I was in an East End pub in Spitalfields, the Pride of Spitalfields, formerly the Romford Arms. It is down a side-street off Brick Lane and I discovered it a few years back. According to the friendly bartender behind the bar there had been a pub on this site for a couple of hundred years and it might once have been owned by Truman’s, whose massive former brewing complex isn’t too far away. Around me on this lunchtime, the main bar was full of the voices of whom I suspect where locals, a soundtrack of banter and random observations about life.

Fuckin’ red squirrels, they destroyed my garden

Beer’s six quid here and I can get it for a couple of quid cheaper at the Spoons at the station but I come here to socialise with you lot

Why d’yer bother then

Then after leaving I went to Liverpool Station to get a train to Suffolk and saw a Great War memorial to the ‘Men of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire’ put up by the London Society of East Anglians. That got me thinking about belonging. I lived in Cambridge for six years but that was not long enough for me to feel as if I belonged to the place. Then I recalled meeting an old girlfriend in 2024 from my time in the city who had since emigrated to Australia. As we visited some of our of old Cambridge pub haunts, she mentioned a couple of times that she was a Fen girl, and I thought of how that despite her long sojourn in Australia she still felt an identity.

I’m Welsh, went to a Welsh-speaking primary school, used to visit relatives where Welsh was the first language, took part in school eisteddfods and occasionally harboured a slight support for Welsh nationalism. I also used to become rather bad-tempered when Wales lost at rugby (I’m used to it now and act just like Buddha come the Six Nations, besides I can get like that when Arsenal lose).

So this is where I belong, but given that I left Llandudno for college at 18 and then only used to come back irregularly I feel I have lost my Welsh identity apart from saying I am Welsh.

I lived in Paris for six months but I am not French. I lived in London for 11 years but am not a Londoner. I lived on the Somerset Levels for four years, then was on Exmoor for 18 years but despite all my attempts I am not a country person. Now it’s coming up to 10 years in Exeter but I am not an Exonian, so the question I ask myself is: where do I belong?

After an hour in the Pride of Spitalfields, as well as other periods spend in pubs up and down the country, the conclusion (whether it is sad or not is up to you) is that I feel a sense of belonging in pubs.

Pubs can give us this brief feeling of belonging, a connection that lasts as long as we are in them. Pubs provide a social clue that binds people together, offer that second family for those who are lonely as well as to those who seek even more extensions to their family. You don’t get that in a Starbucks.

I wanted to leave the city for a couple of hours, get into the countryside and find a pub at the end of my journey. Within 25 minutes of closing my front door I was cycling along a country road, amid tranquil views of surrounding hills and plenty of patches of different shades of green wherever I looked. Past a big redbrick farmhouse I went, its stables and sheds now empty, the building looking so spick and span that I wondered if it could be an Airbnb. Meanwhile the soundtrack was a mixture of my bicycle types crunching on the fine gravel of the country road, the chatter of sparrows hidden away in hedges, the harsh crack of a magpie balancing on a telephone wire and a robin perhaps or another bird whose song I would never get to know soulful within the leafy bloom of a roadside tree.

Then there I was, at my ultimate destination, a village pub that is one of my favourites but which I don’t get out to as often as I would like. Inside the bar it was cool and slightly shadowy, a yin to the yang of the heat and light of outside. I ordered a 5.2% amber-coloured ale, which was brewed in the cellar below, and outside I went to the side of the pub, with the aim of reading my book and drinking my beer. In the glass it was lightly sweet and had hints of berries and a delightful earthiness that gave it heft and weight on the palate, with a noticeable bitterness finishing each swig. A man, mid 60s perhaps, red faced, wearing a baseball hat, cycling shorts, an Old Guys Rule top and big trainers, laces undone, a thing I’d thought had fallen from fashion in the 1990s, sat down a couple of tables away from me. He took a gulp from his pint and began to chat with a man and woman, who were sitting a couple of tables further from him.

‘I left out here 20 years ago, for France, somewhere outside Toulouse, lovely place, nowhere as expensive as here, a good glass of wine for five euros, here you pay the earth.’

He paused and I returned to my book then he began again. This time the potholes that pockmark the roads of Exeter now engaged his attention.

‘Not like that in France you know.’

The man at whom he was talking muttered in agreement. The conversation, or should I say monologue, now turned to the pubs of Exeter.

‘Is the Paper Makers still going?’

‘I don’t know.’

I want to say it’s been closed for ages but I stay silent, this is not my conversation.

‘I see the Port Royal has closed, what happened there, then there’s the Welcome Inn, been closed for years that, used to like the landlady, it’s a coffee shop now.’

It was for a while but Covid killed it and it’s now a private house, again I don’t say anything.

The conversation moves on as if on a carousel and potholes once more emerge as a subject of discussion and such is the frequency of moaning that I half expect the man to start blaming the potholes on migrants, but being one himself perhaps he would be aware of the irony of such a discussion.

A man emerges from the bar and lights a cigarette.

‘Good lord, look who is it,’ says the man who has been talking all the time.

‘How are you boy?’

The newcomer is in his late 60s I would guess, but boy seems to be a common address out in the Devon countryside.

‘All well sir,’ comes the reply.

‘What have you been doing with yourself?’

‘Oh I’ve just come back from Poland, I was just looking around, it’s cheaper than here and the best beer I had was a Czech one, Pilsner Urquell, served straight from the tank at this bar, it was delicious.’

‘What are the potholes like?’

‘Didn’t notice any.’

His voice could be described as rough posh or perhaps maybe something like the second hand car dealer in Surrey I once bought an Audi off. Frank was it, Ernie maybe?

Another man, I reckon in his 80s, joins them, slightly unsteady, holding a half pint. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ he says and they all laugh and then behind me in the road there is a growling sound and a line of vintage cars pass and park up around the front of the pub. I see a TR7, a Cortina and a Lotus among others. There is a kind of wake going on in the downstairs bar, which a few minutes later I pass through on my way to the toilets. A couple of men in orange overalls stand around alongside others in black ties, white shirts and jackets, the overalled men perhaps cosplaying a 1950s Grand Prix vibe. Maybe the deceased was a great vintage car fan, otherwise why would they be mingling with those in black?

‘Another pint, it’s easy to drink,’ I say to the man behind the bar, he agrees and we have a brief chat about the 6.5% beer the brewpub produces every Christmas. Back outside there are now four men sitting where there was just one and the conversation has merged and I no longer can pick up individual voices. Back to my book I go and leave the idle chatterers to their digressive conversations.

The pub can be home to the most idle or banal of conversations, which is perhaps about people wanting to exercise their larynxes, something I often do. There is an impulse to talk about nothing in particular, possibly lubricated by the gentle intoxication of a couple of pints. Maybe the irritation at the constant vocals by the return of the native was a Jungian shadow on how I can be just the same when I have had the joy of a couple of pints. I muttered to myself as I finished the beer and headed for my bicycle and, refreshed and reinvigorated by my brief spell in the countryside, started to cycle back to the city, whilst looking out for potholes.

A Saturday lunchtime outside at Topsham’s Bridge Inn, a regular haunt of mine, five miles from Exeter by bicycle and five miles back. On a wooden bench I sit, words carved into its surface that Dave loved to drink here, a memory, kind and considerate, of someone who could call the Bridge his local. The air is warm, a vaulted sky of darkish indigo with light, flimsy patches of broken cloud drifting along with the ease of Sinatra on the croon. In front of me, a border of hedge and bush traced with the trumpet shaped flowers of bindweed, with a bee idly drifting along as if on an invisible wire going from flower to flower to drink its fill.

Beyond this border, the River Clyst, low and slow as the tide is out, keeps company with several mallards, who rest on the exposed, stone scratched, reed-fringed beach. A crow joins them, looking for food, but one of the drakes rushes towards him its beak half open, a territorial advance. Bucolic the scene may be, but the last time I was here a duck was drifting on the river with two ducklings, there is a duck here, but no ducklings but perhaps they are further down the river out of sight rather than being victims of fox, rat or hawk. Beyond the river and its skirt of reeds, fields of several shades of green stretch towards a wooded hill in the distance. No cows do graze today just a solitary dog walker cutting along a field’s edge.

The stars align once more when I take a sip of my beer, Salcombe Brewery’s Island Street Porter. It is as dark as the plumage of the crow perched upon the faded red corrugated iron roof of the pub’s former maltings, which on this warm and sun-blessed day is open for those who want to escape within. The beer is perfect in its condition, creamy and full-bodied, an assembly of mocha coffee, cooking chocolate, roasted espresso coffee beans, a crackle of dryness, the merest hint of vanilla and once again the old saying that has served me well for years, ‘dark beers are not just for the colder months’, resonated within my head.

