Social Mobility in Victorian England: The Case of Robert Cain
One of the things that surprised me while I was researching my book Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint was how open Victorian society seems to have been to social climbers. Robert Cain, the founder of the Cains brewery in Liverpool has always been widely believed to have arrived in Liverpool aged 18 [...]
Cains Radio Interviews
I was off sick most of the last week but on Saturday I managed to drag myself into Liverpool for radio appearances on the Billy Butler show on BBC Radio Merseyside and then on Brian Reade’s show at City Talk. I’ll try to get copies of the interviews up here as soon as I can; [...]
Cains Book in the Daily Post and Echo
Yesterday I went down to the Brewery Tap to meet with journalists and the Dusanj brothers to mark the publication of Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint. The fact that the Dusanjs were there was surprising in itself as they have stayed away from the media since the Cains Beer Company went into [...]
Cains mp3 Download
It looks like Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint is starting to find its way out to the bookshops now. Yesterday I received my own copies and the supply chain should improve over the next few days. From today you can also listen to me reading the first chapter of the book, “An [...]
Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Wordle
According to the developer Wordle is a toy for creating ‘word clouds’ from chunks of text, or from any blog or website that has an RSS feed. Apart from being quite entertaining, it looks like Wordle is being used in schools to teach spelling and vocabulary. You can tweak the font, layout, and colours, or [...]
Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint–It’s Finally Here
An email from the publisher this morning to say that the Cain’s book has finally arrived. I haven’t seen a finished copy yet, so the tension is high around here, but it looks like it is starting to show up at the online bookstores at least. Borders seems to be quickest off the mark and [...]
Campaign to Axe the Beer Tax
The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) is behind a campaign to persuade the government to drop its recently announced increases in tax on beer. The most recent rise stayed in place while taxes on alcopops and spirits were dropped. There are historical precedents for this kind of protest group, most notably in the years leading [...]
Duty on Alcohol is a Blunt Instrument
So the government says it wants to reduce binge drinking because it is a cause of ill-health, violence, and it costs a fortune in policing. You can’t really argue with that. But all they have is alcohol duty to keep pushing the price up. And the effect of that is that pubs are closing at [...]
Cains Still Not on Amazon.co.uk: Try Here Instead
The list of people receiving order cancellations from Amazon is growing so I’m putting together a collection of alternative places where you can pre-order Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint, which will be with us very soon now. Many thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered the book.
Amazon (UK) is giving you a link [...]
Extreme Beer
This week’s New Yorker magazine has a long and fascinating piece by Burkhard Bilger about what it calls ‘extreme beer’. This seems to be defined as beer that requires unusual and ‘extreme’ materials and equipment, or which is at the upper limits of alcohol content, or contains unusual ingredients. What is really compelling about the [...]
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