Journalists can’t resist boozy stories and the New York Times crawls around Oxford’s pubs (Cambridge’s are just as sordid) while Book Forum stumbles through Kingsley Amis’s “daily haze of whisky and sweat alcohol”.

“A good pub is a ready-made party, a home away from home, a club anyone can join,” says the NYT. “A pub is a great leveler — not a workingman’s club, but an everyman’s club. The best are filled not only with the scent of yeast and hops, but also with banter and wit. Back in 1954, when the Rose & Crown on North Parade Avenue in Oxford was threatened with closure (inadequate toilet facilities), the defense that won the day called it a “home of cultured, witty and flippant conversation.”

There is no doubt Amis would certainly be cultured and his bon mots compelling but apparently he had no taste when it came to booze:

“Having thus elevated the role of drink to the highest status in human civilization, Amis proceeds with a series of disconnected essays on different types of alcohol, some dreadful-sounding cocktail recipes (see above), a good piece on the types of glasses and tools for making and drinking different beverages, some not very sage reflections on wine, and some even worse ideas about what should and should not be drunk with what food. All enjoyable to read, of course, but what is best in this book are the author’s perorations not on the taste of alcohol, but on its effects. No one who has read his novels could deny that he is the grand master when it comes to describing different levels of inebriation—feeling sober, that first drink, the sensations of getting drunk, blind drunkenness, and, of course, the hangover.”

Meanwhile, The Telegraph in the UK is running a series on great British pubs.

It must be irksome when brewing giant Fosters comes along with Cascade Green, as reported in The Age by beer writer Willie Simpson:

“[Cascade Green] claims to be preservative-free and to use glass that is “the lightest weight, highest recycled content currently available in Australia”. Both are probably true but they neglect important qualifications – namely, that the beer is still presumably made with stabilisers and other additives, commonly used by mainstream breweries, and is both heat-pasteurised and filtered. Both these processes use a lot of energy and Cascade Green is then packaged in a slim 330-millilitre bottle that requires proportionately more energy to fill than something larger.”