The Times: Brewery king on £1bn pub crawl

Rooney Anand has built Greene King into a leading brewery, pubs and restaurant chain. He says he loves to compete. Rivals are less impressed.

The shy, retiring Rooney Anand is anything but. “Just going to have a jimmy. Then you will have my unbridled attention,” says the Greene King boss, placing two pints of IPA on our table before heading off to the gents. And there was I thinking that, because he never gives interviews and doesn’t mix easily with other brewers, he would be a hard man to pin down. How wrong can you be? To read more click here.

 

The New Breed of Pub

Mark Charlwood aka Chunk, writer of beer and brewing blog ‘Beer. Birra. Bier‘, describes the emergence of a new breed of pub…

There are those with the football shirts hanging up and the big screens and the lager fonts, those in the country with a thatched roof and a real fire, those with a guest house above and a great roast dinner. Pubs come in different shapes and sizes, from countryside to city centre, evolving from Anglo-Saxon inn to Greenwich Village gastro, an evolution that continues with every pull of the pump handle and every pint of pale ale, an evolution that makes its next stride forward in the form of pubs like Craft Beer Co.

Craft Beer Co, nestled snugly between Farringdon and Chancery Lane, London’s newest beer destination. A pub that can boast 37 (yes 37!) draft beers and a bottle selection that’ll make you do a happy dance. Yeah, it’s cool and contemporary inside with a flash mirrored ceiling and great bar snacks, but whatever, it’s all about the beer. A whopping great beer selection that’s been hand picked to showcase beer at it’s very best – irrespective of style, country of origin, method of dispense or cost.

The one-off casks from the best breweries in Britain, the West Coast IPA’s from California and the sour beers of Belgium; beer is cool again, and there’s a thirst for more than just ordinary bitter. People want to drink good beer, and this new wave of pubs is happy to serve it to them. Craft follows in the footsteps of its sister pub Cask Pub & Kitchen, beyond that London also has The Rake in Borough, a Draft House at Tower Bridge, Clapham and Battersea, The Euston Tap and a Brewdog Bar on the horizon at Camden. All pubs with something in common, a huge variety of fantastic world beer and a desire to get people drinking it. As far as quality and selection are concerned, it’s a great time to be a beer drinker and a pub goer!

So is this a short-lived trend that’ll go away as quickly as it arrived, or is this the next big step in the development or our treasured pub? Will these pubs replace the ones we currently drink in, or will they survive alongside them? Time will tell, I’ll be at the Craft whilst we wait to find out …

 

 

Financial Times: Punch Taverns sets date for spin-off

Punch Taverns has confirmed that the spin-off of its managed estate from its highly indebted tenanted pubs business will take place at the beginning of next month, creating two separately listed companies.

The heavily indebted pub group in March announced its intention to split the managed pub business, known as Spirit, and the tenanted division, which retains the Punch name, and on Thursday confirmed that the two businesses would formally start trading from August 1.

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