News, nuggets and longreads 3 October 2026: Ludwig

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got expired beer, closed taprooms and anti-Kindle sentiment. First, news from Cornwall, where the 2011 takeover of Sharp’s by Molson Coors has reached its inevitable conclusion with the closure of the brewery at Rock and production of cask Doom Bar moving to Hartlepool in the North East of England. To be fair, 15 years is a good old time for a brewery to persist after being taken over. But now Doom Bar – a dying brand as far as we can tell – really has no claim whatsoever on Cornishness, even tangentially. For VinePair Aaron Goldfarb has written a piece that highlights how craft beer culture has changed in the past decade, focusing on the utter lack of value in ‘rare beers’ hoarded by collectors: In the early-2010s, [Wes Leslie] had begun collecting barrel-aged beers, buying rare releases when he worked at Speakeasy, grabbing other cool bottles he saw when he hit specialty beer stores in town,…