News, nuggets and longreads 29 August 2026: Europe Endless

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got newstalgia, community spaces and hangmen. First, some stats on community pubs via the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA): Since May’s bulletin, the number of community-owned pubs has increased from 227 to 234. Those not owned but run by the community has seen a slight decrease of two, down to 29, however, one of the losses is now community owned. The number of active campaigns has risen from 90 to 101, so there is clear public interest in community ownership. This grabbed our attention because we’ve been posting about pub closures quite a bit recently and in a comment on one of those posts Richard Brooks raised them as part of the solution. Despite having written about community pubs at some length in our 2017 book 20th Century Pub we haven’t really felt the influence of the movement in our day-to-day drinking in the way we have noticed, say, micropubs, or taprooms. SOURCE: Dick Vincent/Pellicle…