Essay17 August 2026 · By Sophie Ro

These aren't revivals — they're hauntings

Partly it's nostalgia: the thought that I might be drinking something resembling what my father drank. I know perfectly well that most 1970s beer probably wouldn't suit taste buds ruined by years of heavily hopped West Coast IPAs. But I'll still buy the pint.

The question is: what exactly am I buying?

Because British beer is currently having a revival revival. Old names are appearing on bars again. Some have been painstakingly reconstructed. Some have been reinvented for modern drinkers. Some are entirely new beers wearing dead men's clothes. And perhaps that's fine.

The revival spectrum

What actually survived? The name, the recipe, the yeast, the people, the place, or merely the memory? British beer revivals fall into four rough shapes. The spectrum measures what came back; the thesis under it measures the separate question of whether anyone is being honest about it — which is why Hofmeister, scoring nothing on continuity, still lands in the most honest quadrant of the piece.

A revival that produces a better beer than the original is not a failure. A revival that pretends the original is what it is bringing back, when it isn't, is.

Two ways to bring back a beer

Two revivals. Same broad heritage. Opposite philosophies.

Allsopp's Double Diamond (the reinterpretation) relaunched in October 2024 as a 3.8% pale ale "inspired by" the 1922 recipe. Hops: Citra, Columbus, Mosaic — the 2010s American craft palette. Jamie Allsopp's own launch text is candid, if not by intention: "Revived as a 3.8% pale ale that drinks like a lager."

The historical Double Diamond ran at two strengths depending on format: bottled at roughly 4.8% (a fuller malt version, the one that was best-selling bottled beer in the UK by 1958) and draught keg at roughly 4.0% (the industrial version that arrived in the 1960s and drove sales down 60% between 1972 and 1978). The modern 3.8% is essentially the draught keg strength. Which is the interesting rhetorical move: Allsopp's cites 1922 (bottled-era heritage) while delivering something closer to the 1960s keg spec.

To be fair to Allsopp's, the older Double Diamond was not automatically beloved. Comments under the trade-press coverage of the revival are brutal on the original: "universally loathed", "sickly sweet", "full of caramel and sticky". Roger Protz was blunter: "Double Diamond and other similar beers tasted awful as a result of the manner in which they were produced." The badge is iconic; the liquid may still have been bad. Allsopp's failure is not that it made a modern beer. It is that it asks the archive to do more rhetorical work than the recipe can support.

Burton Bridge DBA (the continuity) launched in March 2015. The brewers had worked on the original Ind Coope Draught Burton Ale before Carlsberg discontinued it. Their own framing is unmistakably humble: "It would be impossible to brew an exact replica, but we are sure it is as close as possible." 4.8%. Drinkers who remember the original describe it as "smooth, sweet, a little bitter", "absolutely gorgeous, rich and almost sticky on the palate". One revival is selling you a 1922 ledger and a 2024 hop bill. The other is saying: we worked on this once, we know what it tasted like, we got as close as we could.

The cleanest benchmark for the badge type is Hofmeister, of all things. Discontinued in 2003, revived from 2015 by two ex-Heineken employees who bought naming rights from Heineken and brewed a proper Bavarian Helles in Market Schwaben. It won Best Lager at IWSC 2017. And the brewery's own account of what it did is exactly the sentence Allsopp's should have used: "The permission to use the name and the bear's likeness was about all they wanted of the old Hofmeister: the beer itself was to be completely new." That is badge-honesty done properly.

Which era are you reviving?

This is the axis that saves the piece from soft-focus nostalgia. A 1970s brand can revive the 1970s recipe — usually cold, carbonated, industrial keg — or it can leapfrog the bad years and revive the beer that corporate brewing interrupted.

David Behrens's Stones Bitter is the clearest case. Writing in the Yorkshire Post, he remembers the 1970s Stones as "ghastly" and "gassy", the "gaudy orange badge on the pump" that "embodied everything that was wrong with Britain at that time". But he also blesses the True North Brew Co revival in Sheffield, on precisely the ground that True North is not returning to the keg era. They are returning to the beer that pre-dated it: cask, drawn from the wood, with the recipe adjusted to replenish the salt Sheffield steelworkers lost sweating in the foundries.

