As the sun sets, the pints rise. It’s been a hot, sweaty day cycling around the beautiful Romney Marsh in Kent, and now it’s time for a beer in a village pub where thirsty riders like me feel they have earned a lager, IPA or pale ale. The pub garden reverberates with chatter about the highlights from the day’s riding, and the ales act as both refreshment and a social lubricant, oiling the chain of cyclists’ storytelling. This scene, timeless and synonymous with British summers, is for many of us a treasured part of our cycling year, when pubs and pints become a regular fixture of our weekend rides.
It’s time to take a step back and consider how beer and cycling, two very different cultures, became interwoven. In pub gardens across the country, Lycra-clad drinkers lap up the ambience among non-cyclist locals, but how and why did this scene become commonplace – not just in the UK, but throughout Europe? To find the answer, you have to go back a long way, because beer and cycling have an enduring history. Pubs, breweries and, now, taprooms seeking to profit from the ‘pedal pound’ might seem very modern but, in fact, cycling has had an intimate relationship with alcohol right from the start.
