On a more postive note, the Herald had a short piece on the best 5 pints of Guinness in the city – being in Grogan’s (hate, hate, HATE the decor),  Mulligan’s, The Gravediggers, Walsh’s, Stoneybatter and Guinness Storehouse (well it’d want to have a decent pint).   The first 3 mentioned I’ve been to many times and they certainly do serve a good pint of plain.

The Portobello Bar was complaining about running foul of the anti-happy hour laws.  While pointing out stupidly cheap drink offers in night clubs may not be best for preventing people from becoming drunken messes is fair enough, claiming it’s  ban on €4 pints is ridiculous.  There are plenty of bars around Dublin that run all day promotions that are able to stay within the guidelines and pull in more business on the quiet days.

The publicans are taking flak from brewers over their prices as well as us poor consumers.  C&C’s chief, John Dunsmore, complained last week that a 10% cut in the wholesale price of Bulmers had not been passed on in 20% of pubs sampled while the rest had only passed on a saving of about 7%.   The Vintner organisations have complained before that the brewers aren’t reducing prices yet when it was, some hid behind the (illegal) price freeze instead of passing on the savings.

As for Pint of Plain, it was mentioned in the Evening Herald in an article about the cheapest pints in Dublin.  I’ve also been on the radio plugging the site.

What will be interesting is to see what impact it will have on the visits to the website.

The Vintners Federation of Ireland are saber rattling again over pub closures.  They’re now warning of significant job losses across the sector.  They’ve upped their figure of pubs closed since 2001 from 1500 to 1700 (meaning there are still 300 more pubs than in 2000).  It’s still a slower rate than in the UK where it’s claimed 52 pubs are shutting down a week.

In the UK, the spectre of plastic glasses becoming the standard drinking vessel reared it’s ugly head.  This is supposedly to bring down the number of glassings in pubs.  This is a typical cop out solution to a problem.  Rather than trying to tackle the root of the problem (drunks causing grief), they’re just targeting a symptom and penalising everyone.  Plastic pint glasses are a vile creation, leaving a horrid taint to the taste of beer from them.  Hopefully no one here will latch on to this terrible idea.

The Portobello Bar has run foul of restrictions on drinks promotions.  I’d be expecting a few more stories like this over the coming months as publicans try to attract people in with the promise of cheap drink.

Edit:

And a late entry is the news that Heineken NV (the world’s third-largest brewer) with a net profit rise of 12%.  This interestly is despite a fall in volumes of nearly 7%.  I must see if I can get some numbers for their sales in Ireland.

Apparently the average price of a pint in Dublin is €4.85 according to the CSO.  That’s not really surprising with many bars charging €5+ for a larger.  I have spotted 1 bar with drastically reduced prices since this time last year.  A whirlwind tour or some city centre pubs is in order to see how much has changed since the price freeze has been ruled illegal.

Pint saved as EU allows Ireland and UK to opt out of metric system

The two organisations also went on about the 1500 closed pubs since 2001 again.  This bit of statistical trickery was exposed a few days afterwards in the Times as really being 2000 more pubs than in 2000.

It will be interesting to see if individual pubs advertise the price freeze.

On a seperate note, it’s nice to see the return of Pádraic Brady’s blog.  His tutorial series on building a PHP Blog application was invaluable for me to get my head around the Zend framework.

So if you’re getting this error, you need to add the follwoing to your JAD file:

MIDlet-1: <application name>,<option thumbnail>,<package>.<starting class>

When you view a crawl, you’ll see the list of bars in the suggested order as well as them marked on a map.  You can also get walking instructions (provided via the Google Maps API) in case you’re unfamiliar with the area.

There’s a RSS feed so you can keep abreast of any new crawls that come in.

I think I shall the following the Old Man Bars crawl sometime soon.