Pellicle

David is a Stockport-based illustrator focusing on comics, the mundane and the funny. His work has featured across many cans, bars and pubs—proof can be found here. Popular side quests include snacks, cask beer, writing and the silver screen.

In the East Midlands of the 1980s, beer culture went hand in hand with mining. Back then, the brewing industry in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was thriving, and many of the collieries hadn’t yet hit peak production. A pint of mild or bitter was less a curated lifestyle choice, and more a hard-earned punctuation mark at the end of every laborious day, best enjoyed in jam-packed, smoky welfare halls where the air was thick with chatter.

The U.K. beer media landscape is a curious one. A niche within a niche, at its most simple it’s a genre of food writing, albeit one with a far smaller audience than say, restaurant or wine reviews. Its audience is more interesting still. Beer readers are often hyper engaged and extremely knowledgeable about their subject, which can have the unfortunate knock on effect of making it less accessible to those with a more casual interest.

Krishan Rajput takes an emerald Budvar bottle down from a shelf and tells me that this is where his beer journey began, in 1989. That year, his family shop, Stirchley Wines & Spirits, began selling a range of beers a world away from what other off-licences were offering. A decade before, his father, Amrik, had opened the business in the South Birmingham suburb of the same name, near where the Cadbury factory still looms large.

In a warehouse building on The Shore in Leith there is a natural wine bar called Haze. Its name is appropriate, both for the unfiltered wines it sells and the haar—sea fog—that rumbles inland on warm days. To get to Haze, you have to cross the threshold of an old merchant’s warehouse, now called Brown’s of Leith, and when your eyes adjust to the mood lighting there’s a pleasant surprise of stainless steel and softly melting church candles inside. Not a lick of beige.

Upon arriving at Maisel’s Brauerei in Bayreuth, Franconia, it becomes immediately clear that this is not your typical Bavarian brewery. A huge steel sculpture of Mother Earth, wearing a crown of hops and extending a single hand holding a seedling, stands guard at the entrance. Within, a Pop Art–style mural fills one wall of the brewery building. A succession of graffiti-inspired pieces climb the red-brick chimney, transforming it into a vertical art installation.

Look out for a new Just Beer Things cartoon every month. We can pay David Bailey to draw them for us because we’re supported by our readers via Patreon. Join them and support artists like David!

I have a thirst to quench. It’s just as well, then, that I’ve arrived at Birrificio Italiano’s brewery in Limido Comasco, a village 20 miles northwest of Milan, in the far north of Italy. A keen northerly wind whips across the forecourt, though bright sunlight mitigates its harshness. Once inside, the brewery’s founder, Agostino Arioli—whom I first met in 2008—asks me if I would like a beer. I plump for a Tipopils, the beer that launched the brewery 30 years ago.

Across the road from the White Rose in Swansea, a pair of neatly dressed women hand us a phone. “Could we be cheeky and get a picture?” It strikes me as an unremarkable request; a quick souvenir of the first pub on the Mumbles Mile, to be followed by messier selfies as the night goes on. But I’ve misread things completely. Picture taken, they head off.

Five hours north of Tokyo and 20 degrees colder, I climb into a taxi in Hakodate City. My driver furrows his brow as I clumsily explain to him where I need to go. “No,” he says firmly. “There is no winery in Hakodate.” Panic sets in. My Japanese peaks at restaurant level, and is certainly not sufficient for a pantomime of “oh no there isn’t/oh yes there is” with a stubborn taxi driver.