Curmudgeon's "Opening Times" Columns

Very Early Doors
Extended licensing hours give people the freedom to use pubs at times that suit them
THE DETERMINED band of drinkers who assemble in the average Wetherspoon’s at 9 am are often viewed with a mixture of amusement, derision and pity, and singled out as an example of the downside of extended licensing hours. However, if you actually look...

Charge More, Sell Less
A premium pricing strategy will do nothing to help the long-term prospects of cask
LAST AUTUMN, the latest edition of the annual Cask Report was published. It recorded cask sales falling more quickly than beer volumes in total, with a 5% drop over the past year, and cask now only accounting for one in seven pints sold in pubs, whereas...

Drying Out
There’s a limit to how far pubs can go in appealing to non-drinkers
A MAJOR problem for the pub trade is the growing proportion of young people who have chosen not to drink alcohol at all. In response to this, a recent report has said that 70% of “Generation Z” believe that pubs need to become “more inviting” to those...

The Beer That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Bitter needs to stop pretending to be something other than what it really is
A COUPLE of decades ago, there was a trend for brewers to start calling their milds anything but mild, in the belief that the name itself came across as old-fashioned and was putting drinkers off. Now this tendency has spread to bitter as well. At first...