Firkin Dogbolter Pump Clip

Originally the page was a rant about how Bass/Punch Taverns had taken over the chain from Allied Lyons (later Allied Lyons) in 1999 and had closed all the breweries – thus spoiling at a stroke the unique nature of many of the establishments. Many of the pubs became O’Neills pubs – pretend Irish pubs. I subsequently updated the page a couple of times with further facts about the takeover, and then after a while forgot about it.

However, whenever I used to check the hit counter for my pages I almost always found that the Firkin page was by far the most popular page on the site – with many people using ‘Dogbolter’ as the search word that brings them to the page on my site.

Something I have just found out however is that Dogbolter lives on! The Ramsgate Brewery of er… Broadstairs produces a bottled beer called Gadds’ Faithful Dogbolter Porter which is a good copy of the original Bruce’s beer. You can read more on the Gadds’ Beer Shop blog and also enthusiastically reviewed on the Boak and Bailey’s beer blog.

I’d love to be able to taste some of that – Dogbolter was the highlight of any trip to a Firkin pub. Being quite strong though it did tend to monkey about with one’s head…

If you want to read more about the history of the Firkin chain you could have a look at my Firkin page (now relocated into the Good Beer, Good Pubs articles section) or check out Wikipedia.