Going Back

28 January, 2026 – 10:29 pm

It’s been a bit quiet on here lately; blogging is a habit you can get out of, sadly, particularly when external validation is running short (i.e. not many people are actually reading what you write). Part of the trouble is that there’s less of a buzz around beer blogging than there used to be – and considerably less excitement about beer and brewing generally. A year ago there was some inter-blog discussion of “what’s new” in beer – specifically, what was new in beer since 2018 – and I couldn’t come up with much: milkshake IPAs and equally sweet pastry stouts were the last new ‘craft beer’ styles to go anything like mainstream, and in both cases we’re going back nine or ten years. (Although I do miss the Bretted ‘sour stouts’ that I mentioned in that post; that was a post-2018 innovation, albeit one that didn’t take.)

ImageSomething that was new last summer was the return of Boddingtons bitter – more specifically, the launch of J.W. Lees’ cask Boddingtons Bitter. I drank it at the Founders Hall, one of Lees’ two town-centre flagship pubs, shortly after its launch. (On reflection I can’t think of many Lees’ pubs that aren’t flagships. Over the last few years they seem to have invested quite a lot in their estate, but specifically in a particular type of pub: large, open-plan but multi-area, with old-school pub fitments, a substantial range of Lees’ beers (kept well) and a standard food offer; very much an answer to the question “how does a family brewer find a niche upmarket from Wetherspoons?”, and frankly a pretty good one. Whether Lees have balanced this out by closing a lot of smaller pubs I don’t know.)

Anyway, the Boddies’ was flying out in the Founder’s Hall that day, and I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. On the most cynical level it was a heavily-promoted novelty, complete with a striking bar presence and its own glassware. Then there was the general local goodwill/curiosity towards Boddies’ as a brand; nobody below their mid-50s will have drunk Boddington’s while the brewery was still independent, but as a brand it still had a presence through the 90s and into the early 00s. Besides which, quite a lot of cask beer drinkers are in their mid-50s or over; a lot of older drinkers can actually remember what Boddies’ used to be like – and some of them can even remember what it was like when it was good (although there is some debate as to when this was). Last but not least, Lees’ neo-Boddies’, when I got to taste it last September, was a really nice beer: a lightly-hopped, sweetish best bitter, but with a massive bitter finish.

So that was September. What happened next? Lees’ didn’t put Boddingtons into their estate generally – presumably thinking it would cannibalise sales of MPA – but kept it for the Founder’s Hall; more widely, the plan was to sell through the free trade. On launch Heaton Hops took a nine or two, I remember reading, and the Crown took three; it also went on the bar at the Micro Bar in the Arndale, and a few less ticker-oriented places such as Corbieres. But, if I’m honest, I didn’t expect it to last. The novelty element and the “by ‘eck it’s gorgeous” curiosity factor would fade pretty quickly, I thought; even older drinkers who remembered the original would surely not want to keep going back to Boddies’ once they’d reacquainted themselves with it.

The other day – which is to say, four months later – I paused for a drink before going home after an afternoon’s shopping. ‘Pause’ was the operative word, as I was stuck for a while between two options. According to Untappd,  Café Beermoth had De Ranke XXX on – a rare sighting in any form, least of all on tap in a Manchester bar. (I’ve had the X and XX – and rather fine they were, especially the latter – but never XXX.) But that wasn’t the only interesting beer they had on – and, as a CAMRA man, I do like to have (and score) something on cask when I’m out – so I’d have been looking at two drinks (at least) rather than one, which didn’t seem ideal that weekday afternoon. Besides, I’ve never found Café Beermoth a particularly pleasant or relaxing place to drink. (Horses for courses; I’m sure they’ll struggle on without having much appeal to the over-60s.)

The second option was the Micro Bar, which had… Boddingtons Bitter. And so it was that I had a pint of that. I was glad I did; in fact I was surprised by quite how good it was. The body (as always) was that of a standard English best bitter, fruity without being obtrusively sweet or sharp, and the finish was (as usual) throat-dryingly bitter. What was different about this pint was the foretaste, which was dry and gently smoky, with a distinct whiff of old books. It was unexpected – mostly before then I’d found that neo-Boddingtons had no aroma to speak of and opened with sweetness – but it worked extraordinarily well. I scored it (drum roll please)… 4.5. (Still haven’t had a beer I’d rate at 5. Maybe next time.)

It turns out that, as of January 2025, the new Boddies is a regular at the Micro Bar. As far as the revival being a flash in the pan is concerned, I was completely wrong. It’s on at Heaton Hops as I write, it’s been a frequent visitor to the Crown and it’s been spotted recently at Corbieres. And, if it’s anywhere near as good as the pint I had the other day, that’s hardly surprising. Perhaps “people have just gone back to drinking it like they used to,” as the bartender at the Micro Bar told me.

Well, perhaps. Maybe retirement’s making me morbid, but I’ve been thinking about all the ways in which I’m not drinking Boddies’ “like I used to”. (In actual fact I only ever drank it once in the 1980s – strictly speaking I should be writing about “all the ways in which I’m not drinking Boddies’ like I used to drink Greenall Whitley Bitter”, but that would just be confusing. Also, one of the relevant factors would be that Greenalls’ bitter was swill. But I digress.)

In 1989, to start with, I wouldn’t have been deterred by the prospect of having two beers rather than one, even on a weekday afternoon. (Fast metabolisms are wasted on the young!) But then, in 1989 I wouldn’t have been in the market for a drink at mid-afternoon on a weekday. It would have been legally possible – all-day opening in England had come in the previous year – but difficult to square with a full-time job. So I wouldn’t have been in the Arndale in the first place – although I wouldn’t have been able to get a drink there if I had been. In 1989 the Arndale was a big beige box, with no natural light anywhere except within six feet of the doors (this isn’t relevant to beer, it’s just weird remembering what it was like back then). The fish market was in the basement, along with a food market selling fruit and veg and some very unattractive-looking meat – and, while you might have been able to get a meat pie or a barm, there certainly wasn’t anywhere selling burgers or pizza, let alone (getting back to the subject) draught beer. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anywhere in the city centre with Belgian beers on tap in 1989; certainly there was no Untappd, not least because there were no mobile phones and (brace yourself) no Internet.

Life was different in 1989, which inevitably means that my drinking life was different (a lot less varied, for a start; less mixing and matching or fitting in a swift half, more settling in for the session). A beer from the 1980s can’t bring back the drinking practices that went with it – even if you remembered the way you used to drink Boddies it would be perverse to try and recreate it, not least because you’d be far too old.

But what that tells us is that the Boddies drinkers of 2026, while they may trend old, aren’t some kind of 1980s re-enactment society; the new Boddies is just that, a new beer, and it’s finding a niche in the post-craft contemporary beer landscape. And that may tell us something interesting about that landscape, and the position of cask beer within it. If you were devising a new beer from scratch, you wouldn’t launch an English bitter, exclusively dispensed on cask, with heavy use of bittering hops and light aroma hopping – but that’s the beer that Lees launched last summer, and (despite my & doubtless others’ scepticism) it’s doing rather well.

Going right back to the point I started with, about the seeming lack of innovation in beer: perhaps this is a partial answer. When you walk into one of those flagship Lees pubs – the Founders’ Hall, the Pointy Dog – you’re not actually entering a traditional English pub, marinated in the near-200-year history of a family brewer. But it is a family brewer and the pubs do look pubbish (in a way that Spoons’ almost never do); more importantly, in my experience they do deliver what you want from a pub. Similarly, at the end of the day there’s nothing traditional about Lees’ Boddingtons, no real continuity with the past – no one can possibly know whether it actually tastes like it did (and ‘tastes like it did’ when?). But it evokes an older style of beer – before haze, before fruit-salad New World hops – and it delivers what you want from that kind of beer.

So maybe that’s the new frontier in beer innovation: doing more or less what we used to do, and doing it quite well. Maybe, for now, we’ll be going forward by going back.

 

By Phil | Posted in CAMRA Man, Chinstroker, Drink local, Going down the pub, Pale'n'oppy | Comments (4)

Your Essential Pub Etiquette Guide Guide

3 December, 2025 – 12:39 pm

Since the first Druid hung a hop bush out of his upstairs window – a telltale sign for the medieval cognoscenti that human sacrifice was no longer practiced on the premises, only the ritual slaughter of John Barleycorn – pub-going in Britain has undergone many changes. Who can forget the great Porter Flood of 1815, when the closure of mainline railway stations after the Battle of Waterloo led to the pubs of Covent Garden being literally flooded with thirsty porters? Or the historic landing in Britain by Danish brewery mogul Carl Inger Blåk-Läbøl, which transformed the British beer landscape so dramatically – and would have transformed it so much sooner if only he hadn’t landed in Wrexham? More recently, British pub-goers still shudder at the memory of the Beer Orders – Lord George’s hugely unpopular decree ordering pubs to serve water instead of beer for the duration of the Great War (asking for tap-water in a pub is frowned upon to this day). And who could forget the 2007 ban on working-class drinkers setting foot inside any pub except those run by Samuel Wetherspoon? Many have cited this as incontrovertible evidence of government hostility to the pub trade: the so-called “smoking ban”.

But gradual trends have also changed the pub landscape. Women, widely believed to make up as much as half of the adult population, are now a regular sight in many licensed hostelries, and have increasingly been seen drinking beer – although the oft-repeated insistence that they’ll only have beer “if there’s something decent on” suggests that equal participation in pub life is still some way off! Meat pies, sausage rollups and porky pasties, once a familiar sight on the brass rails of many a bar, are now rarely to be seen – although the public’s stubborn attachment to foodstuffs like these can be gauged from the growing popularity of a novel liquid alternative, the “pastie stout”. Strengths have crept up, too. In a far cry from the stoical water-drinkers of the Blitz, many of today’s pub-goers have a preferred tipple with an alcohol content of 30 or even 40%; indeed, some of these choices are so strong that they are generally served only in measures of a half-gill, quarter-gill, nipperkin or brown bowl, often diluted with lemonade or tonic water.

In this ever-changing landscape, a guide to pub etiquette is essential. But which guide? No one has time to read all the pub etiquette guides out there, but how do you select? How do you know if a pub etiquette guide is really aimed at you – other than the impact it has on you, or the sound it makes as it goes over your head?

Here, then, are six* key points to look out for in pub etiquette guides, assembled by a number** of beer writers*** for your further edification****.

*Probably. We’ll see how we get on.
**Possibly the number 1.
***Not necessarily published beer writers.
****Pubgoers are assumed to have completed primary and secondary edification.

(This post is a response to Pellicle’s Essential Guide to Pub Etiquette from the other day week month. Thanks and apologies to Matthew Curtis and to the authors. Any errors in the introduction are my own – let me know if you spot anything!)

1. PUBMANSHIP

Pubmanship isn’t as much fun as it looks.

Probably nobody under the age of 50 remembers Stephen Potter (he died in 1969, apart from anything else). Potter was a writer, for print and radio, who had one big hit and – like many people in that situation – grew to resent it. In his case, The Hit was a book called Gamesmanship (1947), which he followed up (increasingly reluctantly) with books either narrowing the first book’s focus (Golfmanship) or broadening it (Lifemanship). The central conceit in these books – and other spinoffs like Anti-Woo, purportedly a guide to successfully avoiding romantic relationships – was that the reader could learn how to be “one up” on everyone else in social situations, and that working the unwritten rules in this way could be an enjoyable pursuit in itself. You could see it as gamifying social relations (decades before Untappd).