"Its rebirth brings it full circle," Behrens writes. The pre-industrial version had a purpose. The industrial one did not. The revival worth having is the one that returns to purpose.

The absentee landlords

The people who own the dead names are often not the people capable of bringing the beers meaningfully back. Heineken holds Watney's and Truman's. Carlsberg-Marston's has the Ind Coope / Jennings / Banks's / Bombardier trail. AB InBev retains Boddingtons. Molson Coors runs Carling. The genuinely interesting work happens when the IP is licensed out — or abandoned — into the hands of people with a regional or technical reason to care. Burton Bridge, Jennings under the Canfields, True North, JW Lees.

Carlsberg keeps turning up at the scene. It discontinued Ind Coope's Draught Burton Ale before Burton Bridge picked it up. It closed Jennings Brewery in Cockermouth in November 2022 before the Canfields bought it back. Its Marston's operation has axed Banks's Mild and Bombardier in recent years.

None of that is a moral verdict on the aggregators. It's a structural observation: honesty gets easier the further the brewer sits from the boardroom.

The archaeology

The archaeology type is where the honesty question gets tested in the most literal way possible. Did anyone manage to preserve a piece of the actual thing — a yeast strain, a bottle, a technical fragment — rather than just a name and a rough recipe?

Truman's is the London example. The Brick Lane brewery closed in 1989, but the strain had already been deposited at the National Collection of Yeast Cultures in 1958. Fifty-five years later, the insurance paid out: two young professionals revived the brand in 2013 and simply asked for the yeast back. Most of the recipes are new; the brand has since been sold to the property company that owns the Brick Lane site; but the yeast is the actual one. Yeast-authentic, recipe-modern, ownership awkward — but the biology is real.

Tennent's did it with a bottle instead of a strain. In the 1970s a Geelong diver named Jim Anderson pulled a bottle of 1868 Tennent's stout from the wreck of The Light of The Age, which foundered off Port Phillip Heads near Melbourne in January 1868. Anderson flew it back to Wellpark Brewery in Glasgow 150 years later, in November 2018 — "one of the oldest bottles of beer in Britain", pre-dating Tennent's Lager (1885). Tennent's then brewed a commemorative stout using archive recipes anchored by what the surviving bottle told them. The artefact came first; the beer followed it.

Project Jurassic Beer

The newest archaeology case is Guinness, and it fits this piece's argument in an unexpected way. In 2025 the Belgian underwater photographer Stefan Panis and his diving partner Eddie Huzzey recovered an intact bottle of Guinness from the wreck of the sailing barque Mindoro, which sank in the English Channel about three miles off Dover on 27 November 1864. The bottle survived the sinking and 162 years underwater. Panis's colleague Pawel Truszynski contacted Kevin Verstrepen, a microbiologist specialising in beer at KU Leuven University in Belgium. The divers themselves named the effort Project Jurassic Beer. Panis's ambition is direct: "There is always a chance that we can recover the complete DNA, and then we can do a small re-brew of the exact beer that was found in the 1860s."

Diageo, which owns Guinness, has been in touch with the divers via the Guinness Archive team. Its full spokesperson statement, per the BBC: "Discoveries like this provide a fascinating window into our past and help build a deeper understanding of our heritage. Currently, our Guinness Archive team is liaising with the divers to gather more information and evaluate the find." Which is telling. Diageo is engaged, but the science and the naming and the ambition sit with the divers and KU Leuven, not Dublin. If a biological continuity attempt at Guinness scale actually succeeds, it will have been driven by a Belgian underwater photographer who is by his own admission "not that big" a Guinness fan, his colleague, and Kevin Verstrepen at KU Leuven. Which is the pattern this piece has been describing all along. The interesting work happens outside the boardroom.

The duty scale is the invisible editor

Since August 2023, UK alcohol duty is charged proportional to strength rather than by product category. Higher-ABV beer costs the brewer more duty per hectolitre; lower-ABV beer costs less. That single change has been quietly reshaping recipes. Belhaven Twisted Thistle IPA came back at 4.0% versus an original 5.6%. Marketing text will call this "evolving the range" or "designed for today's beer market" or "drinks like a lager". Sometimes the real editor isn't the archive. It's the tax scale.

