The village pub is closing. Not mine, not yours, everyone’s. I don’t need to run through the stats on precisely how many are closing, or exactly why. It’s an infuriating mix of taxes, including business rates, vat and alcohol duties, along with the cost of a workforce, and muddle that all with declining consumption, a dampening of disposable income and a general apathy from younger generations towards being social IRL.
Younger people are clued up on the percentage of their disposable income being spent on drinks they can more easily afford at home, we’ve recently come to terms with this being a significant driver of ‘at-home-ism’ or ‘no-booze’ events, and daytime activities. A whole months subscription to Netflix is £6, a single pint of Madri is £6.501.
So, you can watch Netflix for a whole month, on your own, in your house, while simultaneously scrolling through reels on Instagram for the price of one pint of shit manufactured lager. The maths doesn’t really add up for the amount of potential enjoyment you may receive in return for your £6.50.
So, what?
Well, I quite like the pub. The beer is better at the pub. Lovely pint of cask ale simply can not be done properly at home. There are also people at the pub, and for all my own preferences on personality type, for the most part, the people gathered in any pub generally get on.
Pubs set their stall out in a number of ways, and by doing that attract certain types of people. If there’s a vinyl ‘Sky Sports’ banner outside the pub, I won’t go in that pub, because I know the type of people that will be inside. If they sell home made scotch eggs, there’s a good change I’ll go out of my way to get there.
Most pubs, classic, local, country pubs, drink-first pubs, have a shit wine list. Most food-led pubs, overcharge for broadly the same shit wine selection, from marginally better wineries. Gastro Pubs, putting my opinions on the phrase aside, do a better job on wine, but you’re probably there for an occasion, it’s not like you’re there, splashing out on a nice wine, instead of a quick half on a Sunday afternoon.
I host a lot of wine tasting events.
I did two last week, both in pubs.
Pub One was a posh pub, with an aspirational wine list of things most people will have never heard of, at reasonable prices for what they were. I was talking about the winery I work for, comparing English wines to some other similar styles from around the world.
A Thursday night in Norfolk. I’d say almost all of the guests would be comfy proffering the phrase “I know what i like, but I don’t know much about wine”, when asked about their wine knowledge. It was fine, a solid tasting, with solid comments, and a lovely audience.
The pub is food-led, premium, tapas-ish, and a good Sunday roast, not cheap. We were upstairs in a private space, but the atmosphere downstairs was a muddle. A very tidy little ‘drinkers bar’ area with a pool table that you probably don’t want to play for fear of getting fingerprints on the polished rails. Modern art on the walls. Newly pointed red brick fireplace surround. Beer coasters with the pubs logo on them. Stools at the bar look like they’ve never been sat on, a hint towards an idea, rather than a communal drinking spot. Quiet couples having a date night treat in the dining area. The pub is in the middle of nowhere though, so always one of them driving, no point getting a bottle is there?
You know exactly the type of pub I’m talking about, there’s one up the road from you. It’s doing well, owned by that guy from up-the-way, the one that made a fortune doing something else and spent it all on a pub. Looks beautiful. You go there for a reason, because it ticks every box of the ‘good country pub’ framework: Nice menu & wine list, young, handsome staff in matching polo shirts, there’s everything to like, pizza on a Wednesday, summer garden party, electric chargers in the car park for the Tesla.
Pub Two
It’s village pubs that don’t conform to this framework that are closing, except a handful. That was pub number two for me this week, and the reason for this newsletter.
The beauty of a rural Suffolk village pub run by the landlord, his wife, and their kids. The landlord is a ‘tinkerer’, kit for making cider and spirits in one shed, experimenting with brewing their own beer in another, a walk in fridge repurposed as the wine cellar. Clearly into booze of all sorts, they’ve planted a hectare of vines on the field next door for a project.
An astonishing wine collection, on display, in wine racks in any corner that hasn’t got a pile of logs for the open fire in it. 30 bottles of generic ‘house’ Bordeaux superior, 2020 vintage obviously, magnums of Ch Musar here, older vintages in bottles there, a dozen Two Paddocks Pinot Noir from 2012. All just kicking about, next to tables of guests sampling a new fortified English red from a winery in Wales. A rotating selection of local beers.
Any pub that can fill 30 spaces for a wine tasting that starts at 4pm on a Saturday afternoon, with locals from the village, is doing something right in my book. Wine people, ready to listen, asking me interesting questions, comparing our wines to wines they’ve tried elsewhere, or on holiday. Open mined to compare and contrast the same wine from a 20ltr keykeg against the version from the bottle, dispensed on the landlords own Lindr machine, bought to see if wine on tap made sense.
We all stayed for a classic English buffet supper, of home cooked beef cold cuts, herby, buttery new potatoes, salad, homemade quiche, followed by an exceptional selection of carefully chosen hunks of squidgy local cheeses, blobs of onion chutney, and crunchy baguette. Honest food done without pretence or a single cut corner.
Finished by 7pm, the car park was full, everyone in the village was there for a pint, a chat, one chap mentioned that Jim-up-the-road had some bits nicked from his farm buildings earlier in the day, and to make sure you’ve locked any outbuildings. The real-life social media. I drove past at least three empty pubs on my way back, they’ll be the ones that inevitably close.
Look, I doubt either pub needs the money if I’m being honest, and both are reliant on older, perhaps more affluent customers. One is run with all the soul of an accountant maintaining an asset, and the other puts the enjoyment of the product and the process front and centre. I know which one I’d rather live a walk away from.
(nb, i googled “the price of a pint of Madri” and was shown exclusively supermarket prices for a case of 12 bottles or cans, and not the draught price.)