It’s a fertile idea, and you can see how Potter was able to keep coming back to it. (Even after his death the spinoffs and repackaged collections continued to appear; I remember a TV series based on the books going out in the 1970s.) It wears thin quite quickly, though; the books are more for dipping than for sustained reading. It’s fundamentally a joke, after all, and after a while you feel like you’ve heard it already. It’s certainly not an approach you should ever take seriously. In reality many areas of social life just are complicated and awkward to navigate, and you get through them as best you can; there are no social ninjas, expertly manipulating this and circumventing that, and trying to be one is not likely to make you look cool.

ImageImageAs far as I know Stephen Potter never wrote about ‘pubmanship’; this appears to have left the field open for Ronnie Corbett, of all people, to write the book on the subject. (Actually this seems to have been more of a trivia compendium, put out as a promotional item by a cigar company (different times eh).)

But if Potter had addressed pubmanship, he would almost certainly have zeroed in on minor irritations of pub-going and suggested that they should be treated as a series of challenges to be surmounted through skill and dedication. Challenges like finding a table in a busy pub, for instance:

us[e] your peripheral vision to scout for a leaving group with the precision of a sniper. Swoop in with bags and coats, using the correct balance of confidence and manners

Sounds like fun! Actually it just sounds exhausting – and anyone likely to pride him- or herself on their forceful but urbane table-sniping abilities sounds like a bit of a bore. In that situation I think I’d stand, or else give it up and go to the Spoons down the road. Pub[wo]manship isn’t as much fun as it looks.

2. BEING RIGHT

A queue in a pub is like a conga line at a… actually, a queue in a pub is like a conga line, full stop. It’s no fun, it takes up too much space, it annoys everyone else and it basically shouldn’t be there. And you will, eventually, join it.

I don’t know when queuing in pubs got started. It’s largely (predominantly?) a Spoons’ thing, and I suspect it reached its current level under the combined influence of Covid and the cost of living crisis. The first of these discouraged people from joining anything that looked like a crowd or a scrum; the second brought more people into pubs by making lunch in the local Spoons’ a more attractive option (or even the only option).

I agree with everyone who says that queuing in pubs is awkward, inconvenient, out of line with pub tradition and even pub architecture (the bar’s right there!); in short it’s wrong. But if there is a queue – and if it isn’t a temporary bottleneck that the bar staff are in the process of clearing (“Is anybody waiting?”) – then that’s how I’m going to approach the bar, by joining the queue.

All you need to do is ignore it, walk to the bar, order your drink, and get on with pub life as intended.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe that’s the ‘right’ thing to do on some level, but nobody else cares whether you’re right or not. What people do care about is fairness, and that means not acting as if the rules they’re following don’t apply to you. So grin and bear it, and join the conga line when it comes past – and don’t jump the queue.

Which brings us to a broader point:

3. DON’T BE KING CANUTE

Little did King Canute imagine, as the incoming tide inexorably rose to his neck, that in years to come the “King’s Head” would be (Don’t start that again – Ed.)

Moving along… Etiquette is a curious thing, as it’s both descriptive and normative. To anyone approaching an area from the outside – the novice pubgoer, in this case – it’s all normative: what you want to know is how you ought to act. For people who are already participants, though, etiquette is mostly descriptive (how we generally act): you do take part in rounds, you don’t try and give your order to a glass-collector, etc, because that’s how we do it.

But times change, and the ways people act change, and sometimes you can see a change for the worse setting in and push back against it – if only by refusing to take part. So etiquette guidance can include a bit on how people ought to act – as long as it’s qualified with (as we mostly still do). Usually, though, the effect is a bit Canute-like, and the etiquette advisor just ends up looking like a grumpy old sod (even if they’re neither old nor grumpy). For instance, should pubs offer cocktails – or anything else as time-consuming as that to serve? Probably not, unless they’ve staffed up specially. A lot of them do, though – and you can’t really call it a breach of pub etiquette to order what’s available. Should people order cocktails when the pub’s busy? Again, probably not – but would the pub be that busy if it didn’t offer cocktails? As with queues, sometimes you just need to go with the flow.

Which brings us to an even broader point:

4. PEOPLE ARE ANNOYING

As I worked my way through the Pellicle etiquette guide I began to feel as if I’d been buttonholed by a bartender who’d just come off a particularly rough shift. The awful truth is that there are lots of things that people can do in pubs that are annoying, some of which are particularly annoying to the bar staff. Sometimes people enjoy themselves without showing any respect for other people; sometimes they annoyingly show lack of respect for other people enjoying themselves. People do harmless but annoying things, people make well-intentioned but annoying comments; people assume the bartender knows all about the beers on the bar, people assume the bartender knows nothing about the beers on the bar… It’s a minefield out there, and the bar staff spend their working hours walking back and forth across it. Tough job. You should probably tip more.

The thing is, a lot of etiquette advice in that guide is offered from a bartender’s viewpoint, and much of it boils down to “please don’t annoy me like that again”. With the greatest respect for anyone doing bar work (which is a really tough job), finding the Goldilocks spot where I can be sure I won’t annoy anyone in any way at all is probably impossible; in any case, it would go way beyond etiquette.

On the other hand, some things aren’t so much beyond etiquette as prior to etiquette:

5. COMMON DECENCY

I was a bit shocked to see sections in the Pellicle guide on misgendering and on filming bar staff without consent – not because I don’t think those are bad things, but because not doing them (to anyone) strikes me as too fundamental to be called ‘etiquette’. As a wise man once said, be excellent to one another – everywhere, not just in pubs. And if you can’t manage that, at least be decent (“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind”).

6. KEEP IT BRIEF

When it comes to etiquette guides, finally, it’s always good to let the reader know what they’re letting themselves in for at the outset: promise X sections, deliver X sections. Six is plenty – and if you can keep them brief, all the better. Two sentences is probably all you need; maybe three.

 

 

By Phil | Posted in Chinstroker, Going down the pub, Not that anyone asks me, Tomfoolery | Comments (0)

By ‘eck, it’s…

23 September, 2025 – 7:19 pm

Boddington’s Bitter: a story in three parts

Greetings, visitors from Boak and Bailey! Feel free to skip to part 3, where I actually review the beer. Now back to, well, me.

1. That Was Then

I came to Manchester in 1982. You very rarely saw Boddington’s in south and central Manchester back then; I remember thinking I’d spotted their “barrel with bees” logo from a bus once, then looking again the next day and realising it was actually J.W. Lees’ “barrel with five-bar gate”. (You rarely saw Lees’ in south Manchester either, but that’s another story.) Boddies’ was well thought of, but it never sounded special enough to justify a special trip up North (Manchester).

So it wasn’t till 1986 that I tasted Boddington’s Bitter. I remember the occasion vividly; I wrote about it in this lockdown-era post. A friend at work had been banging on about proper working men’s pubs and took me to the Old Garratt after work to prove his point. A proper working men’s pub I guess it was: I remember the place being full of blokes, and the two of us being the only people there in a suit and tie; I also remember being unable to see the ceiling for a blanket of cigarette smoke. And I remember they were serving Boddington’s Bitter. I wasn’t struck by how bitter it was, or how drinkable it was; I wasn’t struck by it at all (it wasn’t even unusually ordinary). So it can be told: I have drunk Boddies’ bitter, made by Boddington’s, brewed at Strangeways. I just have no idea what it was like.

Then came the sellout (1989), and the transformation of the beer into a Whitbread brand, and – from 1991 – the nationwide marketing campaign, handled by the none-more-90s agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. There’s an interesting and detailed account of the “cream of Manchester”/”by ‘eck it’s gorgeous” campaign here; it shows how the campaign we remember developed over time, with the modification of the original form of the slogan (“By ‘eck, you smell gorgeous tonight, petal”) and the successive casting of Anna Chancellor, Sarah Parish and finally Melanie Sykes.

Effective and memorable though the campaign was, it had very little to do with the reputation Boddington’s already had in Manchester. To the extent that it said anything about the beer, it suggested that Boddies’ was mainly known for a thick, creamy head, which clearly wasn’t the case (the Bartle Bogle Hegarty campaign for Cameron’s Strongarm is one of beer history’s great might-have-beens). A corporate brewer had acquired a beer and turned it into a brand, as they do. Whitbread’s investment did wonders for the profile of Boddington’s the brand, nationwide and even internationally:

(From 1998. It’s probably not possible to check out “that British pub at the Trade Center”, unfortunately.)

Neither Whitbread nor AB InBev (who acquired Whitbread’s brewing interests in 2001) did anything for the beer, though. The cask version, in particular, is a distant memory – although one that several local brewers appear to treasure.

2. Think I’m Going Back

There have been numerous attempts to recreate or emulate Boddington’s Bitter. Marble‘s blurb for Manchester Bitter says, somewhat elliptically, “Our most traditional core beer is inspired by a Manchester stalwart; a fondly-remembered original.” This Good Beer Hunting profile of Marble removes any lingering mystery, quoting former head brewer Colin Stronge describing Manchester Bitter as “originally an attempt to recreate Boddingtons, or to brew an assertively bitter, relatively highly hopped Pale Ale” (‘originally’ here refers to 2003, incidentally).

What’s it like? It’s pale and hoppy, although (in both cases) perhaps more strikingly so by 2003 standards than by those of 2025. It’s quite a traditional ‘bitter’ flavour profile in some ways; it’s not especially aromatic, and biscuity malt is a small but definite presence. What it is, more than anything else, is bitter: what you get is basically an uncompromising bitter attack followed by a bit of bread and biscuit, followed in turn by a big bitter finish. Drinking my first cask pint in over three months (you know why), I said it was as if Marble had

taken a best bitter, stripped out most – but not all – of the malt and the body, and filled in all the gaps with aroma hops and (especially) bittering hops … it drinks with the soft cereal complexity of a BB, up to the moment when the bitter finish grabs you by the throat and squeezes

(That particular pint will have tasted particularly good, admittedly.)

So that’s one way to do it. Another is J.W. Lees‘ MPA, whose launch I was lucky enough to attend in 2013. William Lees-Jones announced, unsubtly, that he thought they’d succeeded in putting the cream back into Manchester, adding “and by ‘eck, it’s gorgeous” in case anyone was still in the dark. I’m rather fond of MPA, although I may have been unduly influenced by the brewery pouring five pints down my neck free of charge back in 2013. When I’d recovered, I described the beer as

a light, sessionable golden ale, but with enough hop character and aroma to earn the ‘pale ale’ tag; it’s got that ‘refreshingly bitter’ quality, particularly on the finish. It doesn’t have the aggressive hopping of a Marble or Titanic … but it has got enough hopping to keep it interesting, and avoid the blandness of so many golden and blonde ales

I think I’d say now that its main quality is dryness, throughout – there’s certainly no biscuity heaviness mid-mouth. It opens with a bit of herby aroma hopping and finishes refreshingly bitter; in between, there’s not much else to get in the way. It’s very pintable, very much a session beer (on draught it’s 3.7%), but the flavour profile’s surprisingly plain, even austere.

