Gleaming cars and glamorous monsters

Research for a story this week had me take a trip into town with my wife and one of my editors to drink martinis at the Connaught Bar. Our cocktails were delicious. The Connaught's sumptuous art-deco bar holds the title of best in the world, which doesn't feel like hyperbole when you get inside. But upon leaving we found ourselves back in a part of London that feels increasingly alien and obscene. Drinking in Mayfair is a rare treat but one that can leave an uncomfortable taste in your mouth.

The streets by Berkeley Square are a stage peopled by gleaming cars and glamorous monsters. As we passed the notorious private club Annabel's, a rapacious man grasped his date's throat in a creepy curb-side clinch. We found ourselves walking behind spindle-legged girls in vertiginous heels and the tiniest skirts who hung on the arms of balding 60-somethings stuffed into silk shirts, dripping with chunky gold, closely attended by dark-suited goons. You couldn't see the paunches or the jowls, but you knew they were there.

The UK is in the grip of a cost of living crisis, but one that's made worse by a culture where wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. There were 29 UK billionaires in 2010. By 2022, after 12 years of Tory rule, that tally rose to 177. Their collective wealth grew fat to the tune £1 billion every week last year. Together they have amassed £710 billion, yet working nurses and police officers find themselves dependent on food banks to survive. It's a rerun of the gilded age, an orgy of greed and excess, of unaccountable and unchecked power and corruption. It's hard to write about £25 cocktails, especially now, without feeling that a revolution might be welcome.

Yet £25 doesn't seem so bad when you think it has to pay for all those who got that martini to my table. Not least the bar staff: I entered feeling out of place but their welcome soothed me. Their expert knowledge guided me. Their theatrical pours entertained me. They elevated a simple drink into an occasion. How often have you heard people say bartending is not just a stop-gap job but a career that deserves to be taken seriously? To do so includes paying them a decent wage. The same goes for those who distill the spirits, grow the grain, harvest all the different botanicals, drive the trucks...

The problem isn't that £25 cocktails exist, but that more people can't afford them.

On a lighter note, some good news: I have been nominated for this year’s Guild of Food Writers drinks writer award, alongside Alice Lascelles and Hollie Stephens. The winner is announced in late June.

These are the stories on which the judges made their decision:

1. Madness and Bitter Fruit — Making Perry in the Shadow of May Hill, in Good Beer Hunting.
2. Camping in cider’s belly, in Ferment Magazine.
3. Pillars of Tradition — How a New Generation of Brewers Returned to Decoction Mashing, in Good Beer Hunting again.
4. Add a splash of glamour to your life, once more to Ferment Magazine.
5. Finally, Back in Black — How London’s Contemporary Brewers Are Reclaiming the City’s Porter Traditions, in… yes Good Beer Hunting.

A quick look forward to other things I have coming up, some of which will make it into print. Later this month I’ll visit Hepple Spirits to see their juniper planting programme. I may attend a barrel summit in Deauville to mingle with brewers and distillers, winemakers and cider makers — although this one’s not 100% confirmed yet. And after that it’s off to Washington D.C. to attend Savor, “an American craft beer and food experience.”

This amount of international jet-setting is by no means normal for me. Usually I count myself lucky if someone pays for a train ticket down to Kent. But it should give me plenty of interesting material to share soon.

Subjects on my desk at the moment include: distilleries and rising energy prices, gin botanicals in the UK, and hybrid beers.

Finally, a few recent bylines.

• I wrote for VinePair on why it doesn’t matter that your favourite gin doesn’t make its own base alcohol.
• In Ferment, I argued that pub crawls are the best kind of drinking.
• In Good Beer Hunting, I explored Best Bitter’s recent blip in popularity among the craft beer crowd.

There are a few others too, which you can explore here if you like.