By Dave Hunter
EVOLUTION, not revolution is the philosophy at Glasgow neighbourhood pub Redmond’s of Dennistoun.
Opened in 2014 in Glasgow’s Dennistoun area, Redmond’s – which last year was named SLTN Craft Beer Bar of the Year – has successfully carved out a niche for itself in the thriving neighbourhood.
Among the pub’s points of difference are its extensive vinyl collection of 1500 albums, which customers are free to choose from (whole albums only, no picking and choosing tracks), and its Asian-inspired food menu that includes bao buns, ramen and katsu in addition to Eastern-inflected takes on pub favourites such as kimchi mac and cheese bites, Japanese fried chicken and sweet chilli-cured eggs.
But the beating heart of the venue is its extensive beer range, which stretches from top-selling brands Tennent’s Lager and Guinness to obscure high-strength sours and IPAs.
On draught, the bar has five rotating beer lines, which will include craft brews from all over the world, while the venue’s fridges include around 150 bottles and cans at any one time.
On a recent visit to the venue manager Davy Kirkwood told SLTN that the Redmond’s offer has come together over the past decade as the pub has evolved.
“The longer you go at something, you’re naturally just evolving anyway,” he said.
“Especially if you’re a neighbourhood pub that respects the place you’ve found yourself occupying. You try and carve your own niche, but at some point people make you what they need you to be. That’s the ongoing dialogue between you and your customers.
“It has obviously changed between year one and now, but I can’t think of anything that was radical,” said Davy.
“I say evolution, but we’ve never been scared of doing something that’s a bit out there for a neighbourhood bar.
“Playing all vinyl is another one. We didn’t invent vinyl, and we’re not the first listening bar in the world, by any stretch of the imagination, but leaning into it and saying we have 1500 vinyl, put something on…”
Davy is a vinyl enthusiast: “The artform has kind of been lost. When Zeppelin 4 finishes side one and then ‘When the Levee Breaks’ comes in on side 2. All those wee moments that, for better or worse, have just been lost to someone that only ever heard it on Spotify.
“You find folk have choice overload when they ask if they can choose something and there’s 1400 albums there. And then they just choose Sergeant Pepper’s. So every month we do a vinyl menu and just put 25 or 30 front and centre to make the choice a bit easier for customers. Nothing’s off-limits. You can choose whatever the hell you want.”
There’s a similarly non-prescriptive approach to what’s in the taps. Redmond’s is the opposite of elitist when it comes to its beer selection.
“We’ll get tourists in, and they’ll ask what beers we have. And I’ll say we have this fantastic double dry-hopped double IPA from a brewery in Cornwall. And they’ll say ‘that’s great. But what Scottish beers have you got?’
“There is no doubt in the last year craft beer, in particular, some of your more expensive – your 8 or 9% beers, your IPAs, your very high ABV stouts – they don’t fly out the way they used to. I think principally because to be all in on craft beers is quite expensive,” observed Davy.
“You’re still going to drink alcohol and you’re still going to drink craft beer, but you can get perfectly good entry-level hazy IPAs in four packs in the supermarkets now, and at some point when you’re a bit tight for cash, that’s 20 quid you save a month.
“So we’ve definitely had to be a bit smarter with it than a year ago. And really keep an eye on what customers’ patterns and behaviours are telling us, and not go all-in on buying every new beer that comes out every week.”
To give the beer offer some structure, Redmond’s does special menus at various points in the year –January is Scotland, Belgium is August, Germany is October and so on.
“That allows us to take away the blunderbuss approach of just trying to tick all the boxes all the time and give ourselves licence to go ‘there’s still 150 in the fridge. No one is going to be disappointed by the range of beer’.
“If in January there are only seven hazy pale ales rather than 10, you’ll still be fine. It gives us the licence to not worry about filling every single category of the beer world all the time. Because we’re not a supermarket.”
“We’re really keen on not losing sight of the entry-level customers. We strive to be a great craft beer bar, but we’re a bar with a red neon Tennent’s sign”
Davy explained Redmond’s inclusive thinking: “We’re really keen on not losing sight of the entry-level customers. We strive to be a great craft beer bar, but we’re a bar with a red neon Tennent’s sign. Tennent’s will always be our biggest seller. And our second biggest seller is Guinness. Joker’s our third. Menabrea’s our fourth.
“So what we’re really keen on – with the tap takeovers and the range is the fridge – is appealing to the customer who drinks Joker because it’s an IPA, or drinks Menabrea because it’s a more premium lager, and who might be just a wee bit curious to drink Northern Monk’s Faith or to drink whatever the rotating lager is on line one.
“So when we are buying stuff for the fridge, whether it’s price point or accessibility, we never, ever lose sight of the fact that a lot of our customers in here drinking entry-level craft beer or macro-brewed beer – beers that they’ve seen in supermarkets – might be interested in trying something that’s just one notch up from that, and they’ll find it off-putting if they’re all nine and ten quid.
“If someone used to drink Menabrea or Moretti and now they drink craft lager, or they used to drink Joker and now they’re drinking something that’s hazy, that’s our customers. Those customers aren’t going to drink niche craft beer bars.
