News, nuggets and longreads 31 October 2026: The Switch

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got weddings, funerals and existential crises. First, some brewery rebrand news that seems to speak to a general trend in the market: Kirkstall has ditched its 2010s craft-beer-flavoured pumpclips in favour of designs that evoke the 19th century. Or, more accurately, that evoke (to our minds) Fuller’s and Shepherd Neame in their pomp. We think this is part of an industry-wide move to (a) ditch the millennial cringe trappings of the craft beer era and (b) emphasise the heritage of cask ale as a product category. Given that people are apparently buying Bass, with its 150-year-old branding, this makes sense. But it’s interesting to see conservatism (small C) manifesting after two decades of would-be trendiness. You can perhaps file this alongside the revival of (a version of) Allsopp’s IPA, which we mentioned last week, and the news that Harvey’s – always an old skool brewery – has produced a beer…