‘Sopwith Camel,’ says a man on the table to my left, ‘Red Baron,’ says someone on a table behind me. I want to say SE5, but don’t. We are watching an approaching biplane whose engine is an insistent drone, a lazy but regular light drum stroke of busy bees as it passes over. A few minutes later a two-engined airliner passes over, lazily turning in the air, insouciant and without effort, taking a couple of hundred souls on their way to a few days in the sun.

I have finished my beer but such is the mood of completeness, that serenity I mentioned earlier, the tranquility that bathes my soul, I decide on another pint of the same beer. Once again there is a dance to the music of time on my tongue as I take deep sips that are almost transformed into swigs from my glass. There is a sense of mindfulness as I sit on this wooden bench that acts as a living memory of someone called Dave, moments of calmness and reflection as I look out over the river and the landscape stretching away, aware of the high canopy of blue stretched with fluffy white above me. Everything is in order, the beer, the views, the slow susurration of voices behind me, and even though this outdoor space at the Bridge is bordered behind me by a road I don’t even notice the passing traffic.

In my last book, A Pub For All Seasons, I wrote of how the moods of pubs changed with the seasons and The Bridge Inn was almost like a Greek Chorus as I visited it throughout the year (as I still do) and it told me something about this organic, unforced, unconscious change. On this Saturday, on the cusp of summer (it was May 30), the change from the let us all huddle around the fire of the colder months to this outdoor exclamation of joy was complete. It was time to rejoin the outside world and with the reluctance of a schoolboy creeping like a snail unwillingly to school I finished my beer and got ready to cycle back to Exeter, the mood of this lunchtime pub session remaining with me, a heady, mindful memory of how when the stars align in the pub it is one of the finest experiences in the whole wide world.

A fascination with the idea of beer culture continues to bedevil, especially when it comes to Belgium where I spent most of last week. So at midday at Brussels’ Poechenellerkelder I sat there and tried to think about beer culture in the context of this place, which seems to have a sense of authenticity about it even though it is opposite one of the city’s landmark tourist sites and only opened as a beer bar in 1991 (before that I have read it was a puppet theatre, hence the crowd of puppets and marionettes hanging down I presume). I suppose the easy answers are: the beer service has the perfect pour with a sense of theatre, the correctly branded glass is offered as are salty snacks with each drink, and there is a large list of old favourites, Trappist, gueuze, blonde, dark, saison, fruited beers. I look about and it feels organic the way it has grown with the uniqueness of the variously costumed marionettes hanging from the ceiling, alongside clusters of dried hops dangling above the entrance steps. There is also a clutter of objects on the walls, and it reminds me of an antique centre or even the insides of a reclamation place minus the heavy garden ornaments clumped outside. It is a genial clutter and I think I notice something new on every visit.

However, what aspect of beer culture is it? Is it that aspect where pubs and bars display random artefacts like in Poechenellerkelder — the marionettes and tin brewery signs at the back of the bar before the steps to the loos? Here everything is jumbled up and randomly scattered but there is also a sense of order, maybe a random sense of order in the way we can say there is a sense of order in the universe, despite anomalies such as black holes, dwarf stars and light years. Poechenellerkelder’s interior might look like chaos but if you consider it carefully you will see a magical sense of order. Then I move on to thinking if Belgian beer culture is also a combination of order and chaos — for instance, the prayer-like devotion of Trappist brewing as opposed to the wilder shores of fermentation with lambic and gueuze, shores that when we fetch up on them are serene and placid rather than being inhabited by the Cyclops out to bash our brains out.

The day before I had gone to Mechelen, a small Flemish city I am fond of, particularly as it is where I drink the beers of Het Anker at the source. Before I went to Het Anker I stopped at Bier Centrale, a bar and restaurant that is part of a chain and it is here where other thoughts on the nature of Belgian beer culture came along like with the audacity of seagulls on the scrounge. It possessed a laidback lunchtime mood, and I noted a central rectangular bar, carved wood vibe, lined by stools and brass foot rests, while there was patterned tiled floor at the entrance, then tiles just around the surround of the bar before more wood. On the left side, three steps led up to a platform where there were tables and chairs, while where I was sitting on the other side there were open booths. On the walls, which were covered with a dark blue-green textured wallpaper, framed beer adverts and brewery tin signs looked down. The massive beer list, meanwhile, was in a Vogue-style and -sized magazine, two copies of which were on each table.

My first thoughts were that the bar felt rather contrived, inorganic, staid, corporate, but on the other hand it looked good, an imagined Belgian beer cafe, dominated by dark wood and low lighting, though racks of glasses hanging upside over the bar provided a gleam in the gloom. So was this an aspect of Belgian beer culture, beer culture lite perhaps? Or was that unfair of me?

As I was musing on my thoughts through the medium of writing in my notebook, a young woman, who had noted my empty glass (Zinnebier), came up to ask me what I would like (a De Ranke Franc Belge please), but she also asked me what I was writing. I told her and we talked about beer, which she said she loved and was fascinated by and then added that she liked to go to different pubs with her friends and try new beers but her friends could be a bit conservative and would rather go to cocktail bars. She also asked me what my favourite bar in Mechelen was, I had to say Het Anker’s because I liked the beers and loved watching people there. She agreed with me. After she had gone, I wondered how her interest was sparked? Family? I then recalled a foodie guide in Ghent, when I was on assignment there in 2012, who had told me how her grandmother used to buy crates of Westvleteren, which I then thought a remarkable story, but it also confirmed to me the central role of beer in Belgian society, even though the majority of drinkers plump for Jupiler, Crystal, Alken-Maes and Stella.

On my way back to the station I dropped into Den Stillen Genieter, which I had been introduced to in 2018 when judging in Mechelen for the Brussels Beer Challenge. I asked the bearded licensee if he was happy with cash and a man on a stool at the bar said, ‘cash is king’, a phrase that always irritates, but hey ho, and in the long narrow downstairs bar I dived into my Troubadour Magma with joy, while the mournful, Dungeons and Dragons music from the Lords of the Rings TV programme played. This is a unique bar, which I have not always been sure of, stools along the counter where locals sit, and I always felt it was a beer geek place. After my Magma I wanted another but there was no more and I was offered a NEIPA, which I politely declined and swooped on a Hommelbier Fresh Harvest 2026. Then thinking about Belgian beer culture I thought about beer and its associated obsessions — metal, gaming, men’s solitary hobbies, loneliness, the need to be someone else which ends in self-immolation (Brunhild trying to burn down the hall with Hagen and associates still inside perhaps?). Belgian beer culture, like beer culture, whether out in the cities and towns or in traditional bars or specialist beer joints, could be confusing, and I am not sure I found what I was looking for. Or did I?

Let me tell you about the best summer beer festival I ever went to. It was at a brewery taproom in the countryside where the aroma of grilled meat wafted through the air and the mayhem of the Morris for once made sense. ‘Where have you been all winter?’ I heard someone say to one of the dancers. With bells on his ankles and a stick in each hand, the reply was succinct and delivered with a straight face. ‘I read, much of the night, went south.’ There was a pause. ‘Croydon, that is.’

There were plenty of beers to be sampled, both cask and keg, with the latter including several authentic lagers, one from the Black Forest and another from Franconia. Cask beers were both from the brewery holding the festival as well as a judicious selection of beers from local breweries and those further afield. They were all in superb condition and a delight to drink.

After the Morris had finished, this most sunlit and energetic of beer festivals was a soundtrack of excited voices, bundles of laughter and the yells of children as they chased each other in the garden while their parents beamed benignly and ordered another half-pint. Some beer festivals can be po-faced and disconsolate as those for whom beer is a holy writ gather in their tribes and glower at those who drink with abandonment.

This summer beer festival felt like the great outdoors in a pint (or even a two-thirds) glass, and I felt that it was a pristine event, a triumph and a time to lift a glass to light and warmth. It was now when I could be outside and feel the rays of the sun on my face and relax and feel gratitude for the blessings of John Barleycorn, for beer runs through our society with the sureness and fluency of a river making its way to the sea. I have always felt that beer oils the wheels of discourse, provides the currency for the exchange of ideas, and helps like-minded souls link arms and celebrate the sense of being alive.

As I approached the taproom I saw two men, soft grins swiped on their faces, who I guessed were survivors from the night before and I got a brief glimpse of the evening’s jollity and dedicated sense of toping. To confirm my view, at the bar inside, I asked the young guy serving me if the festival had been busy. He said with emphasis: ‘Oh yes.’ He looked tired, as did a couple of other members of the young staff. I didn’t say it, but my raised eyebrows might have been enough to demonstrate to my server that I thought the mood of the pub to be one of tiredness and being hungover, which if you are hosting a beer festival is no bad thing on the day after.

Despite the music, and the steady stream of visitors, this was a kind of beer festival that suggested tranquillity, though the local swallows and house martins might have disagreed with me as they darted and dived through the air above with the freneticism of the faithful. As I sat down outside overlooking a field that led down to a slow-moving river and drank my locally brewed Maibock, I thought of how there was a mellowness about this beer festival, a serenity, an end-of-the-cold-times celebratory mood, sunny and bittersweet, for the latter suggested the relentless passing of time.

