Will Hawkes

Speaking on the day that Heineken bought Fischer-Adelshoffen in 1996, the manager of the Fischerstub restaurant lamented the impending takeover of one of Alsace’s most famous brewing names.
Our brewing tradition is going to disappear,” Bruno Fischer told France 2’s news program that evening, February 13 from behind the bar at the bierstub that stands in the shadow of the Fischer brewery. “It’s a family, a soul that will no longer be there. Once it’s gone it will be...

Frank Dobson Square is no place to linger, even on a warm October day. This brick-paved chunk of East London has seen better days, not least because its centerpiece, Dobson’s 1951 sculpture “Woman With Fish,” was vandalized beyond repair and removed in 2002. Those sitting on the benches around the square — who number three, including me, this Thursday morning — have only its former home, a forlorn metal plinth, to look at now.
I haven’t come to see the sculpture, though, or its plinth. I’m se...

With Goose Island’s new London brewpub soon to be followed by openings from Little Creatures, Panhead and, possibly, Sierra Nevada, Will Hawkes asks if ‘big craft’ is staking its claim on the capital ...

"It's really crazy," says Kim Sturdavant, speaking down the line from the Social Kitchen and Brewery in San Francisco. "I just had no idea it would really gather traction and take off as quickly as it has, and as widely as it has."
Sturdavant is the inventor of Brut IPA, the latest iteration in the seemingly endless evolution of modern India Pale Ale, the hop-driven brew that has driven the craft-beer boom. Except that Brut IPA, which Sturdavant first made in September last year, has all the ...

The front door at Gaststätte Lommerzheim, Cologne’s most charismatic pub, has barely shut before it swings open again. A middle-aged couple hurry in, share a joke with the blue-shirted bartender and weave their way between tightly packed tables in search of seats. They’ll be lucky. It’s just gone 6pm on a Wednesday but the place is full of customers contemplating fist-thick pork chops and slim, cylindrical glasses of Kölsch, the pale, delicately floral beer that is native to this Rhineland ci...

One of Stu McKinley's most cherished moments as a brewer came on a dark night at a Wellington pub. "It was the second time we'd made Pot Kettle Black, our porter, and we were releasing it alongside another dark beer [that had been] made by the New Zealand homebrew champion," the co-owner of Yeastie Boys says. "At one point I looked around and everyone in the place was drinking porter, and I thought: 'I'll probably never see this again'."
He's almost certainly right. Walk into a modern beer ba...

Self-taught brewers have transformed British beer over the past decade, but times are changing again. A new industry-wide apprenticeship scheme is expected to get the final sign-off from the Institute for Apprenticeships next month. Will Hawkes reports

Alex Troncoso got an email from home last month. "I'm drinking your Pilsner in the Welcome Hotel in Sydney, and it's right up there with the finest I've ever tasted – and, believe me, I've tasted a sh–tload of them," it read. "It's coming to the end of the keg and I don't know what I'm going to do when it's gone. Please send more!"
It's a sentiment many British drinkers will understand. Troncoso and partner Annie Clements are the team behind Lost and Grounded, a brewery that stands out in an ...

What sort of beer is most likely to impress Melburnians? For Dennis De Boer, head brewer at Modus Operandi Brewing in Sydney's Northern Beaches, the answer is obvious: one with coffee in it. "You'd be pretty hard-pressed to find a city more obsessed and innovative with coffee than Melbourne," he says, which is why he's brewed a Vanilla Mocha Stout for this week's Good Beer Week Gala Showcase.

‘This location is unbeatable,’ says Felix Bollen, gesturing around him at Mercato Metropolitano, a huge street-food market based in a former paper factory in Elephant and Castle, south London.
You can see his point: the places buzzes with gluttonous possibility. There are 40 stalls selling food from around the world (the emphasis is Italian, but it’s not just pasta and pizza) and plenty to drink too, from Italian craft beer to the inevitable prosecco stand.
And now there’s German Kraft.

Andrew picks up his beer and leans back against the red banquette seating at Le Romarin, a tiny bistro-bar in the heart of Lyon. Over the next 48 hours, we’re planning to eat our way across this famously gastronomic city, but something is worrying him. “I’m looking forward to the wine,” he says. “I’m looking forward to the cheese. I’m just not sure about the innards."

Gipsy Hill’s new taproom offers plenty for daydreaming drinkers to ogle. There’s a tiny brew-kit, a long wooden bar with a lowered section for customers in wheelchairs, unique steel and wood fittings produced by designer Mike Doveton, and the cellar, which will be on full public display behind a glass wall when the bar officially opens in early March.
This is no accident. For Gipsy Hill co-founder and director Sam McMeekin, the cellar – and particularly its keg dispense system – is the room’s...

Stung by a reputation as gentrification’s outriders, craft breweries are trying to bring in more women, working-class people and people with disabilities to both drink beers – and make them

The crypt at Strasbourg Cathedral isn’t how I’d imagined it. I’d expected something richly atmospheric, sepulchral, a space stuffed with the accumulated religious ephemera of more than eight centuries.
It’s actually quite tidy; almost cozy, in fact. There are simple wooden chairs in neat rows, a humble altar with a beautiful, blue-and-green, stained-glass window above it, an elegant wooden statue of the Virgin of Strasbourg (Mary, arms stretched, with Jesus, clutching a fleur-de-lis, on her l...