I should also say a couple of words about Jack of All Taps, Thornbridge‘s short-run collaborative brew with the Manchester station-based ‘Tap’ chain, whose pump clip proclaimed its goal of being a Boddies-alike.. I drank it twice while it was on at the Oxford Road Tap. Last summer, Thornbridge did a seasonal collab with J.W. Lees which was basically MPA x Jaipur, and the second time I had Jack of All Taps it was in very much that area: restrained aroma hopping, dry body, grapefruit and cough mixture finish. The first time I had it, though, it had a drily bitter finish – it was dry all the way through, basically, and supremely drinkable with it. A more stable re-brew of Jack of All Taps probably isn’t on anyone’s to-do list, but I wish it was.

In the mean time, though, there’s always the original. Well, an original. A revival of the original. The official revival of an original. You can drink something on handpump called Boddington’s Bitter, is what I’m saying.

3. And Now All This

But what’s it like? How do those three son-of-Boddington’s compare to J.W. Lees Boddington’s Bitter, to give it its full name?

The first thing that struck me was its colour: it’s gold rather than blonde, and not a particularly pale gold at that. The second was the foretaste, in which I couldn’t detect any aroma hopping at all (although this is probably partly down to my undiscriminating nose). What there was instead, rather to my surprise, was sweetness. It’s not the dense sweetness of a malty beer or the muted biscuity sweetness of a beer like Marble Manchester Bitter; it’s the overt and uncomplicated sweet foretaste of a light mild, of an entry-level tripel, of Black Country bitters like Bathams’. Mid-mouth there’s a bit more body and complexity, but not much. But then you hit the finish and the aftertaste, which are of an absolutely huge bitterness; I drank this beer back to back with MPA, and I’d scientifically assess the finish of the Boddies’ as twice as bitter as MPA’s. What I wrote in 2020 about my first taste of Manchester Bitter in several months – “it drinks with the soft cereal complexity of a [best bitter], up to the moment when the bitter finish grabs you by the throat and squeezes” – basically applies (although ‘complexity’ would be a bit generous). It’s throat-dryingly bitter, and because of this – and perhaps also because of the contrast with the opening sweetness – I found it very more-ish.

Whether that sweet, Batham’s-ish quality is more true to early-80s Boddies than the bitter-all-the-way style of the earlier three emulations – or to late-70s Boddies, or early-70s Boddies, or… – I’ll leave to those better qualified to judge. It’s a distinctive flavour profile, though; unusual – particularly in our post-2010 aroma-hop-heavy world – and, I think, successful.

It’s not “gorgeous”, though; I doubt it ever was. (As I mentioned above, that word got into the ad campaign through a version of the ad that leaned much more heavily into comic caricature; it wasn’t being seriously proposed that putting beer foam on your face would make you smell gorgeous.) I had a pint of RedWillow Wreckless a couple of weeks ago that I still remember fondly; it was a beer to linger over, the elements of the flavour fitting together like a 3D jigsaw. Now, that was gorgeous. Lees’ Boddington’s is much more streamlined than that and less ambitious – but what it is, is drinkable. It’s very, very drinkable. By ‘eck, it’s… you get the idea!

4. Sorry, Part Four?

I just wanted to clarify that review by saying that, like all cask ales, Boddington’s tastes different on different occasions. It turns out that the flavour profile of the new Boddingtons can cover quite a wide range. The other day at Sam’s Chop House I had a pint of Lees’ Boddington’s which wasn’t too far from Marble Manchester Bitter: the foretaste was bitter and the aftertaste was very bitter indeed. It was a very satisfying pint, all but for the fact that it was heavily chilled. On the other hand, at Founder’s Hall today I had a pint of Boddies’ which I’d describe as unremarkable. It was good – I mean, Good Beer Guide levels of good – but it was definitely not worth running up the flags for. The foretaste was neither sweet nor bitter but a mélange of the two – an effect very familiar from traditional English bitters – while the aftertaste was at best… quite bitter. It’s worth noting that the bartender had to wait quite a long time for it to clear: I wonder if this is a problem of success – in other words, if the Founder’s Hall is just pushing too much Boddies’ too quickly. Whatever the underlying cause, this was an unremarkable pint. It was still highly drinkable – “have a drink when you catch the glass in the corner of your eye” levels of drinkable. But it wasn’t great. And, on that basis, I can understand people tasting the new Boddingtons and being unimpressed. Go back, is my advice; seek it out somewhere else (e.g.).

By Phil | Posted in Chinstroker, Days of miracle and wonder, Drink local, Life's great mysteries, Pale'n'oppy, Very not pale'n'oppy | Comments (1)

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

29 August, 2025 – 7:34 pm

Like other CAMRA members, I regularly score the cask beer I drink using the National Beer Scoring System (NBSS). This isn’t just for my own convenience: venues generally need to score an average of at least 3.0 on the NBSS to be eligible for inclusion in the Good Beer Guide, while CAMRA’s online pub guide includes filters on NBSS scores (>3.0 and >3.5). So my & other people’s scores are actually contributing to a crowd-sourced measure of quality – of the beer itself, that is, not the range or any other characteristics of the venue. It’s not nothing; once when on holiday I noticed a new appearance in the online list of NBSS 3.0+ pubs, specifically a pub whose beer I’d recently given a 3.5. It had gone again by the time I got home; perhaps I’d been over-generous.

As that example suggests, one scorer’s ratings can vary from another’s (particularly when one scorer’s in a holiday mood and hasn’t had draught Tribute in a while). And, as it also suggests, this doesn’t really matter, as there are generally enough scores for the aggregate not to be affected by individual variations. It won’t even matter if one scorer consistently tends to go high, just as long as there are lower-than-usual scores to balance them out – and if there aren’t any lower-than-usual scores, maybe that just shows a higher rating is deserved. You could even say that it’s good to have a few people who are liberal with their high scores – or with their low scores, for that matter – just to give the averages a nudge, and make sure that beers stand out when they deserve to.

I don’t think the NBSS is entirely fit for purpose, though. To see why not, here are the scoring categories as they’re described on CAMRA’s beer scoring Web page. These descriptions have been reproduced on local and regional CAMRA pages all around the country, although a few branches have taken a different approach – notably Heart of Staffordshire (HoS) CAMRA, whose slightly tongue-in-cheek version of the scoring guidelines I’ll also be quoting.

5. CAMRA say: “Perfect – Probably the best you are ever likely to find. A seasoned drinker will award this score very rarely”. The HoS CAMRA version is similar: “Perfect: I’ve died and gone to heaven. Should rarely be awarded!”.

I’ve never yet awarded a 5; I feel it would signify “the best beer I’ve ever tasted”, and I’m still waiting for that to happen. That word ‘probably’ is interesting, though; I wonder if it’s there to counteract this way of thinking, and to encourage more people to give a 5 when they drink something that could be the best beer ever. CAMRA muddy the waters further when they say, further down the same page, that “a 5 is something given once or twice a year”. I suppose ‘at most’ is implicit; even so, that seems like an awful lot of Best Beers Ever.

4.5. CAMRA say: they don’t say anything, other than that if you can’t decide on a whole-number score you can enter a .5. I don’t really think being undecided is the best way to think of mid-points between scores, particularly not in this case – “this is definitely excellent, but I can’t decide if it’s the best beer ever”? I have given a few 4.5s – five, to be precise; perhaps 1% of my total scores – for beers that I was quite confident were very good indeed; even better than what I think of as a 4. Maybe I should have gone all the way to 5, but surely that would have been too many Best Beers Ever. (Two of the five were in Spoons’, incidentally.)

4. CAMRA say: “4: Very Good – Good Excellent beer in excellent condition” [sic] The HoS CAMRA version reads: “4-4.5: Very good / excellent. Cancel plans for the rest of the day”.

Apart from that “Good Excellent” typo (which really should have been fixed before the page was published), I’m not keen on how the ‘official’ version specifies ‘excellent beer’ as well as ‘excellent condition’. I had a pint of Marston’s Pedigree (brewed by Carlsberg) the other day, which was strikingly good. I was quite happy to score it at 3.5; a pub serving nothing but that beer, in that condition, would be an ornament to the GBG, Carlsberg or no Carlsberg. Yes, even soulless corporate macro shadow-of-its-former-self cask-ale-product swill can score a 3.5. Could it have gone as high as 4 on anothe day? I honestly can’t see why not – but that phrase ‘excellent beer’ would seem to suggest not. I much prefer the HoS version, which captures that “I took a punt on this beer and now I’ve got a new favourite beer” experience that we’ve all probably had (and if we haven’t, we should get out more).

3.5. I’ll come back to that.

3. CAMRA say: “3: Good – Good beer in good form. You may cancel plans to move to the next pub. You want to stay for another pint and may seek out the beer again.” HoS CAMRA are singing from the same hymn sheet: “3-3.5: Above average / Good. I’ll come here again, may cancel plans to move on.”

This, the central point of the scale, is probably the least controversial: 3 means the beer is good enough that you want to drink it again, possibly straight away. And – unless you count the words ‘good beer’ – there’s no requirement that the beer should generally be particularly good; it’s all about the beer you’re drinking at the moment. CAMRA also add that “Most worthy Good Beer Guide pubs tend to score either a 3 or 4 for their beers”, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and hence doesn’t really clarify things.

As for 3.5, I guess that would be “I’m very impressed by this beer and definitely want to drink it again (although I wouldn’t necessarily go all the way to ‘excellent’)”.

2.5. Instead of lumping in the .5 mark with 2, as they did for 3 and 4, HoS CAMRA offer: “2.5 Average. It’s OK but doesn’t tickle your beer-buds”. I’ve got some issues with this, but I’ll deal with them under

2. CAMRA say: “2: Average – Competently kept, drinkable pint but doesn’t inspire in anyway [sic], not worth moving to another pub but you drink the beer without really noticing.” As we’ve just seen, this is more or less exactly how HoS CAMRA defined 2.5; their definition of 2 is, more tersely, “2: Below average. Just drinkable”.

The fact that HoS CAMRA are 0.5 out from the official CAMRA definition isn’t very significant – although personally, for what it’s worth, I lean towards the ‘official’ definition: 2 for ‘mediocre’, 2.5 for ‘better than mediocre but still not actually good’. My issues with these definitions are different. Firstly, CAMRA’s definition raises, once again, the confusion between the quality of the beer in general and the quality of this beer (much of which is down to condition). If anything, the specification of a ‘competently kept’ beer which ‘doesn’t inspire’ suggests that the low mark is coming more from the quality of the beer generally than from the state of this specific example. Along the same lines, further down the page we read, “Bland, uninspiring beers score a 2”. I think this is the wrong way round. I’m not sure what’s meant by ‘competently kept’ – is it a lower bar than ‘well kept’? – but in my experience a beer that’s in good nick is very rarely totally bland and uninspiring. I find it hard to imagine a well-kept pint which I’d want to push down as low as a 2 – even if it was a Pedigree; even if it was a Doom Bar. A beer in mediocre condition will get a 2.5 or a 2 from me all day long, though, even if it’s Bathams Bitter.

