July: Heatwave Special, Featuring Lager 🥵

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

This month:

1976: The Year London Ran Out of Lager

It’s July 1976 and Anne and Eddie McManus, who run Hammersmith’s Britannia pub, have a problem. They’ve got no lager. They’ve had none since mid-June, in fact, when this squat mid-century pub - situated across the road from the Odeon - received its last delivery of Harp, Britain’s best-selling lager.

The summer of 1976 was famously hot. From the beginning of May to the end of August, London broiled in temperatures that touched 35 degrees centigrade at their peak and (this sounds familiar) stayed above 30 degrees for 15 consecutive days in late June and early July. There were water shortages, melted roads, trains on fire and straw-coloured parks. Even now, when every summer brings new meaning to the word ‘muggy’, 1976 remains the popular-culture benchmark for heat. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, lots of people decided to give ice-cold lager a go that year. Almost one in four British pints sold in ‘76 was lager, up from a few measly percent at the start of the 1960s. A drink once regarded as irredeemably foreign was suddenly hugely popular: pubs ran out of it, and breweries - some of them having just jumped on the bandwagon - struggled to keep up.