Beer sales have never been lower. 36 pubs are closing each week. And my pal Mark Hunter boss of Carling brewer Coors makes just 1p on each pint brewed. Time to call last orders? Not for him: instead he’s putting his efforts into getting women to drink beer. That’s thinking outside the box in a recession: Just 14% of ladies sup in the UK, compared with 25% in the USA, so there’s room to grow thinks he. Coors has set up Project Eve (?!) a team of five women, to look at ways of tapping into the market, while addressing the issues of taste and calories. Physiologically, there are differences between male and female tongues and that leads them to react to beers in different ways. Carling is the biggest of Coors’s 20 brands, accounting for 5.5 million of the 31 million barrels of beer made in Britain annually.

A Which? study of cleanliness in hotels in London and Manchester found that Comfort Inns and Jury’s Inn will give you a restful night’s sleep but Ibis needs to pull its dirty socks up: mould was found growing on a mattress, blood on a duvet (Manchester) and a toilet with urine and faeces on the seat (sorry about that). The mighty Travelodge was criticised for having dirty bathrooms. Both Ibis and Travelodge said they had taken steps to improve their standards.

A good start to 2009 from my two favourite brands: Dandy outfitter Liberty has stuck two sartorial fingers up at expectations with Christmas sales the best on record thanks to tourists coming over and taking advantage of the pound. Waitrose too saw a 41% surge in trading. Waitrose’s owner, John Lewis (who also saw sales increase), said 23 December was the supermarket chain’s busiest ever trading day. Financial data provider Experian said on Wednesday that visits to UK High Streets in the last week of December were up 12.8% compared with the same seven days in 2007. So there you go: if there’s one thing for certain, its uncertainty. Nobody knows nothing.

Heaven knows in a recession you can’t afford to be picky. Dust off those CVs then for coat hanger and tinsel retailer Poundland, who plan to open at least 35 new stores next year, creating around 1,200 jobs. The brand is owned by Private Equity (remember them?) firm Advent, for whom it seems Christmas has come early as shoppers look to make their money go further (down the drain).  Like the discount grocers Aldi and Lidl, Poundland is attracting a new crowd of wealthier but increasingly price-conscious consumers. The nouveau poor.

They might all be idiots to you and me, but you can always spot a “Goldman Man.” It takes someone with balls of steel to open a shop in this market, especially one that sells books worth a minimum of £3,000! Meet Karl Fowler, former Goldman Sachs banker and brains behind publisher Kraken Opus. His first shop opened in London’s  Covent Garden, to sell the 35kg, 50cm square books on Sir Bobby Charlton, Diego Maradona and Vivienne Westwood. They sell for between £3,000 and £20,000 depending on the signatures of the stars that are included, while a Manchester United book fetched $1.6m (£1m) at a recent auction in Dubai. Mr Fowler, who plans to open another 12 shops from New York to Abu Dhabi, says that despite the economic downturn, demand for his books is huge. Put me down for the one about “H” from Steps.