Nairn’s London at 60: London beers in 1966
LRB
The Campaign for Real Ale’s Good Beer Guide 2027 is out and it is a weighty tome, with a good number of London pubs listed.
It is the 60th anniversary of the classic London guide by Ian Nairn (in print as a Penguin Classic).
Nairn liked beer and he included a brief postscript on London beer as the Capital saw cask beer give way to the Watney’s Red keg ‘revolution’.
Nairn was a fan of cask beer noting ‘the old small breweries have been largely swallowed up and their individual tastes have been replaced by mass produced flavours, which in London tend to be unpleasantly tinny, without any bouquet’.
This pre-dated the founding of CAMRA by around 5 years.
What ‘draught beer’ did Nairn like?
Whitbread bitter
Fullers
Draught Bass & Worthington E
He goes on to note ‘if you are forced into drinking keg which is a kind of bottled beer in big cans’ he suggests:
Bass/Worthington E
Flowers
Guinness
Nairn came to like beer a little too much and died far too young at 53 but the book remains an incomparable guide to London and it doesn’t overlook pubs or beer.
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