them, and they all shouted at the phone, and we gave up on trying to have a quiet conversation between ourselves.

You’ll notice that neither of these parties included young people. Younger people, based on our observations, are generally less likely to indulge in this kind of behaviour.

Perhaps it’s to do with degrees of tech savviness, the stereotype being that older people are less good with gadgets.

Or maybe it relates to age-related hearing loss, which can make us less able to perceive higher frequencies, and thus less sensitive to VERY ANNOYING SOUNDS.

Whenever it happens, we find ourselves hoping that a member of staff might have a word.

In micropubs, or guv’nor managed establishments, that does sometimes happen. You won’t get away with it for long in The Drapers Arms if Garvan is about, for example.

The other alternative is that we need to get better at having the conversation ourselves: “Hello, sorry to interrupt, but can you turn that off, please?”

God, how awkward, though, with so much potential for escalation if you happen to try this with the wrong (pissed) person.

On the most recent occasion, something in Ray cracked.

In a fit of passive-aggression he began to whistle loudly – ‘The Dam Busters March’, for some reason.

They noticed, looked startled, and turned off the video.

Are we being fuddy-duddy, or do we all agree that using your phone on speaker mode in the pub is unacceptable?

Ruvani de Silva certainly singled this habit out as part of her contribution to the recent Pellicle pub etiquette article.

If we are all agreed, how do you think we can stop it happening?

Categories
pubs

The Fargate, Sheffield – a new type of pub?

The grand Victorian exterior of The Fargate with a bouncer leaning in the doorway.

The Fargate in Sheffield city centre is a brand new flagship venue for local brewery Thornbridge. It’s huge and expensively fitted-out – and we struggled to contextualise it.

We were in Sheffield for our semi-regular attendance at the city’s Christmas carolling events but also challenged ourselves to go to pubs and taprooms that were new to us.

We’ve both been visiting Sheffield, for work and fun, for more than 20 years now and we do have our favourite haunts which we like to check in on. While we love, say, The Rutland, however, we don’t want to miss out on pubs that we might like just as much, if not more, if only we gave them a chance.

The Fargate is not only new to us, however, but also new to Sheffield, having opened only in October 2025, in a grand Victorian building that used to be a bank.

On a Friday evening in the run-up to Christmas we encountered bouncers on the door and found the pub absolutely heaving with people in Christmas party clothes or novelty sweaters. Despite that, we only waited about 30 seconds before we were able to slip into two seats with a view of the bar.

“It’s like a posh Wetherspoon,” was our first reaction, but we corrected ourselves quickly. The only real similarity with that value-focused superpub chain was the scale of the place and its shiny newness.

For one thing, the beer wasn’t cheap, with something close to London prices, we’d have said. So, certainly challenging for Sheffield which clung onto the sub-4-pound pint longer than many other cities.

Secondly, the décor was classier, with dark wood, dark corners and a general sense of quality in the finish. Perhaps after a few months, some of these fine details will have been dinged up, knocked off, or gummed up, which does tend to happen with busy pubs. For now, though, it feels very sharp.

Thirdly, the quality of the service, and the presentation of the staff, was impeccable. Despite the scrum at the bar we were served within seconds by a calm, polite, smartly-dressed young man. He was one of many people gliding about behind the counter and we got the sense that our expensive pints were covering the cost of proper levels of staffing for the season.

The interior of The Fargate with lots of dark wood and parquet flooring.
The Fargate on a Sunday evening before Christmas.

What did it remind us of if not a Wetherspoon pub? On our second visit, on Sunday evening, when it was still just about as busy, we got it: it was like a smart German beer hall, albeit without the waiter service or schnitzels.

We’ve often marvelled at how those establishments manage to feel both brand new and totally traditional. Consider the superficially Jugendstil beer halls of Cologne, for example, most of which are housed in grey, angular post-war blocks.

The Fargate is part of a chain of similarly impressive Thornbridge (Thornbridge & Co) pubs across the Midlands and the North, including The Banker’s Cat in Leeds and The Colmore in Birmingham.

We can’t quite classify them among the various types of pub we identified when working on our book 20th Century Pub in 2015 to 2017.

Are they superpubs, or chain pubs? Not quite, despite their size. The Fargate is remarkably free of big printed menus, QR codes, special offers, and other Yatesisms. (It does have some big branded artworks on the walls which look, to our eyes, as if they were created at least partly with AI. Boo, if so.)

Detail from a framed poster with a hand holding a tray loaded with beers.
Smells a bit like AI to us. Those wobbly lines that bleed into the shapes next to them and so on.

They’re not brewpubs, although there is something of the ambition of David Bruce and the Firkins there.

Nor are they wine bars, or style bars, or lounges, or whatever you want to call them. Perhaps without the ten pumps of exemplary Thornbridge cask ale, however, The Fargate might feel like a Slug & Lettuce or All Bar One.

We’re going to provisionally name this possible new type of pub the ‘regional premium flagship’, and see if we can collect other examples. St Austell’s Samuel James in Exeter might be one, now we think about it.

You might be trying to work out from the above whether we actually liked The Fargate. Well, we did, despite feeling like a pair of scruffbags surrounded by all those shiny shoes, designer jeans and high heels.

We particularly enjoyed working our way through the full line-up of Thornbridge beers in the best condition imaginable, and served in dainty, scratchless, spotless glassware.

What we’d like to know is how it feels on a Wednesday lunchtime in February. Will it feel bland without all those people to liven it up and with (literally) the cold light of day upon all that expensive woodwork? Or will it be one of those places that suits all moods?

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 3 January 2026: Pride and Prejudice

The interior of an Victorian pub with carved wooden screens and the bust of a Roman emperor.