“They’re going to pubs, and they maybe just begin that journey. And whether they do or they don’t they’re more than welcome. They can drink Tennent’s here. But we’re so keen to cater to that particular person in that wee moment.”
So how about the clientele? As Dennistoun has started to show some early signs of gentrification, is there a change in who is coming through the door?
Davy reckoned that there’s been some small changes locally, but not so much as to spoil the neighbourhood.
“It hasn’t lost it’s soul. Dennistoun always had a big soul and it’s still got a big soul. Folk here tend to be ferociously proud – not problematically proud – but they’re very happy to live in this neighbourhood and it’s their area and they love it. To that extent it hasn’t changed.
“If there’s a group of eight folk who are going to come somewhere on this street before a Celtic game or before their night out, and seven of them are going to drink Tennent’s, they’ll drink Tennent’s anywhere. If the one person asks ‘can we go to this bar?’ And it’s ‘aw, there he is. Likes his craft beer’.
“That’s fine. That’s seven Tennent’s they’ve bought in your bar. So, A, have Tennent’s. And, B, own the fact that you have Tennent’s and be glad that these folk want to come to your bar, for goodness sake.
“A lot of folk in the bar won’t necessarily care about the vinyl and won’t engage with it, but one person’s like ‘that’s so cool’ and they’ll bring their mates.”
“A lot of folk in the bar won’t necessarily care about the vinyl and won’t engage with it, but one person’s like ‘that’s so cool’ and they’ll bring their mates.”
But despite this common touch, Redmond’s does have a sizeable craft beer offer, and putting properly trained staff behind those taps is important. Davy laid out how they approach that process.
“If you want to be confident talking about lagers and pale ales, that’s really easy. It’s dead easy if someone goes there’s a red wine, a white wine and an orange wine. What’s the difference? That’s dead easy. They’re really different. If someone gives you four hazy pale ales, that’s harder.
“Lines one and two in our bar will always be craft lagers and hazy pale ales. So it’s finding the nuances and the subtleties in it. Why is that one great and that one’s just good?
“So that tier one training we give everyone, we give everyone Tennent’s, an alcohol-free lager, and we discuss how – although they’re really good these days – you can kind of taste the absence of alcohol.
“Then we taste Tennent’s because if you don’t understand the most commonly-consumed product in this bar, then what are we doing here? That is the starting point for a lot of folk who now drink craft beer. A pint of Tennent’s when you were 18.
“And then we’ll try a 5% German lager. And then a hazy pale ale. And just really think about that literal journey for the majority of beer drinkers in this country. You started on entry-level lager and now you’re drinking something that’s a bit more hazy and a bit more this and that. If you lose sight of the journey your customers have been on, it kinda just becomes more of an academic exercise.
He continued: “Tier two is when we just do sour beers. Sour beers are a massive part of our repertoire at the moment.”
Redmond’s also takes an eclectic approach to its food offer. Despite starting off with very standard pub grub, the menu has since successfully gravitated eastward.
Davy explained: “It was just accepted, certainly back then, that if you go to a pub in Britain, it’ll be pub grub. Fish and chips and steak pie. And there’ll be mac and cheese and a burger and there’ll be pizzas.
“Conor [Miskimmin, Redmond’s director] thought, why does that need to be the case? The way I make sense of that is if you come back from a holiday in New York or London saying ‘there’s this really cool bar down an alley, with a really cool food offering’. Why can’t you do that in Glasgow? Why is it some exciting or exotic thing that only happens in other places?
“So Conor said we’re going to do steamed buns. It won’t be for everyone, but let’s hang our hat on that.”
“So Conor said we’re going to do steamed buns. It won’t be for everyone, but let’s hang our hat on that.
“At one point we began doing burgers and pizzas, and we did small Mediterranean plates that kind of looked eastward as well, so there’s no denying that we’ve sometimes had to listen to what our customers tell us. But the biggest shift in what we did was to go all-in on east Asian food. Steamed buns, katsu-loaded fries, ramen.
“There’s a big east Asian personality to it now. That happened after lockdown, and there’s a practical reason for that. If you do pizzas on a menu but not exclusively, then you need two chefs, because you need one chef to roll out the dough. And when there were restrictions we could only open with 34 humans in the pub.
“So in order to have pizzas we would have to have two chefs for only 28 or 32 humans, who wouldn’t always necessarily be buying food.
“So we can do nine and a half out of ten chicken. We can do nine and a half out of ten pork belly bao. Why would we do a six out of ten pizza?”
Davy nodded to Redmond’s management team as a major factor in making it what it is: “Luke [Miskimmin, owner] is refreshingly and pleasantly hands-on as far as owners go. He’s very much one of those owners who leads from the front with the leash in his teeth rather than behind with the whip.
“Luke will do one or two shifts a week over at Phillies. He typically does a Friday shift in here. It’s a big thing to him to see what makes the bar tick.”
So finally, we asked Davy what the plan is for 2025. The answer was simple.
“Our intention for this year is bigger and better. Let’s do everything we did last year, only better.”