You might want to know where this beer festival was, but in the way in which George Orwell revealed that the Moon Under Water didn’t exist, I will admit that this summer beer festival is a composite of several I have attended. Some had great lagered beers and well-conditioned cask and an encouragement of children to play and provide a lightness of being, some had excellent food and at one even the Morris made sense to me. Then there was the one which included a beer garden, plus shaded woodland and a cooling river running alongside, plenty of sunshine, a genial intoxication and the amity of friends as well as meeting new people, children and dogs. So if you do know of a beer festival in the summer that has all of this please let me know.

At Gosenschenke Ohne Bedenken in Leipzig in November 2010 — note the spirit, which I initially turned down but thought ‘go on then’, I felt it the next morning

When I write about travel, I try and understand its intricacies that come from the perspective of being a writer on beer, which means I want to write about the places where beer is made and drunk, the various cultures that surround its consumption and manufacture, the histories, the stories, the tastes, the superstitions and the people who drink it. I want to articulate that travelling for beer is as valid a journey as those taken by wine writers to the various vineyards around the world. The beer areas have their own value, their own customs, their own languages, their own behaviours. Let us try to understand travel first — travel is exploration, journeying, a metamorphosis, change, intrusion, about wanting to be belong and not stand out as a tourist, but in the context of a writer it is also about learning, asking questions of those you meet, observing and understanding, being intoxicated by different customs and ways of beer drinking, as well as occasionally being intoxicated by the beers that you drink, sometimes though as once happened to me in Leipzig in the company of a drop of spirits. How do these customs develop? Was the addition of syrups to Berliner Weiss an attempt to sweeten what was a very sour and acidic beer, the same going for the marriage of cherries and gueuze/lambic? Why did shandy and Radler develop? How did bitter tastes become popular, what is the nature of bitterness and the nature of sweetness? Why are toasts offered up, were they extensions of the toasts the ancients used to make to their gods and when the gods died did fellow drinkers become the new gods?

What else is travel about? It is about swapping your customary mode of life for a different way of life, of experiencing what it is like in another country, another town or city, another continent. When I have drunk beer in America I have often thought of how far I am away from my own local haunts, but in some ways there are similarities as well as differences. What are these similarities and differences? I suppose in some ways one of the first differences I had to deal with when starting to drink in Europe was table service, I recall times when I would go into a bar in Paris and hesitantly make my way to the counter, before the bartender would point at a table, which meant I would be served there. Then I would read that you had to tip if served at the table, so being me I would stand at a bar and drink my beer there, smiling awkwardly but sometimes talking with someone who could speak English. This has happened more recently in a pub in Nuremberg, which was when I went back in November and someone remembered me and said hello: the confederacy of beer drinking. Then there are the waiters at U Fleků, who circle the rooms where you sit and sometimes bring a glass of some local spirit which the novice often believes to be complimentary but in reality they are selling it. It is always wise to know about this.

At Hopworks taproom in Portland OR in June 2015, I had the IPA (naturally) as well as the Imperial Red Ale, Galactic, which I put in the 3rd (and final) edition of 1001 Beers

Travel is all about change, how we change from one environment to another, how our travels pluck us from our safe ordered homes into different environments, where there are different modes of life, where people deal with the world differently, where life goes on in a different way to what you have known at home. So all this travel takes you into the unknown, to different places where for a brief moment you try and look as if you belong, but being of a curious nature you also want to know the customs and the superstitions and the language and the flavours of where you are. Travel is about looking around as well as talking to people. For instance, I stayed in Mozzate (a comune in the southwestern part of Como province) a couple of weeks ago on my trip to Birrificio Italiano, and walking from the station to the hotel I felt as if I was walking through an extreme simulation of Sunday (it was a Sunday after all, but it took me back to the dreary Sundays of my North Wales youth). There were no people about, the blinds on the houses were drawn, very few cars passed, and the only sound was that of a pack of dogs barking in someone’s back yard. Where was everyone I asked myself? However when I went to the village where Birrificio Italiano was I felt as if there was life here, people, a church, a mayor, a lifestyle, not everyone was hidden away. This felt somewhere you could stay, somewhere you could hire a flat and write in the depths of winter about the sublimity of the beers being produced nearby. I had travelled.

Saturday night in Milan, at the Birrificio Lambrate bar and restaurant on the Via Camillo Golgi in the district of Lambrate. My first visit to this bar in ten years.

Mood: lively, busy, frenetic, social, light-hearted, celebratory. Voices clatter through the air, as groups of men and women, regulation uniform of jeans, baseball hats (one branded with the band name Suicidal Tendencies), puffer or denim jackets and ruck sacks scatter themselves about (several hi-vis jackets too), some bar-standing, others table-ready, glasses of beer in front of them. Craft beer done punk/biker/anarchist style. The music being played seems to be Clash songs sung in Italian, I recognise Bankrobber. Hand slap between a drinker and bar guy, who wears a hoodie with the name of the brewery on it, followed by a fist bump and the drinker bangs his fist on his chest, around the heart. Sometimes the noise that could annoy in a pub is a valuable soundtrack to the beer in your hand.

Delicious beer: Porpora Doppelbock, light mahogany in colour, delicate floral hops on the nose, with lightly sweet malt coming through on the palate. Other beers: IPA, DIPA, smoked porter, bock, lager and a cask beer, which I am told is a mocha coffee stout. The place has the look of a traditional English pub with wooden stools at the bar, a brass foot rail and moveable hooks on a brass rail just below the counter, which is weathered and polished wood. Two dart boards to the left of the bar, where games are in progress. I sit on a stool away from the bar, slightly to the left of the main serving area, another Porpora please, thank you.

With my beer I think about my visits to Italy. I first went in 1990, Tuscany, drove there from Paris with an on-off girlfriend. We slept in the car and it took us around 36 hours. She was irritated by my constant complaints over the quality of the beer and on our return a few days later we stopped off near Lyon for a meal. Here in the manner of a shipwrecked sailor slaking his salt-flecked thirst at a bubbling spring, I devoured a Kronenbourg 1664, a beer I usually tended to avoid.

Further visits to Italy down through the years underlined what I thought was the poor quality of the beer available, until 2008. That was when I took a trip to Milan after reading about the quality and growing availability of independently brewed beers such as those from Birrificio Italiano, Lambrate and Baladin. On this visit, myself and a couple of other writers were taken to these three breweries by an Italian beer writing friend and there was no reason why I should ever drink indifferently in Italy ever again.

Given that I sit facing the front of the serving booth I fancifully think that it resembles some confessional booth I have seen in cathedrals on the European mainland, maybe one in Mechelen or Zagreb. It has a wooden gantry on all three sides, while the front gantry has a massive clock embedded in it; it doesn’t seem to be working and naturally I think of the line from Withnail & I about a stopped clock telling the right time twice a day. I sip my beer and write in my notebook, trying to define the stillness in the bar. There is no background music and the only sounds I can hear are the muffled voices of the two young female bar staff talking at the end of the corridor beyond the serving booth.

Silence in a pub can be a two-edged sword. At this time of the day, a few minutes after midday on a cold, grey Sunday, the stillness of the bar is pleasing and serene, a meditative start to a day that I know will involve several pub visits. It is a glorious silence, a prompt to thought, an encouragement to probe your feelings and discover what you like about what’s in the glass you have in front of you (for me, the Budvar avails itself of a crispness, a delicate bittersweetness and light grain and citrus). There is a pliant stillness about this silence, a stillness that settles on my mood, energising and yet also relaxing. I feel as if I am in a novel or a film, I am a character, a found soul for whom at this moment, time is standing still. It is also homely, reminiscent of the silence when you sit in your favourite armchair with a book in front of you (and sometimes accompanied by a glass of glorious beer).

However, if this was the same occasion around 5pm on the cusp of the evening, especially on a weekday, the silence would be oppressive, treacherous even. It would flatten the mood you would expect from a pub, where part of the appeal later in the day is the rush and rustle of voices as people celebrate the end of the working day with a drink on the way home.

The man to my right stands up with his empty glass and orders a pint of the same again and returns to his citadel and continues to stare into nothing after a couple of swigs of his amber-coloured beer. The young woman who served him vanishes into the corridor again and I hear the sound of the pub’s front door opening and three middle-aged people (two men and a woman, urban hikers perhaps from the look of their boots, waterproof trousers and backpacks), enter the bar. Is there any food asks one man and the young woman points to a list of rolls on the wall to his left. The other man puts on his glasses to peer at the hand pumps, presumably wondering what he should order and eventually orders a stout for himself, a half of bitter for his friend and another pint of stout for the woman, who I guess is his partner. Three organic chicken and mayo rolls are called for, alongside a couple of packets of cheese and onion crisps and trio sit down to my left.

