We get the occasional comment on old posts, usually where people have stumbled across them through Googling a specific term.

For example, because we’re one of the few sites online to even mention Starkey, Knight and Ford (a defunct West Country brewery) we’ve had some interesting comments from people with memories to share and questions to ask. Amongst the recent comments, Jon Rose asks if anyone remembers his grandad, Bill, who used to drive steam traction engines for SKF, and David Harper recalls living next door to the brewery as a child. There is also a debate brewing about the colour of SKF Chairman Tommy Ford’s car…

Quite a few people have commented on an old post about another defunct brewery, Truman, Hanbury and Buxton. Most of them are involved in family history projects and are trying to trace people who worked at the brewery or ran Truman pubs. If you’ve got any connection with or knowledge of THB, why not have a look and see if you can help them out?

One of earliest posts was a recipe for Lithuanian delicacy Kepta Duona. In the last couple of years, a few people (including some genuine Lithuanians) have dropped in to say that they think our recipe sucks and to suggest much-needed improvements. On a related note, it was also nice of Jo to report back on her success with our pretzel recipe, and Petr is of course right when he points out that we should have included garlic in our nakladaný hermelin marinade.

We also enjoyed a recent addition to our post about sparklers, which we wrote after our first trip to York. Simo is a professional bar manager who concludes that: “The argument will continue but the reality is that no sparkler means a flat pint, the reality is that southerners would rather have a flat full pint cause they are tight wads.” We had a little chuckle at that.

Of course, there are also the borderline spam comments, too, like the one we got this week from an off-licence owner pretending to be a punter — “Found a great store with a fantastic range of American beer on the Holloway Road!”. We’d have approved it if he’d just said: “I own a really good off licence, here’s the address in case your readers are interested”.

The picture has nothing to do with the post but we’ve got to do something with all our shots of old brewery livery. This is a Courage logo on the side of a former estate pub (now a cafe) in Bristol.