Ale City
This item will be released August 5, 2025.
About The Author
Roger Protz
ROGER PROTZ is a campaigner and broadcaster and the author of more than 25 books about beer and brewing. He was the editor of CAMRA's market-leading Good Beer Guide for over two decades and has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the British Guild of Beer Writers and the Society of Independent Brewers.
Roger appears regularly in the media and in 2016 was the subject of a BBC 4 Food Show special. He gives frequent talks and beer tastings at events in the UK and has also lectured at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC and Beer Expo in Melbourne, Australia.
Roger’s updates and comments on the brewing industry can be read on his website, www.protzonbeer.co.uk, and you can follow him on Twitter @RogerProtzBeer.
His most recent title World Beer Guide is a lavishly illustrated guide to the the brewers and beers across the globe.
St Albans is a city rich in history, with its origins in the Iron Age and known
as Verulamium following the Roman conquest in ad 43. Much of that history
is enshrined in its amazing pubs, which include old coaching inns, a pub
where soldiers fighting in the Wars of the Roses relaxed with ale, and Ye
Olde Fighting Cocks, dating from the seventeenth century and possibly even
earlier. Pubs connected to the railway age opened in the nineteenth century
and there have been further additions in both the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. These include the Farriers Arms, where the longest surviving
branch of the Campaign for Real Ale was formed in the 1970s. Today, St
Albans has fifty pubs, more per square mile than any other town or city in
Britain. Commercial brewing was established in the city during the
seventeenth century, with the Kinder family opening the St Albans Brewery on
Chequer Street. Their history and that of more recently founded breweries are
documented here.
Roger Protz has lived, worked – and drunk – in St Albans for fifty years.
Packed with anecdotes and fascinating facts, this lavishly illustrated guide
details the city’s pubs and brewing heritage
