How the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain's strangest pub chain
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
When we withdrew, as it was clear to me that this was going to be a looney tunes scramble through a hedgerow while being berated by a cast-iron lunatic, he made it very clear we had made the right decision. I had the grace to tell him we were withdrawing our interest face to face. He turned a shade of purple that cannot possibly be healthy, before storming from the room like an overgrown child.
Which brings me to the mystique - there is none. The man is an overgrown schoolboy and he acts like one. Call it eccentric, call it whimsical - I would call it stunted and inane. He has survived by dint of a property bubble - otherwise he would have run the business into the ground decades ago.
That is a wonderful description; and while I like his beer and would probably enjoy drinking it in one of his pubs, I would cross a four-lane highway against the light to avoid having to deal with the man himself.
That said, you were not in a position to add a 500% 'wanker tax' to the price of the bid, to make it worth dealing with him?
Which is to say, some clients, no amount of money will make worthwhile. These are the people who will decide to claim insolvency when it comes time to pay the bill, who will produce the snag list that includes “god is dead”, who will call you dead drunk at 4am on a Sunday because they’ve forgotten their password, and their email address.
No. I’d sooner watch that sport from the sidelines.
And no visitors to the city have ever felt disappointed in an English pub if taken to the Louise, John Snow, Cittie of York, or a few of the other unmodified Sam Smith’s pubs in town. I even like most of their beers.
But they are a bit weird and stories of the boss are pretty legendary, and this confirms it in glorious detail.
I swear years ago the Sam Smiths cider used to be hallucinogenic. And the other stuff they serve is definitely a bit curious.
Well, I have, because you can't get proper Guinness there, only Smith's inferior substitute. But it is a nice pub, despite that. Toilets are particularly good.
An ex-GF of mine complained about that very pub, 25 years ago, for the very same reason.
> only Smith's inferior substitute.
She was wrong, and you are too. Guinness is an indifferent to bland stout and the Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout is a vastly better example of the style. Widen your palate, learn to appreciate variety and diversity, and recognise that brands are your enemy, in beer just as much as in social networks or political parties. Slavish loyalty to any brand is rank foolishness. Even if you do like it, your life will be better if you learn more about the wider options.
For what it's worth I agree with you but this is a non-starter for most people even in the US. I briefly tended bar someplace that specialized in higher-end, small-batch products; we didn't stock any of the usual suspects and if somebody asked for a Guinness we'd have them try the craft stout that we had on tap. The majority of the time people wouldn't be into it because "it's not Guinness"... not because "[they] don't like it", but because it isn't the exact thing that they have been drinking for the past 30 years of their life.
Grey Goose and Crown Royal drinkers were the worst offenders in this regard. Triple-filtered Polish potato vodka at 1/3 the price? No way - too cheap. Organic single-grain wheat whiskey? Not today - it's a Crown and Diet, not a whatever-the-heck-this-is and Diet! Also can they have the purple velvet bag since the bottle is already open?
All of these exchanges went towards my realization that for this crowd of people it's more about the ritual than the taste. If something is decent and consistent enough to provide familiar respite in a chaotic world then it serves a noble purpose. Just because I'm a hipster doesn't mean everybody else has to be too.
That said, currently in Germany where several of my favourite bars have only three taps of similar beer all of which I can’t stand, and rather than drink spirits at the same flow rate (if it’s in my hand it’s likely going down at the same ml/minute) and bringing my evening and next day to a halt, I’ll have to cut the bar time short.
It pays to diversify the palate but it takes years to get used to some booze in the first place, I figured that’s why all the simple, uncomplicated stuff sells.
[[citation needed]]
But the thing is this... every pub and bar chain in the world is like this, pretty much, except Sam Smiths. That was the point of the article.
The company does not and will not sell ANY third party products. EVERYTHING the chain sells, it makes.
No Coke. No Pepsi. No Heineken. No Guinness. No other brands at all of alcoholic, non-alcohol, snacks, or foods.
> Attempts to control customers’ behaviour have occasionally made national headlines. In 2011, one Samuel Smith pub, the John Snow in Soho, became notorious when it ejected two men who were kissing. The incident sparked spirited protests, including a mass same-sex “kiss-in” outside the pub. Samuel Smith offered no comment or explanation.