Earlier on in my stillness I had noticed their table, a Victorian-style Dolphin Table with a cast iron pedestal and three clawed feet, with three stools grouped around it, a memory, I thought, of the night before, where perhaps friends had sat, pints and conversation being shared. The stillness was starting to change and there was now a growing sense of sound traversing through the air, not intrusive, but something on a level of a distant radio station from somewhere far away usually heard in the middle of a sleepless night, unknown and misunderstood but still part of the soundtrack of life. It was time to wend my weary way onto the next pub.

On the aptly named Cemetery Road in Sheffield here was the shell of a closed pub: The Vine Inn. I passed it last weekend when I was in the city. I saw it last year when I walked this way and nothing seemed to have changed: there was still the eviscerated rubble of the interior dumped in front of it and it still didn’t look habitable, though possibly new windows had been put in. I knew nothing about the pub, how good or bad it was and I didn’t even know when it closed (and for once I thought I would resist the siren call of internet sleuthing), though I would guess from its faded nature it’s been a few years. What struck me about it, apart from the suggestion that building work was slowly, ever so slowly, going on, was the possibility that this shell might have harboured any ghosts, whose lost voices could be heard on nights when the wind was in the right direction (or was the pub the ghost?). After all, Sheffield General Cemetery was just up the road, where to wander through its grounds was to marvel at how death had undone so many, from merchant bankers to captains of industry to ministers of various truths and many loved sons and daughters and husbands and wives.

Back to the pub, I wondered if laughter still lingered in the brickwork, perhaps from when Ricardo and Howey (ok I made their names up but they sound like popular pub names of regulars) drunk themselves sober or maybe it was the echoes of a pub quiz (‘pop from the 1980s tonight ladies and gentlemen’) or a game of bingo (‘housey housey!’) or a darts match (‘top of the league mate’)? Then there might have been a man whose name no one knew (inevitably known as the man with no name) who stopped coming in when he lost his ancient Jack Russell, Terry, and some would say that they saw him wandering through the grounds of the cemetery, wraith-like and hollowed-out. Was it a place where the slow passage of time was like a glacier, whether advancing or more likely retreating, or perhaps it was a place where pints shoved time along with the brutality of a bouncer chucking an interloper out of a pub? Time was always moving without the constraint of permission.

I wondered if it had regulars who came in at lunchtime in search of company and serenity or just maybe to play pool (did it have a pool table?), or was it a place where desperation sometimes took hold and sadness was a long swig from a pint in the company of a chaser? What was it like in the evening, when alcohol loosened tongues and careless talk flew through the air like spindrift? Did anyone met their future partner there or maybe start the long journey towards an estrangement from their current partner? Did friends collide over football, combine over the right way to fix a burst pipe or even spend time within when the finality of a life well lived could be cheered on its way. Pubs give us so many permissions to live our lives that it would not surprise me if a dead pub still hoarded its voices and personalities like a miser his gold.

However, as I am doing now, I could speculate and take liberties with the advance of time, but all I know is that this pub was now as dead as Jacob Marley and one day no one would ever know that this was a place where those who called it their local felt at home and one last laugh from Ricardo and Howey rent the air like the sound of splitting fabric.

You could say that the Belgian coast was where I began a life-long affair with the country’s beers. The port of Ostend was my first landfall on the European mainland when I came on holiday with my mother and younger brother, back in the mid-70s. It was one of those budget trips, where we stayed in Ostend and every day went on a coach to the likes of Amsterdam (‘rubbish’ according to my diary, ‘full of hippies’), Brussels (‘fantastic’) and Bruges (‘cheap’ as in unimpressed rather than anything financial). At the age of 15 I also persuaded my mother that it was perfectly legal for me to have a glass of Stella Artois in the hotel bar, which she reluctantly agreed to, though she put her foot down when my 12-year-old brother said it applied to him as well.

A couple of years or so ago I was back in Ostend and over two days I used the coastal tram to explore the sea-facing areas both north and south of the city, popping off in various resorts. I was in search of the places of beer on this often windswept coast, and the tracked mobility of the tram, its ability to be forever moving, was my guiding star. There was no fixed point on the coast, it seemed, when I was on the tram, it was a continuous journey, like continuous fermentation, in that ideas and visions are fermenting in your mind, thoughts bubbling away, ideas swerving from one place to another. You become a watcher on a microscopic world on the tram, seeing people hopping on and off, children on their way home from school, what you think is an enthusiast for the tram (like you are becoming), a birder who disembarked near a wild-life sanctuary and the history buff eager to look at the remains of part of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall just outside Ostend at Domain Raversijde.

Travelling northeast towards the Dutch border, where the tram reached its terminus at Knokke, an affluent resort, which very much merited the description I had been given in a Brussels bar the previous night by a man on the next table. ‘When you get to Knokke-Heist at the eastern end,’ he said, ‘it’s very bling bling and you will see Porsches there.’ He had a point. The main street of Knokke was a uniformity of shops dealing with jewellery, clothes, perfume and interior decorations, though I spotted no Porsches.

I have always felt that a distinctive area in the northern beer lands demands its own beer culture, in the same way that the church towers and castles of Bavaria magic up glasses of Helles and Festbier, or back in the UK the seaside location of Adnams in Suffolk tempts the thirsty. So with this is mind, in search of beer culture, I wandered into a traditional looking bar called Estaminet and ordered a glass of the classic Trappist beer Orval. It wasn’t brewed by the coast or even in Flanders, its home was Wallonia, but it was a beer that suited me at that moment as I sat beneath a canopy on the outside watching the world go by. This wasn’t a place of beer, but it was a start.

Memory often plays tricks, a blurred sleight of hand, the grand magician of time at work, as something you think happened, of which you are absolutely sure of the significant details, is then exposed as a jerrybuilt structure of false remembrance on reading a diary entry that tells you the truth. For instance, take the rediscovery of an entry from April 1989 in which I wrote that I wasn’t sure where my then girlfriend and I were going with our relationship, even though we were planning to marry. I hadn’t read it since then, so when she finished with me a couple of months later I always thought of it as a shock, a surprise ending to what was a perfect relationship. Reading that long-forgotten memo to oneself recently I now know this was not true. I’d also forgotten that my mother said she wouldn’t be coming to the wedding if my father was and then he said he wouldn’t go so my mother could. The dramas of an impending marriage, which when we split up had probably gone off the boil though I had stopped writing in my diary by then.

So when I recall my visit to the Flemish coast in search of its beer culture, I ask myself if what I write will be an accurate version of the two days I spent there or will it be what I would like it to have been? And did I find anything? The conundrum of the Flemish coast is that its beer culture is sparse and very weak in its grip on the imagination, with three breweries and several brewing firms. However, it is a gorgeous place to visit, it has a romance about it, especially out of the holiday season, though I suspect that during the summer it is a ramshackle parade of riotous behaviour and any semblance of beer culture is thrown out of the window. I will be going back on the salt-water path soon and my explorations will continue.

So there I was in Cologne and leaving Hauptbahnhof I crossed the Rhine, slow-moving, the colour of mud, upon which an elongated, snub-nosed barge was slowly making its way downstream. I stopped and took a photo, a snapshot of slothfulness perhaps and continued along the historic Hohenzollern Bridge. It was crammed with people through which bicycles and the occasional skateboarder cleaved their way, imperious and ‘get out of my way’ seemingly stamped on their features. Some people, were in groups whose colours defined their tribal affiliations — red and white for FC Köln, black and white for Eintracht Frankfurt. Sporting rivals presumably, a derby match of sorts, but there seemed no animosity as they thrust their way past me to the right side of the river, many of them swigging bottles of Kölsch. I, on the other hand, was caught up in the cross-current of people making their way towards the city centre, its location marked by the twin spires of the medieval cathedral. I first saw it when I was 18 and wrote in my diary, ‘looked at Cologne cathedral, brilliant, a Gothic masterpiece, so old. It was pouring with rain and quite cold generally today. Went shopping in Cologne’.

I don’t know what I bought but a later sentence in my diary mentioned that a bottle of wine was going back to the UK with me. I have a vague memory of it being red, partly because someone on our trip to Germany had told me that the local red wine was awful. I wanted to make my own mind up. I had recently turned 18 and was taking full advantage of the legal right to drink in pubs and bars, much to my mother’s concern. As I have written in the past, my mother was always proud of my journalistic work but she did concern herself that I drank too much, but she is now dead and I am not. Yet.

