Last week on Dave’s blog, I posted a comment asking the question “what is a good pub?” – and have been playing that thought through my mind for most of the weekend.
On UK based blogs, I hear a lot about “community pubs”. This is a phrase that sounds so lovely and cozy, but in reality detracts from the fact that a pub is a business, not a community service. Regardless of one’s opinion on the tie, brewers, free houses and pubcos are not in it to make people happy, they are in it to make money. If pubs aren’t making money then hard-nosed economics dictates that the place has become an irrelevance and will close. The challenge then for the breweries with tied estates, as much as for the free houses, is to create public houses which remain relevant, loved and above all used by the community in which they are located.
This mulling got me considering the pubs I go to regularly, there are only about 4:
Each pub is associated with different people and reasons to visit, but in my mind each them would qualify as a good pub – but not for any common reason, and despite the fact that for lots of people I know, some of these places are dingy holes with crap beer. They all serve a given purpose and through the interaction of regulars and staff create micro-communities.
Over this week I will describe each pub, what I like about it, and the purpose it serves in my life. I was originally going to say my “beer drinking life”, but then, I only have one, and beer is just part of it.
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