In the beginning there were no pubs.
It’s hard to believe, I know, but it has taken centuries of cultural evolution to build the societies we move through today—pubs and all.
Early examples of pubs can be split into three categories:
– Inns, Taverns and Alehouses.
Inns worked to provide a place of rest and nourishment for weary travellers, now almost entirely replaced by our modern day holiday inns and motorway service stations. Taverns were introduced to Great Britain by the Romans—once they’d provided us with roads and infrastructure the next obvious step was to introduce their tabernae. In Italy a taberna was a bar dedicated to serving local wine, but the Romans gladly adopted British beer instead, and taverns were born. Alehouses followed suit, places for the sale of beer and ale—as the name suggests—that sprung up throughout cities and towns providing third spaces for the workers and men of the community.
Illustrations by David Bailey, photos by Amelia Claudia and Matthew Curtis
A wine and cider writer, featured in Wine52’s Glug magazine, Pellicle magazine, Burum Collective and Two Belly. The mind behind wine newsletter J’adore le Plonk and an untiring advocate for spritzing every drink she can get her hands on.
Nowadays the pub works as a place for family and friends, regulars and newcomers, community and nostalgia, but more importantly, where you can (hopefully) get a pint of good quality beer. When you walk into your local, the architecture and aesthetics that you’re greeted with are as a result of endless innovation and invention. Those feelings of familiarity are no accident, pubs have been built and designed to invite you in, keep you there for a pint or three and make sure the whole experience is as seamless as possible, for you and the bartender.
So how have methods of beer dispensary evolved over the years to make serving pints easier for everyone? And how does the design of the bar work to inform the consumer about what kinds of beer are available to them? Well, let’s find out, shall we?
Beer, you have to remember, came before electricity and refrigeration. In those first instances of pubs there were no draught systems forming the mechanisms of the bar we know and love today. The bar was simply a barrier between customer and worker—separating and distinguishing one from another.
Beer, then, would have been served at room temperature—worth noting that without things like double glazing and insulation this would have been a few degrees colder than modern day room temperature and downright chilled in the months of winter. Beer was also served directly from the cask.
Casks are a vessel for transporting, storing and serving beer that are unpressurised—this lack of forced carbonation is an important factor that we’ll take a look at later. Gravity Dispense, as it is known, was the original dispensary method for taking beer from the cask, before draught systems were invented. Casks would be situated on the bar, behind the bar, or sometimes in another room altogether and the workers would turn on the tap and pour directly from the vessel into the
The method is simple, theoretically cheap and served with a sense of theatrics. However it came with its downsides. Imagine a busy Friday night at the pub, the queue is four deep at the bar, the bartender is having to run to the cellar every order to pour the beer directly from the cask, it’s taking time and everyone’s getting annoyed at the process. Surely, you’re all thinking, there’s an easier way to go about this?
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