(1948-) has played a catalytic role in the craft brewing revival in Britain and beyond. He ran a group of brewpubs in the London area under the generic moniker of Firkin—the name for a nine-gallon beer cask—and proved that beer drinking could be fun as well as pleasurable. The attached breweries were collectively known as “Bruce’s Brewery.” See brewpub.

Bruce learned his brewing skills with two British companies, Courage and Theakston, but was keen to run his own business. In 1979 he raised the finances to purchase a closed pub in a rundown area of south London and reopened it as his first brewpub, the Goose & Firkin. The Goose set the tone for his later pubs: cask-conditioned beer brewed on the premises, bare-boarded floors, simple but good food, and no juke boxes or “fruit machines” (gambling machines that were then ubiquitous in British pubs). Such beer names as Earthstopper and Dogbolter stressed the fun element, underscored by outrageous puns on T-shirts such as “If he nicks [steals] my beer I’ll Firkin punch him.” In the first two weeks of business, the Goose & Firkin sold as much beer as the previous owners had in 3 months.

The theme proved a great success. Bruce eventually ran 11 pubs, 9 of them with breweries attached. Pub names included Flounder & Firkin, Phantom & Firkin, and Pheasant & Firkin. Beer sales grew five-fold in the pubs he bought and operated. The popularity of the Firkin pubs did not go unnoticed in the United States, where craft brewing was just getting its start in the early 1980s. Many American brewpub operators later credited Bruce as their original inspiration, and he later invested in several American craft breweries.

By 1990 Bruce decided to move on. He became a multimillionaire overnight when he sold the Firkins to the Stakis Hotels group. Within a year, Stakis sold the pubs on to Allied Breweries, which in turn sold them a decade later to a national pub group, Punch Taverns. Punch closed the entire Firkin operation in 2001. In the 1990s Bruce divided his time between charity work for disadvantaged children and a directorship of the pub group Slug & Lettuce. He now runs the Capital Pub Company, a group of un-themed pubs that are quite different in style from the Firkin formula.