Once on dry land I moved slowly, surely and slightly claustrophobically with the crowd, pushing my way through a Christmas market in the shadow of the cathedral, the aromatic djinns of cooking meat, mulled wine and frying doughnuts darting about, twisting and twirling and enjoining the passers-by to gather at various stalls. I wasn’t tempted though as I had another goal in mind, to drink Kölsch. Once out of the dense crowd, like a cork slowly popped from a bottle, I made my way to Früh am Dom whose Kölsch I had always enjoyed. Here I wanted to place myself within a fulcrum of Cologne’s beer culture, even though I guessed the place would be rammed. I wanted to drink beer, to watch people and if possible get an insight to the behaviour of those who were streaming into this place of beer. Inside, tourists, locals, football fans flowed through a central corridor off which several rooms had tables and chairs where the hopeful could place themselves down and ask for portions of hefty, hearty food, the kind of meals that would sink the Bismarck and leave no survivors.

I was content to stand at a tall table in the corridor, though brief glances into the rooms showed that they were possessed of an interior soul that I called ‘Baronial hall chic’ in my notebook, Game of Thrones light perhaps, a bit like my 25cl glass of Kölsch, that was served to me by man in his mid-50s, stocky and bald, with the energy of a demon. He spoke English when he heard my poor German, ‘I will look after you’ he replied and I felt like I had been adopted.

Früh’s Kölsch is a very clean beer, golden in colour, and slight in aroma. It is very much a drinking beer, a beer to pour down your throat with abandonment, a beer whose character is sufficient to slake a thirst you didn’t know you had. There was a light bitterness in the finish and I detected a delicate fruitiness that reminded me of wild strawberries, but this timidity is very much the character of Kölsch. And when my glass was empty the same waiter brought me another one and scrawled two upright marks on a piece of paper and then put a cross through them as soon as I had paid him €5. I was slower on the second beer, my thirst slightly quenched, and as I stood there, a still centre in the storm of the crowd, a couple stood in front of me. Meanwhile, waiters shouted as they try to get through the crowd with plates of food, rushing through while people hung about and dithered. ‘Achtung!’ bellowed one waiter as he shouldered his way through the stream of people flowing through.

As seems to be common to the Kölsch bars I have visited in Cologne, the waiters were uniformly dressed, a uniform of work. Here the men (and they were all men as far as I could see) wore blue jumpers, white shirts, dark ties, dark starched aprons (around which were fastened money belts), black trousers, black shoes, a darkness of colours that seemed to represent the whole kinetic energy of their frantic progress. The waiters also seemed to have a brotherhood, a shared communality, as I watched new faces come on shift who were welcomed with handshakes and pats on the shoulder. It was time to leave to get my train to Brussels and a loud masculine roar of meat-generated shouts marked the place where the football fans were and I shouldered my way out into the cold clear air of a Saturday lunchtime in November.

Very traditional interior and the beers are chalked up on a board at the side of the bar. There is a considered hush about the place, no music, just people’s voices and the hustle and bustle caused by the bartender cleaning up. A couple of friends sitting on the small table in front of me are doing selfies and drinking Rotbier. A tube above the bar presumably runs from the cellar to the serving taps. A woman sits at the corner of the bar with a dark beer nearly finished and is scrolling on her phone. A middle-aged couple sit next to her, ceramic mugs full of beer. The mugs are branded with the brewery’s name but I don’t know if they are regulars, or tourists who have bought them and want to drink out of them. (Hausbrauerei Altstadthof, Nuremberg)

••••

Lots of laughter, it’s almost like a boisterous hotel bar where locals go. Tales are told, of which I haven’t got a clue what they are on about, but there are plenty of laughs, jokes at someone’s expense. A trick done by the landlord with a straw, as his server said the foam looked rather sparse on the beers, so he swirled it around in the three glasses and the foam rose. Bavarian beer drinkers seem to be a critical and knowing lot. They hold up the glass to the light, they knock the glass with a metal scissor to get bubbles, they drink spirits and then toast each other. This is a very unique pub, the landlord is having one too. The bar server is constantly busy. Coke in a Dunkel!

‘You are here again and writing again!’

‘I had a book out.’

‘We remember you here before writing in your notebook, have a good night.’

He clapped his hands on my shoulder and off he went. I seem to recall that the guy who spoke to me had a roofing business. More shots of fire water are poured for locals. (Wirtshaus Hütt’n, Nuremberg)

••••

Guy on my table, talking in English to a friend about a woman who he says has been shit to him. A really strong post-split up obsession. ‘I should be quiet,’ he says, but he isn’t. Music in background, Mr Broken Heart continues, arms making a statement, then they go outside for a smoke. After a few minutes they return, ‘my mother is a fucking mess’, more family therapy going on. ‘Whenever something happens negatively in my life I look at myself — and in my head maybe this has how it has gone in my relationships,’ a pause, ‘I think I am emotionally immature, though I give a fuck about my dog’. (Dva kohouti, Prague)

••••

Four men in their 50s come in, all in black voluminous coats and beneath they wear black tops that have zips in them, two order red wine and one has possibly a gin and tonic, the other has nothing. They are silent apart from G&T man who occasionally whistles and taps his glass with a finger and looks at his phone. At the table behind them, the one nearest the front door, a man who could quite possibly be in his 70s, sits reading the papers with a glass of tea that was brought to him by the young woman behind the bar. Back to the men in black, the one nearest the window has a woollen hat on and stares straight ahead and doesn’t seem to say much. The G&T man is talking in French with the man opposite him. And then they are off, maybe they are brothers, all wear trainers, the one with the hat has a crucifix-shaped earring, they look like monks or maybe hooded crows. (Billie, Brussels)

••••

The puppet-like figures hanging over the entrance remind me of a photo I have seen of a mass hanging of Serbs by Austro-Hungarian troops in World War One. Left hanging as a warning to encourage the others. A man comes in, bald head, and says hello to various drinkers, locals presumably, and then brings me a bowl of salty snacks. Yes, I like this place. (Poechenellerkelder, Brussels)

So what is beer culture, I kept asking myself, having blithely parroted the phrase for some years that I needed to work it out for myself.

So here goes in a nutshell: Beer culture is about the customs that surround the making and drinking of beer, the institutions in which it is drunk, the rules and rituals that surround it, the people who both make and drink it and how they identify themselves. It is about the places where it is made and drunk, the landscape that shapes it, the factors that influence it and how it is transmitted through the world.

That was not enough, so I took a deep breath and starting writing: beer culture is about the people who drink and make beer, the places in which it is made and drunk, the surroundings, the decor and the mood of pubs and bars that are shaped by both the people who visit and the beers that they drink.

It is about the history of the breweries, the beers, the trends of drinking, the ebb and flow of consumption, the histories of the pubs and bars in which beer is drunk, whether the establishments are as old as the hills in whose shadows they stand or opened up in a former shop last year, or closed and revived and brought back from the dead.

It is about the landscapes of beer and its adjoining breweries, whether we think of a railway arch in a revitalised part of a growing city, or a farmhouse on a lonely stretch of Flemish countryside, or a village inn and its brewery in rural Franconia, or a factory unit that has so little romance that you wouldn’t realise that award-winning beer was made there unless you went inside. In you go.

It is about the music played, the words written and regurgitated, the songs sung and the laughter that accompanies the glasses of beer being drunk in a bar in Milan (and let us not forget the Morris Men); it is about the clothes that people wear, at Oktoberfest or at British beer festivals, or The Knights of the Brewers Mash Staff parading through the Grande Place in Brussels, with their robes and priest-like hats; it is about the images, the artwork, the inn-signs, the bottle and can labels, the adverts, the social media, the artwork that often can be bought as a print and stuck up on the wall.

It is about walking the streets, pushing open the door of a favourite bar or pub and waiting to be served, anticipation growing within as you imagine the crispness of the beer you will be ordering, the cold and refreshing play of sensation on the tongue, the wet whisper of hedonism, the jokes told and the stories erred on the right side of your playful nature.

It is about the taste, the slight intoxication and the occasional toxicity when we go too far, it is about the amusement that beer can bring, the nostalgia and memories it can evoke, the people with whom we share memories and stories and the glory to come. The brown tide, the froth of the moment and the glimpse of bubbles and the prickle of carbonation; the dance and the sparkle on the tongue, the gush of thought that comes forth, as if Neptune were stepping ashore. The bitterness, the sweetness, the caught on the hop moment, the crisp, refreshing contact with the palate, the signals sent to the brain that what you are drinking is personified enjoyment. The golden sun that shines in the glass, the fruits of your labour emerging from the glass, the sweep of fruitiness on the tongue, alongside the braced bitterness with a cereal-like dryness that is an enabler of enjoyment.

It is about the rattling bus snaking through the countryside with a pub at the end of the journey, the train skirting the wave battered coast with a pub at the next station, or maybe two or three, the walk through the rain, the nature of the game; under the hill all of us go at the final stage of our life but beer can be used to celebrate that passing, reconnect your memory with a swig and another swig, raise a full glass to the memory of dear old matey they all chorused, may he be never forgotten, but as soon as the rain stopped they walked out of the pub never to think of their dead friend ever again, for they were alive and he wasn’t.

