The Estrella you drank in Barcelona is not the Estrella they pour in Manchester. Damm bought the Bedford Eagle Brewery outright in 2023 to brew a 4.6% UK version of a 5.4% Spanish original. Madri Excepcional has never seen Spain. What CAMRA's July 2026 Beer in the UK Report exposes — and why the app cares.

Argentina beat England 2-1 in the semi-final on Wednesday. This piece was drafted for the beer final we might have had — a Berlin rematch of English cask against Spain's Iberian craft column. Publishing it anyway as the parallel-timeline read. Draught Bass hat-trick, a 101st-minute ghost goal, Estrella Damm and La Pirata Black Block. The Pub VAR booth stands by its verdict. The actual final (Argentina vs Spain) follows.

The Coach and Horses landlord who ran the Greek Street pub for sixty-three years and made a public brand of his own rudeness has died aged 99. On the fortnightly Private Eye lunch, the Waterhouse play, the 2005 licensing regulations he wouldn't sit down and read — and why a room isn't the same room once the person who kept it wrong on purpose has gone.

The Samuel Smith's beer baron who ran Britain's strangest pub chain by his own private rule has died aged 81. On cheap pints, dark wood, shire horses, boarded-up villages and a row over an air freshener — and on why the whole thing may become easier without him and also less peculiar.

The football is heading to the business end. The Beer World Cup is heading the same way. With the Perfect Pint Promise just launched and heritage cask back on the rise — Greene King selling Old Speckled Hen to Spanish lager giant Damm, Draught Bass tripling distribution this year, JW Lees relaunching cask Boddingtons — the case for English cask is loud and current. The squad of eleven hand-pulled pints we'd send into a Beer World Cup, and why cask is the one format the world can't quite copy.

The World Cup is here, across 16 host stadiums in North America. We mapped the bars, pubs, breweries, taprooms, bottle shops and beer gardens that can actually help fans before or after a match. A first pass, not the final whistle — Atlanta, Seattle, Philadelphia, Vancouver and Toronto landed cleanly; Dallas, the Bay Area and Mexico City need local knowledge; MetLife is still the loudest help-wanted flag. Open PINtPOINT near a host stadium and add what we missed.

The football teams play on the pitch. The beers play in the pub. Every country in the World Cup gets a beer squad; real fixtures drive the matchups; Pub VAR, The Selection Committee and The Pint Desk arbitrate the disputes. A serialised editorial tournament loosely based on a distant memory of Loaded magazine's lost Beer World Cup. Help us pick the squads.

What does this beer actually feel like to drink? Eight axes — Body, Bitterness, Sweetness, Roast, Fruit, Finish, Softness, Complexity — plus four drinker cues, a drinkability bucket, and one plain-English gut-take sentence per beer. Built for the 800-millisecond tap-list decision; honest about the sour and Belgian-yeast styles it doesn't cover. The capstone of the four-essay arc on choosing the right pint.

In 1979 David Bruce opened the Goose & Firkin in Elephant and Castle. By 1995 the chain had 44 pubs, 19 of them brewing on site. On 8 October 1999 the brewing stopped — and that, not the 2001 brand-discontinuation, is when Firkin actually died. The 12 original London Firkin sites, plotted on a 1990 paper leaflet, traced — deliberately — the outline of a dog's head. Companion: walk the route in PINtPOINT's new Hall-of-Fame crawl.

Three of Anchor's signature beers were lifted from English brewing on a 1975 Yorkshire pub tour. The Great American Beer Festival was modelled on CAMRA's GBBF. Anchor first reached British draught in November 1991, in borrowed Fuller's kegs, and a Halifax distributor kept it there for fifteen years after. The companion to Friday's revival piece: the case that Anchor's identity was always partly English — and what that means for a return to UK taps.