The hop list is the receipt

Within seconds of reading a revival's spec sheet, the hops tell you almost everything. Modern American C-hops — Citra, Centennial, Columbus, Cascade, Mosaic, Galaxy — are the 2010s craft-IPA palette. Classic English hops — Fuggles, Goldings, Challenger, Bramling Cross, Target, Pilgrim, plus Central European Celeia and Saaz — are the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British palette. A heritage revival that uses American C-hops while claiming "as it was in 1922" is either being honest about reinventing the beer or pretending the historical anchor is real when it isn't.

Compare the specs. Allsopp's Double Diamond, claiming 1922 inspiration: Citra, Columbus, Mosaic. Jennings, reviving its own 1990s core: Fuggles, Goldings, Challenger and Celeia hops, with Maris Otter malt and, of course, the brewery's own Cumbrian well water. That last part is not a marketing point. It is the recipe. Burton Bridge DBA: traditional Burton-Ale style. Modern hops are not bad; there is nothing wrong with a Citra/Mosaic pale ale. The problem is only rhetorical — if the archive is what is being sold, the hop list has to match the archive.

Jennings is worth pausing on because it does the disclosure gracefully. Sneck Lifter — Northern dialect for a last sixpence, the money to lift a pub-door latch. Cumberland Ale, the North West bestseller. Cocker Hoop, a cask-spigot joke. And "Back Yam", introduced in 2026 to mark the revival and openly labelled as new, not smuggled in as heritage. That single word is the discipline the revival category needs more of.

The Boddingtons paradox

Boddingtons is the corporate-licensed continuity in its cleanest form. AB InBev owns the brand. JW Lees brews the cask revival in Manchester. The editorial jewel of the licence agreement — described by JW Lees' production director Michael Lees-Jones — is that the brewery's own house yeast is a "non-negotiable" clause. Corporate IP, local biology, cask handpull. It is a specific answer to "which era": pre-corporate, pre-keg, pre-Interbrew acquisition.

The CAMRA argument for it is generous but not naive. Boddingtons is not reinventing the wheel. There are more interesting pints at any given handpull, JW Lees's own included. But a familiar name lowers the barrier for younger drinkers who find a row of unknown handpulls intimidating — and the numbers seem to back it. Bass Pale Ale has reportedly grown 19% year-on-year; early Boddingtons demand in Manchester outstripped supply. Heritage brands are turning out to be a cask-beer gateway drug.

The cost is real too. The world's largest brewer is muscling back onto bar space that would otherwise go to smaller independents. Two things at once: familiar names bring new drinkers to cask, and they crowd out the brewers who kept cask interesting while the big brands were away. The revival argument does not have to resolve that tension. It just has to name it.

The shelf-presence defence

None of this rules out simply wanting the badge on the shelf. A flawed Double Diamond next to a John Bull cartoon is a better Tesco end-cap than another row of identical craft-lager cans that nobody will remember in two years. That is a real editorial position, and it survives the honesty audit — as long as no-one is pretending the liquid is what it isn't.

But some beers will never get a licensed revival. No corporate owner will bring them back; no supermarket will make room for them. Those beers belong somewhere else: in archive recipes, old brewery booklets, homebrewers' sheds, and memory. Which is where Romford's John Bull Bitter — and a few other ghost beers — may have to live.

The ghosts are welcome

I still want them back. Double Diamond, Stones, Boddingtons, John Bull and whatever other ghosts the British beer trade chooses to summon next. Partly because I want to know what they tasted like, and partly because there's something irresistible about ordering a pint my father might once have ordered.

I don't need it to be identical. In most cases it can't be. And occasionally, as Stones demonstrates, perhaps we should be grateful that it isn't.

Just tell me what survived.

The recipe. The yeast. The water. The brewery. The people. The badge.

Or nothing but the name.

The ghosts are welcome. Just call them by their proper names.