The finality of the empty glass, you’ve had enough dearie, time to go home, haven’t you lot got homes to go to; the trade routes and the links between varieties of beer, the routes that link the European continent and cross the Channel to connect with that pugnacious island where some still bang their dimpled pint glass on the table and bellow ale forever, the traces on the map that confound the temperate, the links between regions and the question to be asked, why did this particular beer style come to be in this region, why did Pilsner become a thing in Bohemia, while a darker cold-fermented kind of beer ruled the roost over the border in Bavaria; what were the tastes of the Munich locals who decided in the 1890s that they too wanted a golden lager beer. Why did ale become hailed as the drink of champions in the wet and windy islands of Britain, and how come dark beer kept its handholds on people’s palates throughout the continent; why do some people like this kind of beer and others that kind, how are our palates different, what is the soul of beer and brewing beyond that of making money and reliving a heroic imagined past; why do you drink beer, is it because everyone else does and you want to join the crowd or did, after a time, a growing appreciation of the drink come to govern your instincts?

One chooses to drink immoderately or moderately, the taste of the beer you pick tickles the palate, pleases the palate, possesses the palate with a pleasure that is on a par with the dishes you enjoy and the clothes you wear, and when you choose a beer and wed yourself to it with the clamp of a limpet on a seaside rock, it becomes one of the pleasures with which you define yourself, along with the style of clothes, the books you read, the music you enjoy, the sports you watch, the friends you have, the family you miss, the words you write in journals and diaries, online in documents, Google or otherwise, the ghosts that inhabit your waking thoughts, the people you knew who passed on by, as well as the dogs and the cats and the odd rabbit in its hutch, the mainline to heaven that overindulgence can bring, with the association of hell next morning, then you are back in the pub before you knew where you are, a pint of please, a pint of the usual, and before long the voice at the back of the mind that says it is time to go home now, time to go home, good night all.

Mindful drinking?

A sanctified glass of non-alcoholic beer, cheers to zebra-striping and Dry January, all hands to the low and no pump, the everyone’s-doing-it-now movement, the new zeitgeist didn’t you know it. If I do a search on mindful drinking that is what I get, I bet even AI categorises it as such, but why should no and low have all the fun — there is more to mindful drinking than an IPA that is all citrus and no gaiters.

For me being mindful of the beer that I have, is being aware of its flavour, its aromatics, the position of the glass on the table, the precision with which I have been served and the impact on my palate, the heady glow of growing intoxication and the slow, steady show of imagination that a pint of a strong (though not too strong) pint or half-litre of beer can deliver onto the showreel that is constantly playing in my mind. Be aware, don’t be scared, mindful drinking gives you a chance to plunge yourself into a pool of freeing your thoughts from the cloistered clamp of the day’s business.

Mindful drinking?

I am standing at a wooden counter in a city bar, alert and expectant. It is a clean and new space of what looks like reclaimed wood, pine perhaps, while my arms are resting on it as the young female server, concentration on her face, pours four pints of water. ‘Line cleaning this morning,’ she says. Elsewhere in front of the wooden bar and in the adjoining room, where there is an assemblage of tables and chairs, people are sitting down to eat, as Frank Sinatra swings his way through Jingle Bells in the background (this is before Christmas when it seemed that the mind-numbingly cavalcade of seasonal music could not be escaped in licensed premises).

After the line cleaning the beer I order sits in a pint glass, which is slightly narrower at the base before delicately widening out towards the top. There is a whipped egg-white head of foam, while looking at the beer below I can see bubbles rising to the top, cleaving their way through the bruised golden clarity of an unfiltered Helles. I can recognise anticipation on my palate so finally it is time to take a deep swig. My right hand clasps the glass, midway, cold to the touch. It is equally cold and crisp on the palate, with a wave of crispness breaking on the foreshore of sensation. There is the suggestion of breakfast cereal, the graininess of Weetabix perhaps, a memory of my mother commanding me to eat the two palm-sized tablets of grain that dissolved into a milky mush in a bowl in front of me, before I had to go to school. Another swig reveals a lightly citrus note of lemon.

My attempt at mindful drinking is slightly impaired by Freddie Mercury ululating ‘thank god it’s Christmas’, which he then bafflingly wishes it could be Christmas everyday or some such nonsense. Despite this intrusion, I can also hear the low murmur of voices rising from downstairs. I’m sitting in the upstairs part of the bar, which is empty apart from me. Now it’s David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing across each other. A quick check online and yes it is the two of them singing two different songs. I have a vague memory of it and ponder on the weirdness of the Thin White Duke doing a duo with the Old Groaner. I take a brief pause from the beer but then another mouthful is embarked on, followed by more crisp coldness that refreshes the mouth and wakes up the somnambulant parts of the palate, wake up, sound the reveille! The alarm clock shock to the palate continues as I pass down the glass.

Mindful drinking?

I’m focusing on the beer and how comfortable I am in my chair and how it has just passed 3pm. As the glass reaches the state of emptiness, a slight suggestion of melancholia flits through my mind, Christmas and its thoughts, memories of those no longer with us, grandparents, parents, friends, dogs, health, but the crispness is still there as I come to the end of the glass and decide to head out into the gleaming lights that bring on the emerging city night.

Mindful drinking.

The laughter of locals garnishes the air as I walk into Brauerei Fässla, the elders of the community gathered in the covered courtyard it seems, while an equally venerable dog of indeterminate breed greets me with a wag of a tail and a lick on my hand. In a room to the right, where the bar is, there are no spare tables so I make my way to another room at the back of the bar. Reserved signs are speckled on various tables, but not mine and so I order the brewery’s Pils from a woman who smiles with misplaced pity at my appalling German. Across the way on another table, a bald guy, tattoos stitched on his bulked out arms, musical in their decoration, sits concentrating on his beer, golden, a song sung in the key of clarity.

The soundtrack on this late morning in a Bamberg pub is of laughter and calls and joy growls in the main bar, alongside the clatter and bang of cutlery and plates in the kitchen. The aroma of roast meat, intense in its intimacy, flits through the room, an escape from the kitchen, like a spirit from its long locked stronghold. I sense, or perhaps create, a Friday midday feeling, the joviality of the approaching weekend, though for me, having left home the previous Sunday and perambulated through Prague, nuzzled myself into Nuremberg’s hidden corners and currently based for a day in Bamberg, there is no conception of a weekend, time is just drifting by with the conscience of a cloud.

Food is brought out, delivered with an intensity to five people at a table in the corner, in their 60s I guess, even retired, plump and prosperous, smiles and geniality, cardigans and pearls. Big plates of chips, meat, sausages, cabbage and mash. As I watch and feel slightly hungry but also know that this kind of heavy-set, thick-browed food would lay me low, I think about the Pils in my glass. It is crisp and refreshing, bittersweet and amiable, with a waft of noble hop, a hint of lemon and it skips across my palate with the sprightliness of a gymnast going for gold at the Olympics.

At the table, where the five are gathered, two couples and a male friend I think, all are chewing and masticating, swallowing, lifting forks, wiping sweaty, grease- and gravy-sodden lips with napkins; cheeks are blown out as mouthful after mouthful is shovelled in. There is an air of devotion to the great work in which they are engaged and very few words are exchanged as the consumption of chips and chops, pork knuckles and sausages, mounds of mash and hillocks of red cabbage are investigated with the thoroughness of archaeologists at the dig. Knives carve up sausages, forks deliver the pieces to the mouth, while an occasional word is passed, perhaps because the Herculean effort needed to clear the plates in coming to an end. Bread is broken and swiped left and right on the plate, another swig of beer, and chewing seems to quicken amongst several of the diners as if it’s a race to the finish. One of the women has stopped eating, one of the men drains his glass, but continues to chew and a refill is indicated.

The marathon continues and then it seems all of a sudden the finishing line is in sight. Another man has ended his consultancy with consumption and then another. The scrape of cutlery on the plate as the end is signalled. There are only two eating now, with the man tearing up a piece of bread, while three middle-aged men come in with loud voices. And finally the table has finished and conversation perks up. What a journey they have been on, while more people come in for to wear themselves out for lunch. Time for my next pub.

It was a Wednesday, late afternoon with the light fading like the echo of applause in a grand concert hall (Mahler’s 2nd perhaps) and I was in the Liverpool Arms in Conwy. I had walked there four miles from Llandudno, a lot of it along both Llandudno and Deganwy’s beaches, accompanied by the pelting sound of wind-whipped waves, the sight of oyster catchers riding the air like well-disciplined leaves stirred up by the autumnal winds, while shells — mussels, clams, whelks and razor clams — crunched beneath my feet and driftwood claimed a note in my thoughts that tomorrow I would come and gather some.

In the Liverpool Arms I ordered a pint of Draught Bass, which I first had here in the early 1980s and at the time pulled a face and made sure that Holsten Pils was my next beer. That was then but this was now and I knew that this pub was still a champion of Bass, so on my way to do a book event in the Albion Ale House in Conwy, I thought I would come here first and join in the current affectation for this most venerable of beers (apparently).