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got Rome, Heaven and Belbroughton.

First, some news of the ongoing rise in popularity of no- and low-alcohol beers, with some actual hard numbers attached:

While nearly 170 million no- and low-alcohol beers were drunk [in 2024] the trade association predicts that Brits will consume 200m by the end of [2025], with 22 million pints expected to be poured in December alone… This is an increase of nearly 20% on 2024 and reflects the sub-sector’s impressive growth, which now accounts for 2.7% of the UK’s total beer market… The new figures support recent statistics from Drinkaware that almost one in two drinkers consumed no- and low-alcohol drinks in the last 12 months (up from 22% in 2021).

People have been predicting this, or wishing for it to happen, for decades, but it’s never come to much before. Now, though, it’s undeniable. Sitting in a pub on New Year’s Eve we saw a lot of low-no being bought, served and drunk.

Darren ‘Mack’ McDonald. SOURCE: BBC

From Caroline Gall at BBC West Midlands comes a strange, cheerful little story (is this actually news?) about a corner of England where four pubs have opened in the past half year:

The quaint surroundings of Clent, Hagley and Belbroughton in Worcestershire have welcomed four new premises and a coffee shop within a few months of each other, suggesting a lean towards suburban dining over an urban eating experience… Darren MacDonald, or Mack… runs tyre and exhaust centres around the Black Country… His dreams of running a pub came true when The Holly Bush in Belbroughton came on the market and he and his brother Jamie decided to buy it… They took on the “dead on its feet” pub in January, investing heavily in a total refurbishment before opening in June as a “traditional boozer” serving food including cobs, pies, and fish and chips… Their mission to “do simple food done right” saw them voted CAMRA Pub of the Season by the Redditch & Bromsgrove branch last month… They have about 60 to 70 covers, serve 150 Sunday lunches each week with their staff of about 20, and are proud of the beer they sell from smaller breweries.

Three people sitting at tables on a cobbled street outside a sticker-covered bar.
SOURCE: Paul Davies

It’s always exciting when a new post pops up on what we thought was a defunct blog. Paul Davies at Beer Somellier Kew last posted in 2021 but, just before Christmas, he reemerged to give us a comprehensive round-up of the beer scene in Rome:

Travelling to Roma for almost 40 years its easy to remark that nothing changes. Superficially it can seem as if it is suspended in time as the old monuments remain and the layout of the city has remained pretty consistent. Restaurants come and go, shops too but a major change for me has been the emergence of specialist beer bars. It all started when Manuele Colonna opened Ma Che Siete a Fà in Trastevere in 2001. The pre-eminent bar in Italy’s craft beer scene the pub features 16 draft taps and numerous bottles. You are as likely to find draft lambic, Bavarian rauchbier and UK bitter alongside the best craft beers from Italy. Such is his love for German beer, Manuele is also known as the Pope of Franconian beer! Located behind Piazza Trilussa I first arrived at the bar, or stumbled across it in fact in 2005. It was a real breath of fresh as at the time every outlet in the city sold either Peroni or Morretti. And this amazing bar has become a regular haunt ever since when we visit the city for the biennial Italy v Wales rugby match.

The interior of a traditional East End pub with carpets and old photos on the wall.
The Pride of Spitalfields in 2022.

Alex, the author of our favourite beer blog (type thing) of 2025, Pub Vignettes, rounded off the year with some pithy notes on drinking in East London:

Festive, even in the dog days of summer, with velvet curtains, shag-lite carpet and flock wallpaper in shades of red spanning cranberry to Brick Lane tikka. Everyday Festive is a mug’s game, though, get the Big Tinsel Box out of the cellar. Hard and hairless East End men cruise through pints of lager next to art students pouring from charitably marked-up bottles of supermarket vino. The cabal of local pensioners from the flats across the way and I only have eyes for the five pound pints of Fuller’s ESB. We must have been very, very good this year.

Golden Pints 2025 with a stem glass of beer sparkling.

It’s the time of year when people post their Golden Pints round-ups – or something very like it but with a different name, if they’re too cool to join in with the other children. Here are a few of the round ups we’ve spotted:

We might have missed a few. Joking aside, one of the benefits of everyone labelling these Golden Pints is that it makes it easier for us to find them. If you posted a round up somewhere, let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hardy in profile on the neck of our 1986 beer bottle.

Never mind year-end round-ups – Kieran Haslett-Moore has been thinking about what he wants to find on offer at the bar in Heaven, when his time comes:

I will need something to accompany my celestial cheese board. I might stock the backbar with both the almost immortal Thomas Hardy’s Ale and the monk-brewed internet phenomenon Westvleteren 12. For my 30th birthday I asked that people gift me Thomas Hardy’s Ale as it had just been discontinued for the second time. It has since been resurrected. I figured I would assemble a lifetime supply. 16 years later and my cellar is still holding. I have never paid the extraordinary price one sees on shelves for ‘Westy 12’ but I have been lucky enough to taste it several times. Once memorably in the early hours in a lock-in at a pub in Birmingham. If there is a great bar in the sky, I guess it’s like the mother of all lock-ins, no hangover imminent.

Finally, from BlueSky, here’s Jezza living the dream…

Absolutely nobody will be surprised to hear who was first customer of the year in 't Brugs Beertje. Draft Avec Les Bons Vœux made for a perfect start to 2026 🤣 🍻

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— Jezza (@bonsvoeux1.bsky.social) 1 January 2026 at 15:44

For more good reading check out our Patreon-exclusive ‘Footnotes’ to this post and Alan McLeod’s round up from Thursday.