The second pub I ever went to in Brighton was the Evening Star.
It was my first trip to Brighton and I'm pretty sure it was a match day at Withdean. It might have been the day that Brighton and Hove Albion (BHAFC) secured its promotion to the Championship from League 1 but I can't be sure.
What I do remember is a heaving pub, thronging with football supporters and incredibly efficient staff either with preternatural hearing or just really good at understanding various bits of sign language and pointing. Whilst there was always a queue after a match, it never felt like a hard job to get served in a fair manner. The pub was run by two people who, coincidentally, moved to our favourite beer city...yeah, yeah...Bristol.
It was explained to me that the ES had been a brewpub but that the brewery had expanded and moved out to a dedicated site. Oddly, I've since learned that they took on their large site around about the time I first went to the pub.
So, of course, it was this pub that I first drank Hophead. Almost more memorably, I also had APA there for the first time and for a long while, I would have called it one of my favourite ever beers.
When Dark Star was sold to Fullers I was sad. But, I thought, like 'em or loathe 'em Fuller do brew good beer and as long as the production site doesn't change then maybe Dark Star beers will retain their distinctive flavour, style and "craft"-ness.
Our local pub, The Crown, had Hophead as one of their regular beers which delighted us - and sealed the deal for it being our local. But after the takeover, Hophead started to lose its brightness (flavour, not clarity) and not long after, our landlord said he couldn't stock it any more because it had become too inconsistent. By then, production had moved to Chiswick.
The sell-off of Fullers to Asahi, I guess, was probably inevitable. Fullers is such a mainstay of the "traditional" brewing scene that I suppose it was very attractive to a multinational volume-brewer. Let's put it this way, in a round of "names of cask brown bitters" London Pride is never going to be a Pointless answer.
And so, now, the Dark Star brewery at Partridge Green - which, I understand, was not some rustic plant but a standard industrial unit set up like the ones I adore in Bristol - is being closed at the end of the year. Production will be moved to the Meantime Brewery and the usual "economic" arguments have been trotted out.
I haven't drunk much Fullers or Dark Star since the original sell-off happened so it's not like I'm going to notice other changes from here on in but the closure still makes me a little sad.
When you're introduced to a place or thing (in this case beer) by or with a loved-one and then it's irrevokably changed you definitely take it personally even if you've moved on from the place or thing.
Thank goodness that Mark Tranter still brews locally (8 miles up the road), running Burning Sky and that the Evening Star is back to being a mainstay of our beer excursions (if anything, even better than the day of my first trip there) otherwise it would really feel that something had been stolen.