This was an old Victorian quayside pub, its name engraved in the glass in the entrance door, while in the part of the bar I sit in there was a log burner (nothing lit yet), a TV above with sound down (some quiz show I think), a fruit machine’s lights a mini prompt that Christmas is a-coming in and music playing (the Cranberries Zombie as I wrote). Halloween tat hung over the fireplace, while fake cobwebs were draped over an old black and white photo of a sailor; elsewhere there were stools, tables, lots more black and white prints on the wall, and dogs were very welcome as a cockerpoo peeked at me from beneath the table opposite. There were two other cask beers but it was the Draught Bass I was there for.

It was amber, veering towards copper, and there was sweet malt and a sulphury hint on the nose, followed by more sweet malt on the palate, a floral suggestion before it finished with a sulphur-like dryness alongside a lingering bitterness.

I have a long but patchy history with Bass. In Llandudno we used to go to the Snowdonia because the others said the Bass was good. I would ask for a lager. It was only at the end of the 1980s, in the King’s Head in Upper Street, Islington (the one with the theatre at the back and at the time a cash register at the bar) and the Island Queen, also in Islington (and at the time full of papier-mâché figures hanging from the ceiling), that I got it, but then I lost touch with it until the 2013 in the Cooper’s Arms in Burton where I drank deeply of it. I didn’t see it that often but it was in The Star in Bath, where it was served from a jug and both The Dolphin in Plymouth (‘As I studied my pint of Draught Bass drawn straight from the cask…’) and The Seven Stars in Falmouth (‘Draught Bass, a beer that was becoming rarer to find outside its home territory of Burton…’) when I was researching A Pub For All Seasons. The fluffy cockerpoo wagged its tail as it looked at me, while I noticed a couple sitting at the bar; meanwhile a bulky man in Irish rugby shirt rushed past to the gents, disturbing the dog. The music had changed and it was now an almost electro version of (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. Outside the light continued its fall from grace and it was time for me to go to the Albion.

The next day I was in the Wild Horse taproom in Llandudno and while I enjoyed the brewery’s hazy IPA Tramcar I continued to think about what Draught Bass meant to me. I suppose the beer represented a personal memory, a link with my drinking past as well as the remembrance of the places I visited in London in the late 1980s. The beer, its ebbs and flows in my drinking life, seemed like it had been a distant friend with whom you lost contact with and then you would see them on the odd occasion, but was Draught Bass a friend? Wasn’t it just a passing acquaintance on a par with those you shared an intoxicated hour with on the lines of ‘how’s it going?’, ‘what you doing with yourself?’, ‘well I must be getting on’? I think it was only during that period I wrote about above in the late 1980s that I really found Bass to be something — if briefly — essential to my drinking life, something that grabbed hold of my imagination. It was a beer that I found easy to drink, a beer that even then I felt had depth and joy and was as pleasing as a walk in the countryside on a mellow autumn day. It was for me, then, a world beater, the kind of beer that I would happily stick with as the night wore on, and nights do wear on, loquaciously, irreverently, illogically, intoxicatedly, and at the end of the night, if we are lucky, we lift the last pint in praise of a life well-lived.

I wonder when I will have Draught Bass again?

So there I was in the Topsham Brewery Tap with a full pint of Burning Sky’s green hopped IPA (the fresh hop being Target if you must know). Notebook out, stray glances at the shy approaching the bar, a jovial greeting between two men, friends perhaps, a furled umbrella ready for the coming storm. I looked at the beer, orange-amber in colour, though after initial viewing perhaps veering more towards orange, topped with a billowy snow-white head of foam, alongside regulation haze. I took a sniff for I wanted to record the details of the beer. Herbal, spruce-like, citrus and resin on the nose and as I dived into the beer I found suggestions of orange, grapefruit, the zest of cut peel, balanced with a resiny note before finishing dry and bitter. It was pliant on the palate, allied with a stickiness, a lovely sticky resiny note, a taste that reminded me of the smell in a pine forest after rainfall perhaps?

This was a beer whose crispness was allied with a subtle sweetness. A beer with a surge of citrus, the levee when it breaks, a song of dryness and bitterness and resin, while the pungency of hoppiness on the aroma somehow reminded me of gorgonzola, which is not a bad thing. ‘What sort of beer do you, like’ drifted the voice from one of the bar staff, ‘don’t forget to try our own nitro-porter,’ said a passing brewer, ‘I think it’s the best beer I have ever produced.’ ‘I will,’ I replied, but first this and I returned to the beer I had in front of. This was a beer that dazzled with the brightness of citrus, the keenness of citrus and the trill of citrus, letting you know that this was a beer you could not get throughout most of the year, even if you stamped and stamped your feet and yelled until you were baby blue in the face, no you cannot have it until after the hop harvest.

As I studied the beer with the thoughtfulness of a scholar aiming to discover a new text of medieval history in an ancient library, I began to think about the whole idea of green hopped beer. To me it suggested organic, the Garden of Eden, rustic life, Capability Brown, green fingers, the world in the evening and Gainsborough. The swirl of aromatics, pungent and green, deep and urgent, created a scree slope of sensation down which the palate’s flavour sensors slid with the gleefulness of children on the first day of the school holidays. There was a mid-palate pepperiness evident too, all of which made for me a beer as complex as Wittgenstein on the spree (or even the Spree).

This was my one and only green hopped beer this season and I thought of how much is made of their release and I recalled that Eddie Gadd at Ramsgate Brewery was a big advocate (in the last couple of years he’s collaborated with Utopian for a green-hopped Pilsner, but not this year it sadly seems). Then I wondered if the enthusiasm for them was as strong as it had ever been or had I simply not been looking in the right places? Further thoughts? Is it the Oktoberfest of ale (despite Utopian and Ramsgate’s example), a companion to the asparagus of spring, a linking of arms with the Starkbier festival of Lent. Was the appeal still there?

I thought of a recent comment from a friend that the people in focus groups he regularly leads always said they wanted authenticity and heritage in their beers but then they would go out and drink Madri. Other questions: are green hop beers more likely to be made close to the hop-growing areas, though the earliest I recall was Somerset-based Cotleigh Brewery’s over 20 years ago? Can you tell the difference, is it a marketing gimmick, we love the idea of green hops being used but how far is it being communicated? And does it need to be communicated?

More sips and more thoughts, a nod to an acquaintance who took the stool next to me. Yes, I think they remain relevant and remind thinking drinkers of the hop harvest. They mark a turn in the season, and bring forth a beer that is only available once in the year — they are a salvation, a game of hops, maybe, a clearly thought out game, and I think I might have answered my own question. Yes they remain relevant and as I agreed with myself I noticed that my glass was empty and considered that it was time for another, and of course the nitro-porter brewed just metres from where I sat (it was delicious btw).

I have a strong, iron-like attachment to the passage of the seasons and in the company of this almost obsessive attraction there is a similar if not identical contentment in the way I believe pubs can mirror the passing of the year. That is why I needed to write A Pub For All Seasons. It was an itch that demanded to be scratched, a voice within that asked for an answer, which was then shaped into something that soothed my soul for articulating what the seasons and the pub meant to me. It almost felt like a culmination of everything I had experienced throughout most of my adult life. Yet, there is always more exploration to be done, about the seasons and the pub and how I feel, especially we are well into what for me is the most glorious season of all — autumn.

This is the season where I begin to feel comfortable again, begin to somehow breathe more easily, hunker down in front of the flickering flames of the wood burner, read deeply of demanding books (I am slowly making my way through the second volume of Proust), cook and devour curries from all the regions of India and kick my way through the copper-bronze leaves that lie in their thousands along the path through the park. Here is where I walk Dante, who at 15-and-a-half is in the winter of his life, but remains in thrall to enjoyment.

So there I was in a pub in the centre of Exeter, Utopian Brewery’s bar/restaurant, Arcadia, not a traditional pub whose fittings spoke the secret language of the forest or that had the patina of age which those who became part of it experienced down the years, but it was still a comfortable place, relaxing, and most important of all autumnal, especially as the temperature seemed to have dropped outside. The front door was closed and the heating was on, while in front of me I had a pint glass of Utopian’s Fest-Märzen, a beer of which I am currently inordinately fond of.

Here is where it felt autumnal in the front bar. If I wanted autumn in a glass then here it was, dark amber in colour, a firm handshake of foam on its top beckoning me in. The aromatics were rich, bready and toasty, which veered towards a childhood memory of malt loaf (or because I am Welsh, bara brith), there was also the slightest hint of caramel somewhere there as well. The aroma felt like a bearhug, something that warmed and wrapped up the soul, a friend that you haven’t seen for years but when you meet again it’s as if nothing has changed.