Secondly, I hate that word ‘average’: we know that colloquially it means ‘not good’ (‘bang average’), but literally it means ‘the statistical mid-point in a range’, which would imply that there’s just as big a range of beer quality below 2 as above it. Which may be why HoS CAMRA moved the ‘Average’ descriptor to 2.5 – midway between 0 and 5. It’s not really a numerical issue, though, because it’s not just a range of numbers on a scale: it’s a range of pubs, ultimately, ranked in order of beer quality. Are we really saying that half of all pubs serving real ale serve beer that’s ‘average’ – NBSS 2.0 – or worse? If so, what on earth has CAMRA been doing all this time? If we’re not saying that – and I know for a fact that my average beer score is more like 3.5 than 2 or 2.5 – can we stop using the word ‘average’ when what we mean is ‘not very good, of low quality, mediocre’? It’s a great word, ‘mediocre”; I can recommend it. You’ll find lots of uses for it, I promise.

1. CAMRA say: “1: Poor – Beer that is anything from barely drinkable to drinkable with considerable resentment.” Again, HoS CAMRA are thinking along similar lines: “1-1.5. You can only finish it if someone’s holding a gun to your head.” I’m surprised they’ve kept in that old ‘considerable resentment’ line, which to me conjures a slightly ludicrous image of Real Ale TwCognoscenti gritting their teeth and doggedly working their way through borderline-drinkable pints, to do their duty to CAMRA. If it’s not right, take it back, for goodness’ sake. I have to say, I don’t really recognise this category of beer that’s too bad to drink with any enjoyment but not bad enough to take back; I don’t think I’ve ever used a 1. in scoring. (Honesty compels me to admit that I have used 1.5 a few times, most recently for a beer which I decided was on the turn about halfway down the glass – and which, as my suspicions grew, I did in fact drink with considerable (and growing) resentment.)

0.5. HoS CAMRA are at it again with their .5s: “0.5. Vinegar. Send it back or buy some chips to sprinkle it on.” I see what you did there – and I think we probably do need a category for “it’s cask ale but it isn’t drinkable” – but I’m not convinced we need this category and categories 0, 1 and 1.5 as well. In fact there’s a definite case that “I ordered this beer but had to take it back” should be 0. But thereby hangs a tale.

0. CAMRA say: “0: No cask ale available – This can be because the pub never has it or it’s run out.” HoS CAMRA simply say, “0. No cask beer!”. There are several issues here, starting with the fact that 0 is a negative answer to the Yes/No question “Does this pub have any cask ale?”, while everything from 0.5 to 5 is a numerical answer to the quantitative question “how good was this specific beer?”. If 0 is used to refer to the venue as a whole, it becomes meaningless and uninformative when applied to beer quality (as the Curmudgeon pointed out some time ago). If there isn’t any cask beer, what you do with the ‘how good is this cask beer’ question is not ask it at all: you don’t answer it with the lowest possible score.

To see what I’m getting at, imagine an area where pet cats have fallen victim to predatory, leg-biting foxes. But is it actually a widespread problem, or have a few three-legged cats got disproportionate attention? The local vet carries out a survey (possibly written by the Saturday boy) asking one simple question: “How many legs has your cat got?”. What happens to the area’s cat-leg average if households that don’t have a cat answer ‘Zero’? Using ‘0’ to mean ‘no cask ale available’ has just the same problem: a venue that consistently serves cask beer in poor but drinkable condition is very different from one that was serving NBSS 3.5 beer on twelve of the 21 occasions it’s been rated, and no cask beer on any of the other times – but they’ll both get an NBSS average score of 2. (You may want to swerve both of them, admittedly.)

What would I do instead? I’d have some text at the top saying “Please ignore this questionnaire if you don’t own a cat”, for a start. As for the CAMRA categories, I think it ought to be made clear that what we’re judging is that particular beer on that particular occasion – which in practice will mean a lot of the time what we’re judging on is condition. Other than that, the official versions of categories 3-5 are OK, apart from the typo and the ‘excellent beer’ reference in the rubric for category 4. Below 3 the categories get a bit more contentious. Personally I think I’d go for ‘Poor’ for 2 and ‘Undrinkable’ for 1, and just leave everything below 1 alone; I certainly don’t think there’s room for more than one meaningful category below 2. Ideally we’d probably use a 0-4 scale and shunt the whole thing down –

0. Undrinkable, took it back
1. Poor condition but drinkable
2. GBG quality
3. Excellent
4. Best. Beer. Evs.

– but a change of that scale isn’t going to happen until CAMRA’s taken over by a clique of statisticians and pedants, and that could take weeks to organise.

So we’re probably stuck with NBSS 0 (meaning ‘no cask ale’, sadly), NBSS 0.5 (meaning ‘this beer was undrinkable, I took it back’), and a continuous scale from NBSS 2.0 (‘poor quality but drinkable’) up to NBSS 5.0 (either ‘the best beer I ever hope to taste on this Earth’ or ‘one of the best beers I’ve had this year’, depending who you ask). It would be nice to get a bit of clarity on that last one; also, on whether we’re scoring the beer as a beer (wrong) or the particular beer in this glass at this moment (right). The latter isn’t a deal-breaker, though; those of us who are doing it right can just carry on. And if you really want to drink a pint with ‘considerable resentment’ so that you can score it as a 1.0, be my guest.

By Phil | Posted in CAMRA Man, Chinstroker, Going down the pub, Not that anyone asks me, Wibble | Comments (2)

Session #149: Pub food

27 July, 2025 – 1:11 pm

For the July 2025 edition of The Session David Jesudason has asked us to think about pub food.

I’ll start by reproducing part of a post from 2018 on the decline of weekday lunchtime pubgoing, for reasons that will become apparent.

1987, Manchester

“I think it’s time for a ROD,” Jill announced one Friday morning, with the self-consciously ostentatious air of somebody who’s using a code of their own devising and challenging everyone else to notice. “We haven’t had a ROD in ages. You’d be up for a ROD, wouldn’t you, Nik? What do you reckon, Chris – time for a ROD?”

Chris took the bait and asked what a ROD might be. Jill was delighted: “A ROD, of course – a Royal Oak Day!” It turned out that going to the Royal Oak for lunch was something they’d done in the past, before I’d started working there, possibly even more than once. It was a bit of an undertaking, as the Royal Oak was five miles out of the city centre; even with somebody driving, it would take a minimum of half an hour just to get there and back. We didn’t clock in and out at this place, but you couldn’t have many two-hour lunches before somebody noticed.

So RODs weren’t for every week – in fact I’m not sure we ever did it again – but that day there was a general agreement to go for it. At 12.00 we left and the five of us got into Chris’s car. (Chris was our designated driver, in the sense that Jill nominated him to do the driving – I don’t think he drank any less than the rest of us.) After rather longer than 15 minutes (blame it on the traffic) we reached Didsbury… and the Royal Oak.

The Royal Oak was famous at this time for its lunches, and justly so. They didn’t do hot food; they did cheese and crusty bread, and plenty of it. Once you’d paid your money you’d be carved a slab from one – or more – of the mountains of cheese that stood on a small table at the back. To be (very slightly) more technical about it, these were cheeses – whole cheeses, or what remained of them after several days of lunchtime trade. If I remember rightly, there were three or possibly even four cheeses on offer – Stilton, Lancashire, Sage Derby, possibly even Cheddar (although it’s not very popular in this… yes we know). You could have a slab of each one of them if you were so inclined, with all the crusty bread and butter you needed (and a doggy bag for leftovers). Everything was open to the air, of course. I do remember noticing tiny black flies buzzing around a dish of chutney, but it didn’t bother me; they didn’t take any interest in the cheese as far as I could see, and I wasn’t planning on having chutney anyway.

The cheese was wonderful – or rather the cheeses were wonderful. My mother used to tell a joke, which she said she’d got from her (deeply religious) father: a young woman on a train is accosted by a stranger, who asks her out of the blue: “Do you love Jesus?”. She’s nonplussed and doesn’t say anything, so the stranger continues: “Not your English Jesus. Round, red, Dutch Jesus!” I defy anyone to go to the Royal Oak, in 1987 or thereabouts, and not love English Jesus. The beer was good as well – the Royal Oak was a Marston’s pub. The cask selection was distinctly limited – the mild had gone keg since the last time I’d been in, much to my disappointment – but what there was was good. To be precise, what there was was Pedigree, and it was in good form – no doubt partly because they sold so much of it.

The place was buzzing, the beer went down very easily and the cheese was never-ending (my doggy bag lasted me most of the next week). We must have been there for the best part of an hour, and the trip back to town took even longer than the journey out. Still, it was a Friday.

2025, Manchester

I don’t go to the pub from work on Friday lunchtimes these days, partly because it’s not really a thing these days but mainly because I retired a few years ago (from the job after the job after the… hold on, I’ve lost count… not the job I was doing in 1987, anyway). But one day last week, the other half and I found ourselves in Didsbury at lunchtime, and decided it was once again time for a ROD.

And yes, they do still do those lunches. Well, kind of – you don’t see slabs of cheese open to the air these days, for good reasons. (The system they were running in 1987 looks like a health inspector’s nightmare in retrospect – especially when you think that the pub will have been full of cigarette smoke.) But there was a well-stocked chiller cabinet containing individual shrinkwrapped portions of several different cheeses and a couple of different patés, as well as small (well, medium-sized) pork pies; you could choose any three for £9, which would also get you about six small slices of bread (also shrinkwrapped), plus butter and chutneys.

We both had a pork pie, which was verging on being enough for a light lunch on its own. In addition I had Stilton and brie, the OH a fruited Wensleydale and duck paté. The pork pies were the star of the show – a good pork pie, particularly in a pub, is something I’ve got a lot of time for. The Wensleydale didn’t really come off, and the brie wasn’t very special; another time I think we’d both have the cheddar. It was still a very satisfactory lunch, and not at all dear. The portions didn’t have the medieval-banquet quality I remembered from 1987, but they were too big for either of us to finish, and you can’t really ask for more than that!

The pub didn’t have the medieval-banquet quality I remembered from 1987, either. Admittedly it was a Tuesday rather than a Friday, so even back in the day it would have been quieter, but that Tuesday lunchtime it was very quiet indeed. We didn’t quite have the place to ourselves, but the only other punter was an old man looking even older than me, who alternated between nursing his pint in a corner and chatting with the bartender about the latter’s social life. I’m guessing they didn’t sell a shedload of cheese that day.

As for the beer, the Royal Oak was a Marston’s pub in 1987 and still is, although this has meant different things over the years. In 1987 the pub was simply one of the pubs in the estate of Marston’s the brewery, but it’s got more complicated since then – since 1999, specifically. Since that year, the pub itself has been “Marston’s as in Wolverhampton and Dudley as was”, which was also the ownership of the brewery from 1999 to 2020. From 2020 to 2024 the brewery was “Marston’s as in Carlsberg Marston’s”, and right now it’s “Marston’s as in Carlsberg Britvic”.

I hadn’t had any Marston’s beers since 2024, quite possibly not since 2020. I had drunk Pedigree a few times during the 1999-2020 period, as well as a few other beers from the broader “M. as in W. and D. as was” stable, and I’d never been impressed. This comment from 2015 is representative:

When I lived in Withington the Red Lion was a bit of a cut above – it served Marston’s! On this visit they had quite the range: beers from Jennings, Wychwood and Ringwood as well as the Marston’s mothership. I had a half of Ringwood Boondoggle – Jennings’ Mild had just gone off – which was… fine. No, it wasn’t fine: it was mediocre. … It struck me then that this is what Marston’s do, these days – they make bland brown bitter (Pedigree), alternating with bland malty brown bitter (Cumberland), bland dark brown bitter (Hobgoblin) and bland yellowish bitter (Boondoggle).

