News, nuggets and longreads 30 May 2026: Smiles of a Summer Night

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got stats, monopolies and bad Bass. First, some news about brewery numbers. It’s always good to peg your sense of where we are in the craft beer cycle to some concrete measures. In the UK, the number of registered breweries, and whether that number is rising or falling, is a pretty good indicator. The media tends to pick up on big increases and big drops which is why the BBC’s England Data Unit this week had a story built around this stat: “Across the UK 320 [brewing] businesses shut last year, Companies House data shows. Yet only 170 opened, resulting in a net loss of 150.” There are some other interesting nuggets in the article including a graph that illustrates the waveform of the cycle through growth, maintenance and decline, and an interactive tool for checking your region. The latter shows that only London is still gaining breweries, although analysis elsewhere focused on the existence of…