Will Hawkes

In a shaded Oxford pub garden, on a calm summer’s day in this most genteel of English cities, a man called Steve is explaining what Tap Social means to him. “If I hadn’t met these people, If I hadn’t come to this company, if I’d have gone back to London, God knows what I’d be,” he says, before pausing briefly, a rueful half-smile, half-grimace playing across his face. “I’d probably be the oldest fucking drug dealer in town.”
Steve, 58, whose last name has been withheld on request, is a sous c...

Depending how you see it, it took Martin Taylor either 10 hours or 25 years to reach The Taversoe, a family-run pub on Orkney. Ten hours, give or take, was how long he and his wife Christine spent driving from their home in Sheffield; 25 years is the time he has devoted to visiting every pub in the Good Beer Guide, from The Channel Islands to Shetland, ticking them off week by week and year by year until just one remained, on Rousay, a windswept island of just over 200 souls.
In all he visite...

Hard seltzer arrived in Britain in early 2019 in the form of Balans, an “Aqua Spritz” made by Swedish cidermaker Kopparberg. Launched with a listing in ASDA, the nation’s third largest supermarket chain, it sold itself on its lack of calories. There were just 60, drinkers were assured, in each delicately designed 250-milliliter (roughly 8-ounce) can. “With Balans, we’re helping consumers say no to ‘maybe next time’ and ‘yes’ to embracing 2019,” insisted Rob Salvesen, head of marketing, in a p...

Once you’ve visited a few Washington DC breweries, you start to get the message. At DC Brau, the city’s first production brewery for almost 60 years when it opened in 2011, a sign inside demands “Statehood for the people of DC”.
City-State Brewing Co., founded in 2021, has also tied its identity to that of the city, and Right Proper Brewing Co’s glassware declares the beer was “made in the Douglass Commonwealth”—the name DC would take upon statehood.
Politics is everywhere in beer, but rarely...

If Washington, D.C. was slow in catching on to craft beer, then it's quickly becoming a nation leader in one crucial respect: Black representation.
The capital, which welcomed its first modern manufacturing brewery, DC Brau, as recently as 2011, now has three Black-owned breweries, making up approximately 20% of the city's total of 15.
Together with Black Brew Movement, a D.C. organization that aims to bridge the gap between Washington's Black population and craft beer, these breweries (Sanko...

Steffen Marx doesn’t look like the scourge of Munich’s traditional brewers.
On an unseasonably hot afternoon in mid-May, he’s dressed—from the waist up, anyway—in a fluorescent yellow high-vis vest, his gut exposed, his jawline covered with a stubbly beard. Standing in the yard of his brewery, Giesinger Bräu, he is short and solid, with a squat bottle of beer in his hand, a glint in his eye and arms covered with tattoos: a maypole, hops, the brewery logo, the Munich skyline.
Perhaps, though, ...

The young man at the beer garden in Munich has his hands full. In one, he holds a liter-size stoneware mug, foam spilling untidily over its rim; with the other, he’s carefully transferring a small, not entirely compliant child from a stroller to a long wooden bench.
It’s just after 5 p.m., and this beer garden, Paulaner Am Nockherberg, is filling up. Chestnut trees cast shade over dozens of long, slim tables. Six middle-aged friends settle in a sun-dappled spot; a pensioner in a fedora and sp...

When London's first COVID-19 lockdown began in March 2020, Deacon Rose wasn't sure his business would survive. Coqfighter, the Korean fried chicken concept he launched in 2014 with fellow Australians Troy Sawyer and Tristan Clough, had grown slowly but surely in its six years of existence – but with no government assistance announced at that stage and a period of lockdown looming, things looked grim.
"We didn't have a lot of cash in the bank, [and] we're not a big enough company to go into hi...

It’s 11:30 on a Thursday morning, and a middle-aged woman, her hair in a neat blond bob, is devouring a hot dog in the baggage reclaim hall at Copenhagen Airport. In some countries, that might seem quirky, but it’s perfectly normal here: There’s a hot dog stand next to the currency exchange window, and plenty of others are also eating, attracted by the smoky, savory tang hanging in the air.
Danes love hot dogs. I learned that from my Danish neighbor, Michael, when he dragged his grill into th...

At The Beacon Hotel, a pub in the post-industrial corner of England’s Midlands known as The Black Country, three friends are at the end of their weekly pilgrimage. It’s Wednesday lunchtime and Lyndon Smith, Dave Gell, and John Pagett have driven 12 miles from their homes in Kidderminster to this Sedgley inn to drink their favorite beer, Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild.
Glass dimpled mugs, full of foam-topped, deep red Ale, sit in front of them on a small table in the wood-paneled back room. There...

After a long day on his feet, Marko Husak has found what he’s looking for.
Spread out in front of us on a large table at the Sweet Centre, a restaurant in Bradford, West Yorkshire, is a Kashmiri feast: chana puri, lamb karahi, biryani, daal, naan and—most crucially—chicken karahi. “That’s the taste of Bradford,” Marko says, emphatically, gesturing at the round metal bowl in which the last dish, sprinkled with coriander, has been served.
My ears prick up. We’ve spent a frost-bitten Friday seek...

I had expected to find Shannon Tebay at the Savoy’s American Bar. In August, she became the first American head bartender at this London institution, hired to add a fresh, New York touch to the bar’s historical luster. Given that the American Bar has been serving up cocktails since 1893, that seemed significant. A bold new era, even.
But here we are, drinking coffee at Grind, a cafe-cum-cocktail bar on the south end of London Bridge, on a chilly morning in February. She has left the American ...

‘When I came here, people would look at you funny if you said you’d had a drink during the week,” says John Taylor, Sweden’s favourite TV gardener-turned-cider maker, as he gazes across the soft folds of the countryside outside Malmö. “It was like you were an alcoholic: ‘You’re drinking on Tuesday?’”

Michael Farquhar is concerned about Christmas trees. The operations director at D&D London is pondering how he'll manage to buy a decent tree for each of the restaurants he looks after in time for the festive period.
"How will we get them?" he says over coffee in a South London café. "They normally come in from Holland, Germany or Norway. Every restaurant needs on...