Boak & Bailey (Jess & Ray)

@boakandbailey.bsky.social

2576 Followers 463 Following

In Bristol. Beer blogging in the UK since 2007. Also wrote some books about beer and pubs. Header image shows a detail from the cover of one. Won't repost if you don't use alt text. Find us at boakandbailey.com

A Victoria cast iron pub table with the face of cricketer W.G. Grace, with his initials above.
A massive industrial fan in the corner of a taproom.
A half pint of pink-orange beer
An 1860s bar back advertising Irish and Scotch Whisky.
A massive metal silo in front of a brewery with a mural.
A glass of Augustiner wheat beer with the bottle next to it.
An A4 sign in a pub window: don't queue, gather round our little bar to get served!
A shrine with a photo of Elmer, a lucky cat, and various other items. A sign reads All Hail Elmer.
A wooden beam on the ceiling of a pub with pump clips, tankers, and Toby jugs.
Pipes and gauges and tanks bathed in purple light.
The fluffy, thick, meringue-like head of a pint of lager glowing in a sunbeam.
The Park Inn, a plain looking semi rural pub with a sign advertising Holden's beers, in 1976.
A packet of Henderson's relish flavoured crisps.
A cast iron Victorian or Victorian style pub table with a quite crude casting of Britannia.
The interior of a modern craft brewery with lots of stainless steel and bunting with brewery branding.
The outside of the window of the Drapers Arms with the pub's logo in yellow.
The interior of a pub with bare wood, mustard coloured details, and big windows looking out onto a quiet suburban street.
A close up of the flying hippo logo on a Lost & Grounded beer glass full of golden lager.
That meme of a guy holding out his hands, looking dismissive: "American problem... don't want to know..."
An uplighter lamp next to a wooden panel with an old son saying “Goof Beer Guide 1991 – we are in it!”
Shiny brewing equipment with pipes and hoses.
The cosy brown interior of a pub. A foil wrapped mini Easter egg is hiding on a ledge.
Described in post.
Signs on a BrewDog bar crossed out with black plumbers tape.
A beer menu with the Westmalle logo on the front.
A chalkboard advertising lobster and champagne evenings.
A pub on Bristol harbourside with its beer garden being set up in the sunshine.
The interior of the wayside inn - the Fox and Goose, not that it matters was like the interiors of all wayside inns, dark and cool and smelling of beer, cheese, coffee, pickles and the sturdy English peasantry. Entering, you found yourself in a cosy nook with tankards on the walls and chairs and tables dotted hither and thither.
A Guinness branded hoodie on sale in a Sainsbury's supermarket.
Described in post
Thomas and Mary also admitted to having bewitched beer in the brewhouse. "The odiousnesse of the infectious stinke of it", it was said, "was such & so intollerable that by the noysomnesse of the stinck or tast[e] many people dyed."
A half pint of very dark beer with a display of Tayto crisps on the historic bar back.
Responses to stories like this have been broadly unsympathetic, partly because, as you know, nobody ever really liked BrewDog; everyone claims to have been the first to turn against them; anyone who did like them was a rube and a fool; and, anyway, the beer “tastes like piss”. (No it doesn’t, or at least didn’t when we checked last year.)
A pint and a half of brown beer on a shelf with William Morris wallpaper behind.
A pint of cask bitter and a handled German style beer mug full of dark lager. Behind is a menu advertising Sign of the Times light lager at 3.4%.
A screenshot of Anthony's newsletters in our RSS feed reader.
A pint of Guinness in a plastic glass with a football game in the background.
A pump clip for 1950s Burton Ruby Mild by Sunken Knave and the Heritage Brewing Company.
The interior of a Belgian style cafe with small wooden tables and normal sized chairs.
A loyalty card for Five Points Beer: Five Pints of Five Points.
A glowing orange portable heater next to the keg washing machine.
First, there was their place in the community. To a great extent, pubs were living spaces – extensions of the home – especially for those who lived in barely tolerable slum housing. For many working men the pub served a similar function to the studies, libraries and drawing rooms of middle- and upper-class homes. In his 1971 memoir of life in Salford before the First World War, The Classic Slum, Robert Roberts summarised the attraction for men like his father: To the great mass of manual workers the local public house spelled paradise... After the squalor from which so many men came there dwelt within a tavern all one could crave for-warmth, bright lights, music, song, comradeship, the smiling condescension of a landlady, large and bosomy, for ever sexually unattainable, true, but one could dream... But above all, men went for the ale that brought a slow, fuddled joy. Beer was indeed the shortest way out of the city. (End quote.) But he also described the grim alternative: Summer evening leisure for men without the few coppers to go into a tavern meant long, empty hours lounging between kitchen chair and threshold. How familiar one grew in childhood with those silent figures leaning against door jambs, staring into vacancy waiting for bedtime.
As a consumer it can get pretty exhausting: support pubs, support small breweries, boycott supermarkets, support record shops, support bookshops, support struggling restaurants, support your local butcher, baker, artisanal candlemaker. Buy local, buy Fair Trade, buy British. Oh, and pay into a pension, and save for a rainy day, and put a roof over your head in a property market gone insane, and also we’d like you to go onto a contract which means we can’t guarantee your income from one month to the next. Oh, and it’s 30p to use the toilet now, by the way, because there’s no magic money tree and so on and so forth.
A pack of four souvenir beer mats adapted from real beer brands to advertise the Drapers Arms in Bristol using text from bad online reviews. The one on top says "Nice food... if you like pickled eggs and crisps." Next to it Jess is holding a bag of crisps with a pickled egg in it.
A list of what beers were on at the Drapers at about 15:30 on 3rd Jan 2026
A corner at the Drapers Arms featuring a lamp, a plant, a railway poster and a photo book with two creepy dolls on the cover.
A packet of Tayto (Northern Ireland) crisps.
William Morris wallpaper, an old lamp, an Orval sign.
Described in post.
A pint of Thornbridge Jaipur, yellow with a creamy sparkled head.
The gable end of a modernist pub that looks a bit like a normal house. The sign says The Alex.
A portrait the late Her Majesty the Queen on the wall of a pub.
A splendid volute entrance to a pub. Curved glass that looks like Captain Nemo's submarine.
The interior of a bar with board games, photo wall and various coloured lights.
A pint of bass on a round pub table with a red leather top.
The bright green and dark red exterior of a Victorian pub with the name painted above the door.
A sign for Unwin’s Brewery above an industrial unit in a railway arch.
The Trafalgar, sketched loosely in black and white – a big pub with balconies facing out over the Thames.
An A board outside a pub warning people to drive slowly because kittens are playing outside the pub and around it.
A Victorian corner pub, The Golden Lion, in Fishponds, Bristol.