It was full-bodied and crisp as I took the deepest of swigs and then there was more of that malt loaf/bara brith character, a signpost pointing towards childhood. There was also a light sweetness alongside a dryness that for some reason brought to mind the sound of a crackling fire on a gloomy afternoon, lightening up the prospects that you thought had been lost forever. After all this drama, the voices in the auditorium quietened down as it finished with a subtle bitterness and restrained sweetness.

This was a beer that anchored me to the season, a beer that somehow summoned up images of street lights coming on in the gathering dusk, leaves twirling around in a light chilled breeze that suddenly seemed to be bringing with it an intimation of the coming winter. An ancient cathedral on a late afternoon just as the rays of the setting sun come through the lowering clouds and lit up its stained glass windows.

It was a beer that made me want to write about it, made me want to just jot words down in my notebook — elegiac, sensibility, belonging, authenticity, the weary way home across the fields as the light faded and the dark took over but in the distance a light in a cottage, shining bright, was a vision of home. This was a beer that you could come home to during this season of melancholia and mellowness, remembrance and ritual. A beer that, as I took another swig and its crispness and rich malt character satisfied the soul, was yet another reason to maintain a love for this most complete of seasons. Meanwhile, people came and went, stood at the bar, students asking what was the cheapest beer, we’re upstairs with our society, a spell being broken until I took another swig and suddenly found that my glass was empty.

Had I time for another? Of course I had, I always have time for another, we always have time.

I’m in a Wetherspoons on the outskirts of London. It is 11am and I have a pint of Jaipur. The funeral is in an hour. One man photographs his breakfast, while three men discuss the changing names of pubs, then I hear ‘I went to school with a guy called Dave Reed’, while two men sitting at a round table in front of me, next to the fruit machine, are mainly silent as they take sips from their pints, bald and middle-aged, seemingly from their expressions worn and washed-out. They look into space, occasionally exchanging words, then their breakfasts are brought over. The two men chew, chomp, gnash, while others watch the street, play the fruit machine; the style of the morning is short sleeved shirts, cargo shorts, trainers, tattooed legs, the latter watching a man in high viz jacket and cap water the plants outside. Laughter. ‘It’ll be raining in a couple of days, he’s wasting his time.’ A chortle and then back to the chewing, the mastication of slices of black pudding, bare-leg-pink sausage, flattened gleaming bacon, a tumble of baked beans, clean plate, brushed clean with the crust of a toast and then the two men are back to their silence. Roofing Solutions on their t-shirts, three men come in, for breakfast perhaps? Hollow-eyed men with lanyards dangling like pretend nooses and sticks grasped firmly to hand progress through the space in front of the bar. ‘You alright mate?’ ‘Yeah, not bad.’ ‘Stop winning money!’ The clunk of loose change as it goes into a pitcher, ‘thank you very much William’, ‘not a problem’, a stooped man with a face that reminds me of a thinner version of WC Fields.’ ‘Here he is.’ ‘He ain’t got a jacket.’ ‘What’s it to you,’ comes the reply. ‘He was dressed up as a boy scout yesterday,’ says another voice. The man with the long face who photographed his breakfast is having a talk with himself, while elsewhere pints are piling up on tables. Tattoos, chewing, chomping, swallowing, gulping, laughing, ‘listen mate’, finger pointed without malice. We’d better get to the funeral.

Next day I am back in Exeter, in another pub.

Dislocation. Hot heat, sun bearing down on the street, t-shirts, no shirts, long dresses, shorts and skirts, the shadows on the wall of a departing figure, Plato’s Cave, pale skin ailing, an afterthought of dislocation, my son growing up and moving away, the noise of traffic, pulling up to each bumper, the newly borns and the pre-schoolers with their mums and small dogs sitting in the cool of a chain cafe, ‘oh look a bus!’, the excitement of a little girl, the human condition of noise, children intoxicated, but not drunk, a different meaning, the innocence of intoxicated children, the similarity of excited children to drunken revellers, so alcohol brings out the child in us until it decides to throw a tantrum and bash its fists on the ground and kick the dog.

Death, coffin, the crem, burnt remains, what’s left of the lonely hearted, what remains of ambitions, the death of the soul, how we vanish, how we live on in the dark, we live in the dark. We give ourselves fear in the dark and when we are awake at 3.30am it’s the most dislocated time of the day. Dislocation — photos of young versions of you, me and her and now one of us is no longer of this earth. We are on the earth but not in a form that consoles us and those who love us, who have fond memories, will soon see us fading away from the room of memory as much as the all consuming sadness that briefly causes those left behind to collapse in a semblance of mourning. The bulletproof container of memory. RIP. Life and death is contemplated in the pub.

Chaucer liked April because this was when folk felt the need to go on pilgrimage. It also gave him the excuse to write one of the most enduring works in English literature. April’s a bit wet and often quite cold (and it’s also the cruellest month according to TS Eliot), so for me May is the month when I feel the need to go on pilgrimage — and this year it was to the beer gardens of Bamberg and the surrounding Franconian countryside.

Beer gardens are my idea of a heaven on earth. They are places where I feel free, spaces that light up the senses with a divine combination of the kind of beer that angels would drink and bold swipes of golden sunlight, with the odd cloud drifting by as if checking up on what it is missing. I have a particularly pleasing memory of a beer garden in a Cambridge pub nearly 30 years ago, when the world was young and the beer journey that I would take was equally in its infancy. I recall a lunchtime session with friends that seemed to last forever and, which later in the day, I would try and capture in a journal I kept at the time. I wanted to stop time.

Despite my attempt to use words to bend the laws of the universe a lot of time has passed and much beer been drunk since that insoluble day. So here I was in Bamberg rather than Cambridge, during my blessed month of May and the beer gardens (or kellers) were open. So here I was at Wilde-Rose-Brau, just up the road from Schlenkerla’s brewery, as sunlight dappled the fluttering lime-green leaves of chestnut trees, nervous dots and dashes of light, a morse code of delight.

Voices murmured, glasses of darkly golden Kellerbier were clinked and downed with the avidity of a traveller at an oasis; children ran around the play area, occasionally joined by a parent with glass in hand; the sound of birdsong rose and fell like a steady heartbeat; the sweetish smell of sauerkraut crossed with the sterner aroma of grilled sausage drifted through the air. This was my happy place, my happy time, a sunlit, beer-focused community (I was with a couple of friends), where good beer was drunk, bullshit on life and beer and the rest was spoken and, above all, I felt enveloped by a serene gladness to have made this journey.

What a contrast to lunchtime’s light this was. Then I had experienced the reverse of the beer garden’s sunny disposition by diving into Schlenkerla’s dimly lit, gothically inclined tavern in the heart of the old city. Being lunchtime, the mood of the place was social, gregarious, open-minded, beery, friendly and jokey. Stories were told, pictures on phones shared, confidences tapped out; plates of Herculean onions stuffed with minced pork landed on the wooden tables soon to be followed by the clank of knife and fork against plate as hungry people dived in; I witnessed and was impressed by the tireless promenade of the food server as she balanced plates and glasses between the tables, while above her the vaulted ceiling, patterned with whorls and images of animals, pressed down as if the centuries wanted to tell the diners something special. Meanwhile, metal lampshades hung down like ornate crowns for some untold king of the winter months.

There was something about the twilight aspect of this tavern that stoked my mitteleuropa fantasies, the middle of Europe, where poets and writers sit in beer gardens and taverns and beer has a central role to play. However, looking around the tavern, I started to realise, as I have done in many other beer-inclined legends around the world (Leipzig, Portland OR, Bruges, České Budějovice), that for people here a glass of the smokey, full-bodied, darkly caramel Märzen is as commonplace as the daily view of the Thames and the Tower of London is for someone who has spent their life in Tower Hamlets. As I took another gulp of beer, I noted a slight acidity alongside a crispness, a snap and a bite on the mid palate. If Wagner’s Ring Cycle featured beer this would be it and the tavern its home — a place of eternal twilight through which we would move as if in a fog, eternal autumn, a cave, a vault in which the echoes of the past resonated and reverberated.

Back in the light, in another beer garden, this time at Brauerei Greifenklau, the early evening sunlight infiltrated through the leaves, and brought to life another aspect of the happy aspect of drinking outside: the beer. Here the Kellerbier was clean and malty, minerally and earthy, while its Rauchbier was mild compared to Schlenkerla’s. I could have spent the evening in this garden, but the earth and the sky grumbled and rumbled to the north, and thunder hammered its way through the mountains. Next day, whilst we sat in Kreuzbergkeller Lieberth’s beer garden, a few miles outside Bamberg, the rain was biblical but until umbrellas starting collapsing people remained with their Kellerbiers and drank and chatted as if nothing was happening. And this time the light was reminiscent of the dimness in the Schlenkerla Tavern, all of which suggested to me that Franconia is a place of light, of different degrees of light, a place where the beer garden achieves a heavenly status and its drinkers know this as they continue to clink glasses and drink an equally heavenly beer.