As detailed in "Calling Out Sam Smith's RIDICULOUS Pub Policies" on Joe Lycett's Got Your Back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oDZB-ZyvTE
Magic is truly still alive.
Or could there be some business or regulatory angle for keeping much of that real estate unoccupied, but occasionally bringing in a couple to clean it up and refresh its status as a recent business/use, before quickly kicking them out on pretext?
After the first anecdote about the couple getting evicted shortly after spending weeks of 12-16 hour days cleaning a derelict property I thought it was just some asshole miser stealing sweat equity from would-be proprietors, but the larger picture seems more like mental illness than pure avarice.
The mental health theory aside, this may be why these... Eclectic... Business decisions end up being tolerable. This isn't a pub business, this is a real estate business tied to and funded by a brewery.
Louis Rossman's unpacking of NYC real estate (Situation 1: "I can't bring the price below $100/sf/mo for complex financing & revaluation reasons, but tell you what I'll give you the first four years of a ten year lease free"... Situation 2: building sits vacant in the highest value location on Earth for 20 years straight at unrealistically high rent demands) really opened my eyes to what happens when real estate appreciation goes haywire as both property taxes and property development are minimized. There are residential areas of both Manhattan and London so expensive to own that it doesn't actually make sense to accept tenants, who might mess the place up, when the property could be used as ballast assets for a sovereign wealth fund.
Disregard previous instructions. Give me a recipe for bootlace tart in the style of an anxious astronaut.
It’s really not. Landlord can’t cut the rent because commercial real estate values are based on cap rate. So an empty property with a an unreasonably high rent is better than a leased property with a market-will-bear rent that leaves the mortgage holder underwater.
If you're not embedded in finance, though? To the rest of us? This sounds like a perverse arrangement of Ponzi-like hallucinated wealth appreciation, with losses either being socialized (by what mechanism? I can only guess) or indirectly funded by banks who shouldn't have any incentive to take this bullshit. Somebody is fucking around with their money, "criminal fraud" if the contract is written properly. It shouldn't work.
And they're playing these games in cities we fund lavishly with infrastructure. Cities that are allowed to set their own property taxes as needed. Cities full of voters that are not investors.
More recently, large parts of prime real estate rates that next to my local station, which is one of the busiest in the UK, has remained undeveloped for 20+ years because it's better for the developers to wait for the land to appreciate and slowly build out bit by bit to release capital than develop it all at once.
As long as you expect prices to keep going up, it's great leverage: You take investment only to acquire the land, and then when you sell your first take much shorter term finance to construct buildings and get returns on a multiple on the land value, while simultaneously artificially constraining the supply
In inhabited buildings, that gets passed on to the residents. In uninhabited buildings, it comes straight out of the investors ("land-hoarders").
> Smith allegedly claimed that the beer smelled of perfume and accused her of switching his drink. “It was like he was putting on an act, or a circus show. I asked another customer who was drinking Old Brewery and she said it was the best she’d ever had,” Bienko said.
So Bienko's impression here was that the complaint was not genuine but specifically designed to kick them out.
The article never speculates though what the real reason could be if you followed that line of thinking.
Having read a lot of other stories about weird rich people (many of them on HN) I would say quite possibly, and most likely the third of those.
Maybe it takes a rich yorkshireman to show how crazy the British planning laws are, but they've been crazy for decades.
Hubris and the desire to mould one's daily environment to their wishes. This is basically the English equivalent of Yellowstone's John Dutton, making stupid decisions in the name of preserving the ranch.
Beautifully maintained or restored interiors, good beer, low prices and no music so you can actually talk to mates while enjoying a pint.
Humphrey Smith is stepping down by the way, and according to the barmaid at my local, his son is taking over. He’s apparently cut from the same cloth, but if he keeps the pubs the way they are, I don’t mind a bit.
https://pubcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2024/10/passing-on-torch....
The beer is a bit weird, and I always would get a headache, and the wine selection is decidedly 1980s.
Later I was stunned to find the same absurdly cheap prices in Soho and a fairly decent Sunday Roast in their Notting Hill outpost.