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A few years ago I went to West Flanders, or the Westhoek as it’s known in Belgium. It was a trip organised by Paul Walsh, publisher of the late, lamented Belgian Beer & Food magazine; we visited breweries and bars, and stared wistfully at cemeteries and battlefields preserved for the benefit of the many tourists who visit each year. It was 90 percent fun, ten percent solemnity, about the same ratio as Paul himself.

Beer Instagram can be thin gruel. It’s got reams and reams of the same stuff - pictures of cans, pictures of beer glasses, pictures of people with cans and overflowing beer glasses; images of dingy orange beer, put through a filter to make it more orange; adverts for beer; pub exteriors, pub interiors - and not much else. (I’m as guilty as anyone else).

I had an enjoyable chat with Matt Burns, creative director of Thirst, a drinks branding and packaging design company in Glasgow, a few years’ back. Thirst are at the top of their game at the moment, having done work for everyone from Fuller’s to Northern Monk; they’re undeniably amongst the best in the business (Matt is also a very nice person, fwiw, despite being Australian).

Business was slow when I stumbled, thirsty and bramble-punctured, into The Bull in Wrotham, Kent, shortly before lunchtime last Thursday. I was the only customer. Good for me, less good for the pub - but by the looks of things, it wasn’t a typical state of affairs. The Bull is smartly (if a touch blandly) decorated, and the village is full of nice cars & other signifiers of wealth. Plenty of cash around for pub meals, you’d think.

In the end, it wasn’t so bad. Despite predictions, the re-opening of pubs on July 4 didn’t prove to be the prelude to a national carnival of drunken buffoonery. There have been a handful of incidents, it’s true; a ‘furious beer garden brawl’ in Glasgow, an electric fence around the bar in Cornwall, a few arrests in Nottinghamshire. The fact, though, that an image of a busy Old Compton Street on that first Saturday night drew much of the social media ire suggests things in general were calmer than expected.

I had an unpleasant encounter with the bathroom scales yesterday: my first weigh-in for months revealed four-and-a-half pounds that didn’t exist in March. Annoying, but not really a shock. My lockdown has been a story of more consumption and less exercise, and you don’t need to be a doctor to know where that leads.

Bermondsey is the heart of modern London beer. This central neighbourhood of lock-ups, housing estates and flimsy-looking new-build flats - yours for just £1.25m - is home to the city’s greatest concentration of breweries and, on Saturdays, excitable beer drinkers. Or at least, it was. Like anywhere else in the UK and around much of the beer-drinking world, the fun stopped in March.

At The Park Brewery in Kingston, south-west London, uncertainty reigns. Having ceased brewing between late February and late April due to the Covid-19 lockdown, the wife-and-husband team behind the brewery - Frankie and Josh Kearns - recently decided to start re-brewing beer for cask, in the expectation that pubs might open on July 4, as widely predicted.

Euroboozer’s base, a warehouse just off the M25 north of Watford, is normally a hive of activity. Six or seven vans leave every day to deliver beer into London: palettes are packed to be sent off around the rest of the UK; beer arrives from around the country and, via ports like Harwich, from overseas. This importation and distribution company employs 14 permanent staff and four regular contract workers, handling significant brands that run the gamut from iconic Danish craft brewer Mikkeller to historic Austrian lager-makers Stiegl.

The big losers from Britain’s extended lockdown have been the nation’s pubs; those shops who’ve been able to deliver to people’s homes, by contrast, are the winners. Supermarkets, delicatessens, wine merchants and off-licenses/bottle shops - these companies, so popular understanding has it, have done well.

Unless you’ve been in really deep lockdown, you’ll know that Britain’s pubs are struggling. “Britain’s pubs face worrying future”, says The Sun; “15,000 pubs to stay shut forever unless lockdown lifted,” according to the Daily Mirror; “Will Britain’s pubs survive the coronavirus?” asks the New York Times. There are many more along similar lines.

I was halfway around the National Brewery Centre at Burton when I got a whiff of horseshit. That unmistakable smell was in the air in the Bass Brewery’s former stable and, for about 20 seconds - as I peered half-heartedly at the old pub signs and dray carts covering the floor and walls - I mentally congratulated the museum’s management on laying on such a delightfully authentic note. Some of the museums’ exhibits might be a bit tatty, I thought, but this is really good. It genuinely smells like a stable. Very farmyard-y. Well done everyone.

It was a foregone conclusion. An event billed as “Victoria Against the World,” held at an excellent pub called the Terminus Hotel in the North Fitzroy neighborhood of Melbourne, Australia, during Good Beer Week in May, culminated in local favorite Boatrocker against London’s Beavertown, a whisky-barrel-aged imperial stout against a black IPA. Both were well-made beers, but when the hands went up to decide the winner, the English interlopers stood no chance. Victoria 1, Mother Country (not to mention the rest of the world) 0.

Probably the most entertaining sight in modern British beer is watching Thornbridge head brewer Rob Lovatt struggle to overcome commercial reality. Lovatt, whose has a frequently-expressed preference for traditional European beer over New-World hops, has spent the past few years producing new IPA after new IPA, presumably through gritted teeth.

I’ve always wanted to visit the Carling brewery, but now I don’t need to bother. The BBC’s Inside The Factory took an extended look inside the Coors plant in Burton, where Carling is made, a few weeks’ back. It was an interesting and straight-forward look at the process, even if beer snobs like me were left coughing into our double-dry-hopped raspberry sours by the revelation that Carling’s fermentation and conditioning takes just five days.

There’s a lot of wine on the list at Levan, an ‘all-day bar and dining space in Peckham’ that is currently one of London’s most hyped new restaurants, but just three beers. Amidst a selection of mostly French wines in the ‘Something Before Dinner’ section, you’ll find Burning Sky Cuvée, Braybrooke Keller Lager, and Toast IPA. Good beers (well, I don’t really know Toast IPA), but, you know, just three of them. There are as many wines made in England on the same page.

I was struggling for breath, my threadbare Marks and Spencers suit stuck to me with sweat, as I stumbled down the ramp at Blackheath Station. I’d been at the Kentish Times Christmas party and had decided to stay for one more - and now I was cutting it fine to get the last train home. Too fine. As I emerged onto the platform, the train began to pull away.

Greg Koch isn’t always nice about German brewing, but he makes an exception for Stephan Michel. “He’s a great voice for brewing in Germany,” says the Stone Brewing CEO of the owner of Mahr’s Bräu in Bamberg, Franconia. “He’s extremely knowledgeable and connected. I love Bamberg and his awesome brewery.”

I took my son to Rome last week: it was half-term, he loves ancient Romans and pizza, and, to be honest, so do I.* One of the places on our itinerary was Da Baffetto, a classic pizzeria close to The Pantheon. On my last visit to the Italian capital, many, many years ago, my girlfriend and I squeezed up next to a retired American couple here and merrily chatted about this and that for an hour.

Brasserie Georges is a treat. This iconic restaurant in Lyon satisfies all the most urgent Francophile desires: there’s chicken-liver terrine served with a huge, help-yourself ceramic jar of cornichons, red leatherette banquettes, waiters in waistcoats, art deco chandeliers, and a very enticing prix fixe menu. Every fifteen minutes or so, a (recorded?) organ pumps out the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’ as a waiter hurries here or there to deliver a cake.