All of which is leading up to saying that I wasn’t expecting much from the pint of Pedigree I had with my lunch. And how wrong you can be: it was terrific. I mean, it was what it is, a medium-strength amber bitter, but bland it wasn’t – nor did it have the heaviness or the assertive cough-syrup finish I remember Pedigree having in the past. It was in really good nick, too. Marston’s the brewery are, in principle, dead to me – not because I have a particularly strong objection to breweries selling out, but simply because any change of ownership creates the probability that the beers won’t be what they were, a probability which can only grow over time (remember Meantime?). But on the basis of that pint, the lads at Carlsberg Britvic are still turning out some decent stuff – more than decent, in fact. Grr, Harbucks…

So what have we learned today, apart from that last bit which I’m going to ignore? Something I always notice, when I go on Mild Magic crawls and the like, is how hard it is to get lunch in a pub these days (unless it’s a Spoons’). There are some honourable exceptions – around here Holt’s and more recently Lees have put a lot of work into the food menus, at least in their larger pubs. But a distinctive lunch offering is something that could really help a pub or bar stand out – and something not a million miles away from what the Royal Oak does could be a relatively cheap and easy way to do it.

The 1980s Royal Oak lunches, outstanding and memorable as they were, were necessarily very unusual: most pubs were never going to stock up on entire wheels of cheese, and wouldn’t have been able to shift that much cheese if they had done – or to look after it well enough to keep it from going dry/soft/mouldy/walkies. The 2020s iteration of the Royal Oak lunch is still pretty unusual – offhand I can’t name another pub that does it – but it doesn’t have to be. Obviously food hygiene standards need to be met, but there’s very little prep, minimal service and no cooking (just refrigeration). Good cheese costs money, but it’s not going to be £3 for 100 grams, which I guesstimate is how big those portions were – at least, if it is you’re looking at the wrong cheese.

In short, it seems like it ought to be doable, much more widely than it’s currently being done. One, two, many Royal Oaks! (Maybe just the one in Didsbury, though.)

By Phil | Posted in Drink local, Going down the pub, Love/hate relationship with JDW's, Moon Under Water, The Session | Comments (1)

Mild Magic: the pubs

6 July, 2025 – 5:41 pm

This is a second post about 2025’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild. The previous post focused on the beers; this one’s about the pubs. I visited 48 pubs during MM so I won’t comment on every single one, just note down what comes to mind as I go along.

Manchester city centre‘s always a pretty target-rich environment for these crawls; this time round there were fifteen participating pubs, or sixteen if you count the New Oxford in Salford. I ticked off fourteen all told: the Old Monkey and Lower Turks Head (Holt’s), the Marble Arch, the Smithfield Market Tavern, the Waterhouse and Paramount (JDW), the Piccadilly, Oxford Road and Victoria Taps, and another five free houses: the Britons Protection, the Molly House, the Angel, the City and the aforementioned New Oxford.

The New Oxford was one of the pubs that stood out for beer (& beer condition). The pub’s had a succession of makeovers, and has ended up with a greatly reduced selection of both cask and keg beers; the cask beers that remain struck me as considerably more interesting than they’ve often been in the past, though. In effect an old-style ‘exhibition pub‘ has turned into a craft (cask) beer bar. Anyway, Fierce‘s Very Mild Moose was very good, very unusual and in excellent condition. I was also very impressed with the beer at the Victoria and Piccadilly Taps, the Angel and (perhaps surprisingly) the Briton’s; the last two were light milds, two of only five or six places where I saw a light mild this year. The Angel also stood out as particularly relaxed and welcoming, not that pubs in mid-afternoon very often look hostile; I can see myself going back there. The Oxford Road Tap was a new tick for me: a pleasant enough bar squeezed into a very limited space, and a good addition to a small but reliable ‘chain’. And if they had the Thornbridge Boddies-alike Jack of All Taps on all the time – and in the condition it was in on my first visit – I’d be visiting regularly. (The second time I had it, it had turned into a Jaipur-ish pale with a big grapefruity finish, but the first time it was just dry; very, very dry.)

As for pubs in the southern suburbs, generally I visit a fair slew of pubs on the Wilmslow Road corridor. This time round I decided to economise – particularly on Hyde’s pubs – and skip both the Withington and Cheadle ends of the route, the latter having been a bit problematic in the past. So I went to the Head of Steam, the Fletcher Moss, the Gateway (JDW), the Railway and Wallop [sic]. I’ll expand this section to include the Barking Dog, Lord Nelson and Tim Bobbin (JDW) in Urmston, as well as the Ford Madox Brown (JDW) in Rusholme, the J P Joule (JDW) in Sale, the Carlton Club in Whalley Range, Reasons to be Cheerful in Burnage, Station Hop in Levenshulme and the Ladybarn Social Club.

In Didsbury and environs, beer quality wasn’t great at the Head of Steam – which isn’t what it was and hasn’t been for some time – but was excellent at Reasons and, rather to my surprise, at Wallop, which had picked up a lot since my last visit; I wasn’t even patronised. (Milds from Runaway and Brightside, respectively.) Urmston was more of a mixed experience than usual; the Barking Dog was a new tick – with a beer range I’d describe as decent but unexciting – but as it was completely empty it’s hard to say much more about it. The other two Urmston pubs were both busy, on the other hand, and it didn’t really improve matters. There was a ‘do’ on at the Lord Nelson, complete with trays of sandwiches, and I wondered if this had diverted the staff’s attention from the cellar; certainly the mild was on its last legs, and had been chilled to within an inch of its life to keep it on them for a bit longer. (Beer quality at Holt’s pubs generally – including the Railway – was a bit disappointing this year; hopefully I was just unlucky.) As for the Tim Bobbin, far be it from me to perpetuate outdated and class-based myths about Spoons’ – and I felt perfectly comfortable in all the other JDW’s pubs I’ve mentioned here – but the atmosphere in the Urmston Spoons’ that Thursday afternoon could best be described as ‘lairy’. I was glad to finish my mild and beat a retreat to the decidedly more chilled environs of the Schooner.

Station Hop was a new tick: a nice, relaxed bar with a big range of Blackjack beers, good quality cask ale and staff who are both understanding and efficient if you knock the said cask ale all over the table when you sit down. Recommended (the bar, not the knocking beer over.) That just leaves two clubs – the Carlton Club a new tick, Ladybarn Social Club a welcome revisit – at both of which I had some really excellent beer, from RedWillow and Phoenix respectively. (I had the RedWillow dark mild in four different places this year, and it was better at the Carlton Club than anywhere else.) The two clubs were very different in terms of custom, though; the Ladybarn club was empty, but in Whalley Range I got through most of a pint of mild while I was looking for somewhere to sit. Presumably – and hopefully – Ladybarn gets busier later on; I had two beers there and rated them both 4, so it doesn’t look as if their beers hang around for long.

I was fairly selective with Stockport ticks, too; I went to the Petersgate Tap (twice), the White Lion, the Baker’s Vaults, the Magnet and the Nursery, as well as Heaton Hops up the road, the Steelworks in Bredbury and Voltigeur in Romiley. The White Lion was a new tick and a relatively new opening, although you’d never know to look at it: a sprawling, roadhouse-style pub, brass rails and all, and doing very nicely the weekend we visited. Good beer, too: they were serving both Timothy Taylor Dark Mild and Golden Best, although the latter ran off when I ordered. The Baker’s Vaults deserves credit for serving Ardgour Dol Fodha Na Greine; it’s not often you get to try a beer from a brewery you’ve never heard of. The Nursery, being a good ten minutes’ walk from civilisationWellington Road, wouldn’t have been on my list if I hadn’t misread a post on the Stockport CAMRA mailing list – or indeed if I’d stopped to ask myself how likely it was that a neighbourhood Hyde’s pub would have an interesting guest mild on. (I should have gone to the Magnet, although by the time I did the mild in question had gone.) The Voltigeur was a new tick: a comfortably ‘pubby’ small bar, reminiscent of the Samuel Oldknow. Voltigeurs, in case you’re wondering, were an elite group of soldiers who were trained to go into battle on foot and then jump on the back of cavalry horses to get to the front more quickly, in effect riding pillion; the word literally means ‘vaulter’. (“This proved unworkable”, Wikipedia notes laconically.) Heaton Hops, lastly, is clearly going to be a regular port of call from now on; I missed the Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild, but the Rudgate mild was almost as good – and getting to have a go at Emperor’s Darksaber (14.5%) more than compensated.

The last group of ticks were in outlying towns: Stalybridge, Buxton, Macclesfield. Just a couple in Staly – the Buffet Bar and Bridge Beers – plus a new tick in Ashton: the Forester’s Call, a street-corner boozer where the Bridge mild was (unfortunately) rather tired. The Bridge beers at Bridge Beers were excellent, though (I had the Golden Mild and a pale ale called Ella). I was on the point of telling Dave [Bridge] how much I appreciated his brewing, and how much I’ll miss it, when I realised he was telling another customer what a relief it had been to stop doing it. Everything has its season, I guess.

Five ticks in Macclesfield and four in Buxton: the Castle, RedWillow, Bollington Brewery Tap, Jack in the Box and Society Rooms (JDW); RedWillow Buxton, Wye Bridge House (JDW), Ale Stop and the Cheshire Cheese. I caught up with Sarah Hughes at the Castle, and spent a pleasant quarter of an hour speculating about the purposes of the impedimenta displayed on shelves; greebling, you can’t beat it. Bollington Brewery Tap was the only new tick here. There are, in my experience, two kinds of purpose-built brewery taps: the ones that are just a big soulless shed with a lot of picnic tables and no atmosphere whatsoever, and the ones that are just a big soulless shed with a lot of picnic tables but somehow make you forget that. The BBT (as nobody is calling it) was the former, unfortunately. The beers in the other Macclesfield pubs were very much ‘usual suspects’. The Blackjack Dark Ruby Mild at the Jack in the Box was particularly good, though, as was the ambience at this outpost of the Mackie Mayor empire. (We economised on lunch, though, and got something at Gail’s. Well, I say ‘economised’.)

As for Buxton, I think Buxton (the brewery) missed a trick by not signing up Buxton (the brewery tap) for MM: we went there last and had their Monsal Mild, which was on a par with the best of the beers I’ve mentioned so far. But even that was outshone by the same beer at Wye Bridge House (JDW); it was one of the less prepossessing Spoons’ I’ve been in lately – very much in the ‘works canteen’ school of design – but they can certainly keep a beer. Sadly, I couldn’t say as much of the Cheshire Cheese, a Titanic pub serving eight or nine of their beers on cask. There was no mild – nor anything dark apart from the inevitable Plum Porter – and the 40th-anniversary rebrew of Premium Bitter which I had was, unfortunately, sour. With it being a best bitter I wasn’t entirely sure what I was tasting to begin with – some sharpness could be ‘to style’, after all – and I’d ordered a pint to go with a sandwich; I persevered until the state of the beer became unmistakable, by which time I’d drunk about half of it. As we approached the bar on the way out I was reassured to hear somebody else complaining about the state of the beer and the bartender saying she’d take it off. It was only when we were practically out of the door that I glanced round and noticed that the Premium Bitter was still on; evidently it was another beer that had been taken off. Conclusion: approach this pub with care (and maybe don’t approach at all if you’re looking for mild.) After all that, beating a retreat to Ale Stop and spending some time with the Hipgnosis catalogue and some beers from Bollington and Torrside (always nice to see) made a very pleasant change. As with brewery taps, so with micro-bars: sometimes an empty room in mid-afternoon is as dead as a very dead thing, and sometimes it’s a welcoming haven from the world.

