WHAT’S HAPPENING IN LANSING, MICHIGAN ?

June 2025. Sheffield.

Back from Lichfield and its excellent bod (better opening hours than the cathedral) to find something weird happening on the blog;

20,000 odd blog views from America in a day, half of them from Lansing.

Shamefully, I didn’t know Lansing was the capital of Michigan (always assumed it was Michigan), the home of the great Mark Crilley and also the badly named Cask And Company (no cask).

But even Mark C can’t read all 10,000 of my posts in a day (can he ?), so Chat GPT reckons it’s bots. Normally that means Russians, though who can tell the difference between Russia and American in 2025 ?

Hopefully they’re scraping data to train ChatGPT on pub etiquette or similar. Or possibly it’s that Quinno searching for Bass outlets.

Well, Quinno, having told you in April that Kelham’s Alder has Bass, and then in May that’s it’s ditched Bass after a month long probation, here it is again.

Competing with Big Trip,

and Murphy’s, that other name from the ’90s you’d forgotten existed.

“I thought you’d taken Bass off !” I say, like a child who thinks his parents have forgotten to buy him Mouse Trap for Christmas.

“Couldn’t get supplies” says the young barman, clearly as frustrated as I am by supply lines. I thought this issue, that saw Tynemouth Lodge drop Bass after forever, had been resolved.

Well it’s there now, and £3 in Happy Hour.

It’s good enough (NBSS 3), but the heat is winning out a bit.

Those little bubbles in the top pic tell a tale. I don’t know what, I don’t do beer.

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Published by retiredmartin

Retired NHS, doing long walks around UK and the world to record the great bits. Focused on Good Beer Guide pubs and live music.

17 thoughts on “WHAT’S HAPPENING IN LANSING, MICHIGAN ?”

  1. Yeah, definitely too warm. Global heating affects Sheffield, South Yorkshire as well as Lansing, Michigan.

    A link to a video called Top Things To Do in Lansing Michigan suggests that those things could last almost one quarter of an hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7GqhYtOiC0 I haven’t watched it, but perhaps it includes going through the entire archive of Retired Martin’s Days Out in British Pubs. One click per second.

    On Google it’s saying “People also ask, what is Lansing known for”, and the answer does not include cask beer. Not even tepid Bass.

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  3. Back in May, I enjoyed an excellent pint of Murphy’s at the Mauretania, in Cobh, Ireland. Beamish Irish Stout was also available, and continuing the Cork-brewed stout theme, both Sainsbury’s and Tesco, are selling nitro-pour cans of the stuff as well. It’s not just Bass that is making a comeback, welcome though that is!

    ps, I gather the Mauretania was one of Professor Pie Tin’s former locals, when he lived in the town.

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  5. Lansing…the Yang Sing was perhaps the foremost Chinese restaurant in Manchester’s Chinatown.
    Having burnt down in 1997, it survived several further fires to retain that position, and its name lives on today, as The Little Yang Sing (though at a different location from Princess Street) on George Street.

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  6. The Lansing of the Big Blue Dot is probably Lansing, Kansas, which is next door to Leavenworth, which in turn is home to a certain Big House with a largish number of guys who are unlikely to imbibe beer from cask, keg, bottle, or can. Perhaps they are attracted to Mr. RM’s fine photos.

    DRinMpls

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    3. The WordPress site that I administer shows many email notifications as having been opened in the US, even though nearly all the subscribers are locals.

      I think that a lot depends on where the owner of apps, media, account provision, or other IT that people are using is registered.

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  7. I drank quite a bit of Irish stout as a student in Stoke in the early nineties. Most pubs still had bottle conditioned Guinness, the student union bar at the poly served Beamish as one of its draught beers, and Murphy’s was widely available in different formats (iirr, they were the first to put a nitro widget in the bottle).

    It’s a bit ironic that the, thankfully now long since disappeared, sectarian divide in Cork which meant it had a Protestant and Catholic stout brewery ultimately led to a Dutch company, Heineken, taking over both before shutting the former and moving production to the latter.

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