News, nuggets and longreads 27 June 2026: Backrooms

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got fruit lager, TV ads and AK. We don’t often put product launches in this top slot which we reserve for news but this piece about Brixton Brewery (Heineken) launching a fruit lager highlights a trend: “Flavoured lager is the fastest growing category in the on-trade, delivering 30% volume growth in 2025, and now accounting for more than 2% of all lager sales in the off-trade.” The thing is, we haven’t really noticed this happening, suggesting that we’re not paying enough attention to the supermarket and off-licence shelves. It’s being driven by the success of Jubel, we think. If you’ve read (or written) a more substantial piece on this emerging style, let us know in the comments. For Pellicle Paddy Gardiner has profiled McMullen’s AK mild – not a trendy beer and not even one particularly beloved of real ale drinkers. What a good single-beer profile can do, however, is challenge you to look…