New ticks this year: I was particularly impressed by the Oxford Road Tap, Station Hop, the Carlton Club, the White Lion and Ale Stop. Other first-time visits were the Barking Dog, the Voltigeur, Forester’s Call, Bollington Brewery Tap, RedWillow Buxton, Wye Bridge House and the Cheshire Cheese.

Re-evaluations and rediscoveries: the New Oxford, the Angel and Heaton Hops. There are also a few places that ought to go in this category but are likely to remain once-a-year visits, public transport between them and Chorlton being what it is: Reasons to be Cheerful, the Castle and the Buffet Bar.

Thanks to everyone involved in organising Mild Magic; it keeps changing – and growing – and I think this year the results were particularly good. Cask mild may never again be the volume beer it once was, but the style is evidently flourishing, thanks in no small part to CAMRA. Looking forward to 2026!

 

 

By Phil | Posted in CAMRA Man, Crawler, Drink local, Love/hate relationship with JDW's, Mild Magic, Travels with beer, Very not pale'n'oppy | Comments (0)

Session #148: The ultimate pub quiz round

30 June, 2025 – 12:00 pm

For June’s Session, Laura Hadland asked us about The Ultimate Pub Quiz Round. Like the previous topic, this is a subject on which I’ve got too many thoughts rather than too few – hence the belated post!

Here’s an example of a good pub quiz question:

What is the next number in this sequence? 4, 2, 3, 4, 6, 2, 4, ?

I’ll leave that with you. (Unless you got it straight away, clever-clogs.)

I wouldn’t say I love pub quizzes – that would sound weird and altogether too intense – but then, I wouldn’t say I love a pint on a Friday afternoon. I wouldn’t be without either of them, though. I’ve been going to a local pub quiz for twenty-odd years: a monthly quiz that I went to on my own, where the winning team was asked to set the quiz for the following month; more recently another monthly quiz, which subsequently went weekly, which I go to with my other half.

We are that dreaded thing, a Team of Regulars who Know the Quizmaster; we’ve been answering one person’s questions for a good ten years. It’s not that big an advantage, though; to the extent that there’s any advantage, it lies in knowing the kind of thing a particular quizmaster does, and you can pick that up in a single quiz, if you keep your wits about you. (And no, we don’t win every week, or even every other week.) It is a bit of a disadvantage for us when it comes to other quizzes, though. We’ve been to five or six other pub quizzes in Manchester, not to mention seeking out the local pub quiz when we’re on holiday, and glory tends to elude us. (“Pop music from the 00s? Who knew there was pop music from the 00s?”) We did get into the Top! Three! Playoff! at the weekly quiz at the Founder’s Hall, but it turned out that the Playoff! didn’t actually involve quizzing; it consisted of folding a paper dart in twenty seconds and then throwing it as far as possible (shades of The Office). My dart performed an elegant loop-the-loop and landed at my feet, so that was that. The winners had in fact come second in terms of actual points for answering questions; I wouldn’t have liked to be on that team. But hey, it’s just a bit of fun.

OK, I’m competitive. I was terrible at Games – I mean, ‘last to be picked’ terrible (“do we have to have him?”) – so I feel the world ought to let me have this!

What makes a good pub quiz round? Let’s start with what makes a bad pub quiz round and narrow it down. In terms of topics, the pub quiz featured in an episode of The Detectorists is hard to beat: the first four rounds were on sport, lad’s mags, ITV 2 and the Balearic islands. Personally my ideal pub quiz would feature questions on radical politics, Victorian literature and Belgian beer, and a music round drawn exclusively from David Bowie’s 1990s releases, but this ideal is very rarely approached. There aren’t that many really bad topics, though; most things are OK, particularly if you get advance warning. (Our current quiz is ‘general’ throughout except for some questions on a specialist topic – which is announced beforehand, and is chosen by the previous week’s losing team.) Anything except sport (I’ve found that people who know about sport really know about sport – and that’s unlikely to be news to you, dear reader, as I’ve also found that most people know about sport). Anything except sport, lad’s mags and ITV 2.

We’ve come last a couple of times, as it goes, although the second time was the last quiz before lockdown and there only was one other team (no dedication, some people). We chose Father Ted and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series).

For me there are three things that make a bad quiz round. One, which I’ve touched on already, is basically not being a quiz round. Questions, pictures, music, points, that’s a pub quiz. Don’t ask participants to draw a picture, make a model or (in the case of a quiz that I haven’t attended) write a “dirty limerick”. (Is that one of those “you know you’re old when” things? If so, yes, I’m old.) The Font quiz, the one time we went, included a plasticine round; fortunately we had our (grown-up) daughter with us that night, and by the end of the quiz she’d produced rather a fine grand piano, complete with pianist and piano stool. So that was actually quite fun, but I personally would have been completely lost (see also Founder’s Hall).

Another thing that ruins a pub quiz – for quizzers; for the pub it may be positively desirable – is spinning it out

so that it

takes

all

night.

The quiz we went to once at the Hillary Step had a lot to recommend it – including an excellent music round (in the specific sense of the word ‘excellent’ defined here) – but It. Was. So. Slow… I was having to make my beer last by the end of it (it was a school night, after all).

Q: What comes after Question 1? Is it
a) two or three minutes of ‘thinking time’, perhaps with background music, followed by a repeat of question 1, read slowly and clearly, and another couple of minutes of thinking time
or
b) Question 2?
Think carefully.

Lastly, a quiz round with a lot of specific answers that you either know or don’t is a bad quiz round. Dates are particularly bad for that: asking for specific years is setting people up to fail, unless you’re asking about world wars, General Elections or Olympic Games (and I’m not too sure about the elections).

At the end of all that, are we any closer to what makes a good pub quiz round? We’ve established that it should be (a) composed of questions (and/or pictures and music), and (b) conducted in a reasonably brisk and concentrated way, not just as a recurring interruption to an evening’s drinking; also, something about dates.

Thinking about it some more, I think the key to a good pub quiz round is that the questions are gettable. A good quiz question is one that you either know straight away or can get to, by using clues in the wording of the question; by comparing notes with other team members; by letting it simmer in the back of your mind. And if all else fails, by taking a stab at the kind of thing it’s likely to be. Female New Labour politician, Greater Manchester – it’s that Salford woman, isn’t it, it’ll come to me… Hazel Genn? No, that’s someone else. Blears – Hazel Blears. Conceptual artist noted for her… there you go; could be Sarah Lucas but it’s probably Tracey Emin. Footballer, played for Chelsea… Peter Osgood? Put it down, we can always change it later, and it’s better than leaving a gap.

Letting your mind work on its own, bringing back things you didn’t know you knew; comparing ideas with other people and listening to how their minds work; those things are the real pleasure of pub quizzes. That and not having to pay for your beer.

(If we win. Which we haven’t in a while, as it goes. It’s West Didsbury & Chorlton A.F.C. tonight and yes I know, it’s pretty obscure here. Wish us luck!)

PS

What is the next number in this sequence? 4, 2, 3, 4, 6, 2, 4, 8

 

 

 

 

By Phil | Posted in Chinstroker, Drink local, Free as in beer, Going down the pub, The Session | Comments (1)

Session #147: Beer Folk

30 May, 2025 – 7:50 pm

Fell in the street in a drunken heap…

For May’s Session, Phil Cook has asked us to consider “the beers and pubs in art and fiction that have grabbed our attention”. I immediately thought, “that’ll be easy – I’ll do beer and pubs in folk”. Immediately after that, however, paralysis hit. What did I mean by ‘folk’? The really old traditional songs? Songs with known authors that have entered oral tradition, like “The Old Dun Cow“? Contemporary songs that you’ll hear in folk sessions? (“Down where the drunkards roll” is a great song about pub life; it was written by Richard Thompson in 1973.) Or was I going to write about beer and pubs in the folk scene? Or in the folk scene of the 1960s and 70s – which began the contemporary folk revival, and which has been described to me as “afloat on a sea of beer”? Come to that, what did I mean by “in” (Heaven help us)? Historical data about alehouse mores in the lyrics of folk songs? The role of the pub as a venue in the British folk scene (as distinct from the American coffee-house scene)?

It could go so many ways. I should probably write a book. For now, here are a few thoughts, all of which could be developed at greater length (but probably won’t).

THAT JOHN BARLEYCORN THING

No.

BOOZING, BLOODY WELL BOOZING

Talking about the way that beer and drinking is described in folk songs immediately runs up against the question of what we mean by folk songs, a question which I mostly intend to ignore. There isn’t one thing called “folk songs”, though. There’s very little continuity between the cultures in which traditional folk songs were written and those where they’re currently sung; even between the contemporary folk scene and the 60s revival there’s not as much continuity as you might think.

But we can still see some common themes if we look back over the history of folk composition, including the modern songs that have taken root in the ‘folk’ scene. One theme is that we drink a lot. Look at “When Jones’s Ale Was New” (which has been dated back to the sixteenth century), which introduces a whole series of characters (“The next to come in was a mason…”), all of whom get well and truly merry. Or look at the former music-hall song “The Old Dun Cow” (1893):

And we all got blue blind paralytic drunk
When the Old Dun Cow caught fire!

Or “The Barleymow” with its catalogue of measures (including gallon and half-gallon), and its modern cousin, Keith Marsden’s “Bring us a Barrel” (1966):

Then bring forth the puncheon and roll out the butt
For they are the measures before us to put
The jug will go round and good ale it will flow
And we’ll be content for an hour or so.

(A puncheon contains 72 gallons, a butt 108. Pubs that take beer in barrel measures (36 gallons) are a rarity these days.)

Alongside that, fittingly enough, runs the awareness that drinking a lot isn’t always a good idea. The horrified fascination with which “Down where the drunkards roll” observes its cast of self-destructive boozers is hard to beat:

You can be a gambler who never played a hand
You can be a sailor who never left dry land
You can be Lord Jesus, all the world will understand
Down where the drunkards roll

Or take the Pogues’ “Sally Maclennane” (not really a folk song, but I’ve heard it in a session so I’m having it), in which a nostalgic but hard-edged evocation of pub life mutates into dark irony, then pathos, finishing in a strange combination of all three:

I played the pump and took the hump and watered whisky down
I talked of hoors and horses to the men who drank the brown
I heard them say that Jimmy’s making money far away,
Some people left for Heaven without warning.
…
When Jimmy came back home he was surprised that they were gone
He asked me all the details of the train that they went on
Some people they are scared to croak, but Jimmy drank until he choked
And took the road for Heaven in the morning.

The theme of alcohol as a health risk goes way back. The title of this blog is taken from a song which seems to date back to the eighteenth century; it could be taken as a rousing celebration of beer (particularly when half the pub’s joining in the chorus) but can also be read as a warning of the dangers of alcoholism:

It’s you that makes my friends my foes,
It’s you that makes me wear old clothes.
But since you come so near my nose
It’s up you comes and down you goes.

Oh Good Ale, thou art my darling,
Thou art my joy both night and morning!

“Back and side go bare” was in circulation even longer; it was collected in Somerset in the early 20th century, having been written some time around 1550.

I can eat but little meat,
My stomach is not good;
But sure I think that I can drink
With him that wears a hood.
…
Back and side go bare, go bare,
Both foot and hand go cold;
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.

‘With him that wears a hood’ basically meant ‘with the next man’ – hats were status symbols in the sixteenth century, with labouring men wearing hooded garments. As with “Oh Good Ale”, the tone of the song is superficially positive, but I think even in the sixteenth century the narrator would be considered to have a problem. The reference to ale “new or old” reminds me, tangentially, that “Jones’s” ale was originally Joan‘s ale – and the reason it was new was that she’d just brewed it. In an eighteenth-century version, every verse except one ends with a refrain of “When Joan’s ale was new”; the last verse sends everyone home and says they’ll be back “When she had brew’d anew”.

BUT ABOUT JOHN BARLEYCORN…

No. Not having it. Write your own blog post.

SO I HEARD MEN SAY

There are some surprising snippets of social history in folk songs. Take “Poor Murdered Woman”, a song we can (sadly) date quite precisely to 1834:

She was took off the Common and down to some inn
And the man that has kept it his name is John Simms
The Coroner was sent for and the jury they joined
And soon they concluded and they settled their mind

Apparently it was fairly routine for a coroner’s jury to convene in a pub (presumably in a back room); so routine that the song says nothing more about it.

My favourite example of this kind of fossil evidence is the song “Soldiers Three”, which apparently goes back to 1609. Here are the lyrics in full, with the repeated refrain omitted after the first verse:

We be soldiers three,
Pardonnez-moi je vous en prie
Lately come out of the Low Country
With never a penny of money.

Here, good fellow, I’ll drink to thee,
And all good fellows wherever you be

He who will not pledge to this,
Pays for the shot, whatever it hits

Charge them again, boy, charge them again,
As long as there be any ink in your pen

The speaker asks for charity in verse 1; in verse 2 he picks on a punter and toasts him (presumably with a half-empty glass), challenging him to return the favour. In the third verse this method is obviously wearing thin, and he threatens to blow out the lights (and/or windows) if nobody will ‘pledge’ him (and buy a round). Finally he resorts to demanding credit – “Put it on my tab! What’s the matter, your pen run out of ink?” (“Charge them again” = “Fill ’em up!”). If all else fails – or if the fun of cadging drinks wears thin – there’s always the option of knocking somebody’s drink over and starting a fight (Oh, pardonnez-moi!). A more vivid picture of out-of-work squaddies in search of a drink and some action you couldn’t hope to find – and all done in ten lines.

BUT I HEARD THERE WAS THIS FERTILITY MYTH, RIGHT, AND

No, no, no.

So there are these songs about someone called “John Barleycorn”, who grows to maturity (complete with a beard), gets cut down and ground between millstones, and has his revenge on his tormentors by making them stupid and ill. It’s barley, do you see? With a beard! And they make beer from it, and… OK, it’s not that obscure.

Over the years, the idea has been put around by people who should know better that there’s more to “John Barleycorn” than meets the eye. It’s a song celebrating a heroic figure who is struck down and killed and then returns in glory. It may appear to be a humorous song about beer, but surely what “John Barleycorn” is really about is the death and resurrection of Our Lord –

just kidding. No, the theory that got around was that it’s a pre-Christian nature myth, perhaps representing a buried memory of ritual sacrifice à la Wicker Man (not a documentary). Fortunately folk song scholarship has moved on in the last half-century. Compare and contrast:

This ballad is rather a mystery. Is it an unusually coherent folklore survival of the ancient myth of the slain and resurrected Corn-God, or is it the creation of an antiquarian revivalist, which has passed into popular currency and become ‘folklorized’?
– A.L. Lloyd, The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959)

It was perhaps inevitable that this song would attract the ritual-origins theorists, who claimed that it was all to do with corn spirits and resurrection, but it is now generally agreed that such notions were romantic wishful thinking and there is no evidence either for the theories of themselves or for this song to be anything but a clever allegory.
– Steve Roud, The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (2012)

I don’t even think Bert Lloyd really believed the ‘ancient myth’ line, or even that he (like Mulder) wanted to believe; he did like a good story, though, and he liked to keep a lot of different plates spinning. I’m with Steve Roud: there is no evidence that the John Barleycorn songs and poems are relics of some sort of pagan death-and-rebirth myth, and no need to speculate about what the lack of evidence doesn’t tell us. Apart from anything else, pretty much all the versions of John Barleycorn that are around now seem to descend from one written in the late 18th century by Robert Burns. For me, that thought’s quite impressive enough – Burns was a great poet (and he’d have been delighted to have contributed to the oral tradition), and the late 18th century is a very long time ago. But it’s not the fathomless mists of antiquity, and it’s certainly not a period when pagan belief systems were flourishing. Here’s the thing, though: the earliest sighting of the name “John Barleycorn” is as recent, relatively speaking, as the early 1600s; even if you broaden out the search to include any poem personifying barley and/or beer, you only end up in the second half of the 1500s. Which, unless you’re prepared to argue that Shakespeare lived in a pagan country, is a problem for the corn-god malarkey.

Barley grows; it’s small and delicate, then it grows big and strong. Then you harvest it, then you thresh it and do other unspeakable things, then you make beer from it; then it takes the legs out from under you and gives you a headache. Small thing becomes big strong thing, we kill the big strong thing, it has its revenge on us. It writes itself! It’s not myth, just poetry! Honestly, the amount of nonsense you hear talked about folk songs sometimes – some people seem to want to make them into something they really aren’t. People like Bert Lloyd, who basically prefer a good story to an accurate account of the evidence, drive me mad. I mean, look at “The Recruited Collier”…

YOU WERE SAYING, THE WORD ‘IN’ CAN MEAN DIFFERENT THINGS?

Ahem.

The last thing I wanted to touch on was the connection between the 1960s folk revival and the other contemporary revivals – of craft, artisan production and ‘real’ foodstuffs, ale included. That there was some connection with the other kinds of revival – and specifically with CAMRA – seems hard to dispute. Apart from anything else, the mood music is right: there’s an odd sort of self-ironising earnestness about both CAMRA and the folk scene (and I’m including myself in both those groups) that make them a natural fit. It’s as if we were saying, we recognise that it’s ridiculous to denounce everything modern and hanker after the unspoilt traditions of olde England, we know the ‘ho there stout yeoman’ stuff is irritating and fake, and we’ll happily send ourselves up along those lines… but having said all of that, we do in fact think quite a lot of modern innovations have genuinely turned out to be bad things, we would be quite interested in the unspoilt traditions of olde England, if you’ve got any, and a foaming mug of nut-brown ale and a chorus of “Fathom the Bowl” would go down rather nicely at this juncture squire. Although it is all a load of nonsense really – and after all it’s only beer, it’s only folk song. But then again, beer is worth taking seriously, and folk song certainly is, so…

All of which is rather neatly summed up in Miles Wooton’s “Public Bar”:

Early one evening just as the pubs were opening
A traveler was walking down a cold and windy street
He saw a door ajar, he stepped in a public bar,
Said, “Landlord, I would like a drink and something good to eat.

“I fancy some crusty bread and roast beef of old England
Some fresh butter from the churn, a pickled onion too
And if you think you could draw some bitter from the wood
I’d be quite content to quaff a gentle pint or two.

“I’ll sit down by your pine log fire and ponder on the infinite
The quiet of your hostelry shall seep into my heart
And if a regular should come into the bar
Maybe I’ll entice him in a contest of the dart.”

“Come in,” says the landlord, “I’ve got pre-packed beef paste sandwiches
And instant frozen sausages which I purchase by the ton
So if you fancy it I could defrost a bit
And serve it up with ketchup on a supermarket bun.

“I’ll pour you a plastic pot of quaint old English ready-brew
As advertised on telly by a famous rugby scrum
No dirty wooden barrels here – we only keep hygienic beer
Safely sterilized inside this aluminium drum.

“So sit down by the pine log fire – I’ll switch the logs on presently –
Maybe you would like to try my brand new fruit machine?
Three cherries in a row will set your heart aglow,
My jukebox plays some rock and roll that will really set the scene.”

So the traveller sat down beside the polystyrene inglenook
Plastic beads were swaying to an electronic sound
He started to bite and chew, he took a sip of ready-brew
He gave a ghastly gurgle and fell dead upon the ground.

“O dear, ” says the landlord as he switched the colour telly on
“Another fatal accident – the third this week, I fear!
If they can’t hold their own, why can’t they stay at home?
I must say that we get some funny customers in here.”

COME IN AND DRINK IF YOU ARE DRY

Which of these pubs would I wish myself into? Not the last one, certainly, but the others aren’t too enticing, either – the Old Dun Cow’s on fire, for a start. I wouldn’t want to cross paths with the Soldiers Three, and the pubs in “Sally Maclennane” and “Down where the drunkards roll” sound a bit hard-drinking for my liking – let alone “Bring us a barrel” (72 gallons in an hour or so?). Perhaps I’ll just slope off home, like the narrator of the song I began with – and if, like her, I end up “flat on my back in the rainbow rain”, let’s hope I face the night, and the hangover to come, with the same spirit as she did.

I promise thee, my shameless lady
Who laughs out loud in the sad patient night,
Always to be honestly thee,
In my waking dreams or my drunken nights,
I don’t fear the yawning sunshine morning;
I’m forward running back again.

Which isn’t about pubs or beer – and isn’t strictly speaking folk. But it is a magnificent description of being drunk, and who wants to speak strictly anyway?

PS There are 17 songs quoted, cited or linked in this post; I’ve heard 16 of them in folk sessions, including six I’ve joined in with and eight I’ve sung myself. Living tradition? Not exactly, but it’s certainly a living something, however often its last rites have been read. Bit like CAMRA, really.

By Phil | Posted in CAMRA Man, Chinstroker, Going down the pub, The Session | Comments (0)

Mild Magic 2025: the beers

26 May, 2025 – 3:37 pm

Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild, is over for another year. Like all these events/challenges, MM involves visiting a certain number of pubs and drinking mild; what that certain number is is up to you, with prize tiers from 12 up to ‘the lot’. I did the whole card for the last Winter Warmer Wander, but that only[sic] entailed visiting 65 pubs; as this year’s Mild Magic roster ran to a full 100, I limited myself to the next level down, i.e. 48. It was an interesting list, though, with entire districts I hadn’t visited. Striking a balance between novelty and feasibility involved making some difficult, or at least unfamiliar, choices (no Fallowfield or Marple), as well as some that frankly weren’t so hard (no Gee Cross or Cheadle Hulme). And I still haven’t made it to Chapel-en-le-Frith; next time, maybe.

But I’ll talk about the pubs in the next post; this one’s about the mild. So, what is mild? A simple but unsatisfactory answer is that, although the word ‘mild’ currently designates a style, it originally referred to a condition: the state of beer being fresh, ‘mild’ as opposed to ‘aged’ or ‘stale’. Consequently there is no core stylistic meaning of ‘mild’, and it would be futile to try and find one. A longer and slightly more satisfactory answer is that you can expect a mild ale to be more sweet than it is bitter, and to have one or both of two other qualities: some mild ale is strikingly dark, some mild ale is strikingly light-bodied and easy-drinking, and some is both. In other words, milds can be divided into dark milds, sinkable milds and (inevitably) dark sinkable milds. (Strength is secondary: mild’s generally not the strongest thing on the bar, but a strong mild isn’t a contradiction in terms.) Then there’s the simplest answer of all, which is that every single mild I had on this year’s MM – from Ardgour Dol Fodha na Grèine to Timothy Taylor Golden Best – displayed the word ‘mild’ somewhere on the pump clip, so right now in practice that’s how you know. (Hyde’s were going quite big on the historic Anvil Mild this year – and I was very largely swerving their pubs – so my theory about Hyde’s 1863 didn’t need to be tested.)

What’s a good mild? Read on! Across 46 pubs – not counting two that didn’t have any milds – I had 27 different milds from 22 breweries. As follows:

THE FAMILY BREWERS

I only visited two Hyde’s pubs this year (in Didsbury and Heaton Norris), at both of which I had Anvil Mild. I don’t know if this is an old recipe, or if so from how long ago – the brewery only describes the ‘Anvil’ beers as “historic brews recreated and influenced by the original Anvil range”, which could mean anything or nothing. Still, it’s an unusual beer, particularly considered as a mild: sweet and 3.4%, but a darkish amber in colour and not especially light-bodied. I haven’t put the two side by side, but I’m fairly sure it’s both darker and heavier than 1863 (despite that going out as a bitter). Overall it was fine, but no better than that; it didn’t make me want to rush back. (Tangentially, a very similar mild stylistically was the rare sighting Ardgour Dol Fodha Na Greine, which was similar in colour and body but even lighter in alcohol at 2.8% – and also didn’t blow me away. Nice to see something different, though!)

Nor, to my surprise, can I be any more enthusiastic about Holt’s than Hyde’s, this time out. For me at least, Holt’s had a shocker of a Mild Magic, even though they’re usually a really reliable mild brewer. My NBSS scores for four pubs – two serving (dark, sinkable) Mild and two the stronger (dark) seasonal, Unmistakably Mild – averaged out at 3. Which isn’t bad bad, but it’s worse than my average for any other brewer, and considerably lower than I’d expected. (I actually only recorded three sub-3 scores in the whole of MM, and a suburban Holt’s pub – where I’ve drunk some sublime Mild in the past – supplied one of them. Hopefully it’s a blip.)

GOLDEN DAYS

Speaking of NBSS scores, every light mild I had this year (setting aside those two amber-coloured milds) scored a solid 4. There were only three of them, admittedly, but they were really good. Step forward Timothy Taylor Golden Best; Bridge Beers Golden Mild; and a new one on me, Tatton Pennine Mild. It’s a difficult style to get right – the lack of bitterness and the light body give faults and shortcomings nowhere to hide – but these all hit the mark. Light, clean-tasting and very sinkable – I had a pint of the Golden Best, and should have done for the Bridge mild (but instead went back for ‘the other half’ within minutes of sitting down).

GOT THE FLAVOUR

Flavoured beers weren’t nearly as prominent as they were among the stouts and porters last winter, for which (frankly) much thanks. I wasn’t wildly impressed with Bridge Beers Ruby Cherry Mild, although the pub where I had it had evidently had it on for a while, which didn’t help. The other big fruit-flavoured beer was Brightside‘s wearisomely-titled Ch-Ch-Ch-Cherry Mild (yes, I see what they did there), which I didn’t get on with; the cherry flavour wasn’t obtrusive or over-sweet, but the base mild wasn’t particularly sweet either, and the two flavours didn’t really gel. It was all over the show this year, though; I had it in five different pubs, generally pretty well kept.

THAT SINKING FEELING

We’ve covered the “sinkable, not dark” category in passing. The remaining 18 beers can be divided (slightly arbitrarily) into “dark and sinkable”, “dark but heavy” and “the really good ones”. There isn’t much to say about the “dark and sinkable” milds; apart from anything else, being sinkable beers that I was mostly buying in halves, I didn’t tend to spend much time with them. Bank Top Dark Mild, Bollington Bollington Nights, Courier 50 Lousy Songs, Dunham Dark, Marble Mild, Milestone (a new name on me) Classic Mild, Phoenix Monkeytown Mild, RedWillow Ruby Mild and Titanic Classic Mild were all very satisfactory and didn’t outstay their welcome. Across twelve scores they averaged 3.4.

DARK, DARK, DARK

Then there are the more chunky dark milds, which – I think it’s fair to say – represent a departure from what mild has come to mean over the last half-century (even if some of them have ended up not far from some older versions of ‘mild’). Standouts here were Blackjack Dark Ruby Mild and Brightside Manchester Magic Mild (both 5% or over), as well as old favourites Rudgate Ruby Mild and Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild (6.5%), although the latter sadly wasn’t in as good nick as I could have wished. A special mention to Fierce Very Mild Moose, a dark mild brewed by the unconventional method of using the second runnings from an imperial stout. Which is just what it tasted like, but that’s not a complaint: what else would you want a “dark but heavy” mild to taste like? Ten scores total, average 3.7.

BEST TILL LAST

I’ve held off mentioning a couple of beers from the last two categories, so as to include them in this section. (For completeness the ‘best’ should also include Bridge Beers Golden Mild.) There are two real standouts among the heavy dark milds. Runaway Progress Dark Mild is one of an experimental series of beers, representing the brewery’s take on a “classic Black Country dark mild” – so Batham’s / Holden’s, I guess(?). Whatever they’re aiming for, I think they’ve nailed it with this beer: it’s only 3.6%, but it has all the depth and richness of the beers discussed in the previous paragraph, most of which are a lot stronger. And then there was Buxton Monsal Mild, which is 4.5% and tastes even more like an imperial stout than the Fierce beer. It’s a great beer in any condition and an astonishing beer in good nick; the first time I tasted it I scored it 4.5. As for the sinkable dark milds, I had a terrific half of Timothy Taylor Dark Mild (which I haven’t seen in years – hope it’s going to be around a bit more now). And then there’s the strange case of RedWillow Dark Mild (‘vintage’ recipe), which I’d had – and not really rated – in three different places when I ordered a pint at a nearby venue one afternoon. The mark of a really sinkable beer is that you don’t see it going down. In this case I had to look around a bit to find anywhere to sit down; when I finally put my glass down, I realised that it was more than half empty. RedWillow Dark Mild: in good nick it’s really good. Including that one, nine scores averaging 3.8; not including it, five scores averaging 4.1.

ON AN IRRELEVANT NOTE

On an irrelevant note, on my MM travels I also drank several non-mild beers (and one mild in a non-MM pub). NBSS scores in brackets; where not shown, I gave the beer a 4.

Blackjack Early Days porter, Bridge Beers Ella IPA, Brew York Little Eagle PA (3.5), Buxton Monsal Mild again (in the Buxton tap, not in MM), Kelham Island Pale Rider, Leeds Pale (3.5), Mallinson’s Godiva Waimea (3.5), Marble Earl Grey IPA, Milton Justinian PA, Roosters London Thunder porter (3.5), Siren Mum’s the Word porter, Tatton Lazy Haze PA, Thornbridge Jack of All Taps PA (was 4, but has never been as good since), Titanic Premium bitter (1) and Three Acres Southern Strong ale (3.5).

Average of these beers: 3.6 including the ‘off’ beer, 3.8 excluding it. (Perhaps I was being more choosy about the non-milds, perhaps I was just glad of a change…)

STATE OF MILD

Overall it’s a mixed picture. Superficially, the fact that there are large numbers of brewers selling beers clearly badged as mild makes a pleasant contrast with the picture from a few years back, when established brewers were busily renaming their milds (remember “Old Indie”?) or else dropping them altogether. But the fact that independent brewers are embracing mild as a speciality style – in some cases with Mild Magic itself in mind – isn’t actually in contradiction with the decline in mild as a volume beer. It’s striking that very few of the particularly good milds I’ve had this year have been ‘pintable’; I could imagine a session on Bridge Beers Golden Mild (although that’s never going to happen, alas) or on either of the Timothy Taylor milds, but the Buxton and Runaway are ‘tasting’ beers rather than sessioners (despite the latter’s eminently sessionable strength). The way the RedWillow dark mild came to life in one particular venue – when (I’m guessing) the barrel was new on – also tells a story. Perhaps low-strength, low-hopping beers like this need more traffic than they’re likely to get these days – even, seemingly, in the tied houses of family brewers with a mild on as standard. More research (in Holt’s pubs) may be needed!

 

 

By Phil | Posted in CAMRA Man, Chinstroker, Crawler, Mild Magic, Very not pale'n'oppy | Comments (0)

Session #146: The Value Range

25 April, 2025 – 11:10 am

Hosting the April Session, Ding says: “I would love people to tell us where they find the greatest value in beer.” He usefully points out that ‘value’ can mean a lot of different things: the Spoons’ pint (cheap but good), the imported Belgian bottle (dear but worth it), and something about a brewpub that I didn’t really follow (possibly ‘cheap but good’ again).

It’s a surprisingly complicated question – you could say that value has a range of meanings (do you see), and some of those meanings touch on quite sensitive topics. For myself, I got my first white-collar job at 22 and didn’t really look back after that, except for a hiccup (rather a long hiccup) when I left a job in publishing to do a doctorate and support myself as a freelance journalist. This career choice would be more or less suicidal today, and even in the early 00s it was brave: there were months when I made a pint stretch through my weekly pub quiz, and hoped to God we’d win the kitty because that way I could stretch to two pints the next week. (I have particularly vivid memories of the evening when there was a charity collection in the pub and the rest of my team agreed we’d donate our winnings. Lovely gesture, nice one lads.)

Let’s be clear, I’ve never been really hard-up – never had to skip meals or withhold the rent – but I do know what it’s like when spending money’s short. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s shit. And one of the things that’s bad about it is that it gives you a weird relationship with value. The idea of value as in good-value-for-money is tainted: the Value Range isn’t what you get when you’re looking for an optimal balance of quality and price, it’s what you get when you can’t afford any better. (And everyone knows it, and everyone knows you know it. Nobody cares, admittedly – they’re all too busy thinking about their own shopping – but that’s not much consolation.) At the same time, oddly, the idea of value as in ‘high value’, as in expensive-but-worth-it, is also tainted. I didn’t think much about this in the context of beer until I got into blogging – among people who aren’t beer enthusiasts the idea of spending silly money on beer doesn’t really arise. But the first few years of beer blogging, for me, overlapped with the early years of my academic career; this wasn’t as pinched as the worst of the freelance years, but it did have its precarious moments, and the change-counting mindset died hard. For a long time I felt personally offended by large-format high-abv beers; I remember explaining to Zak Avery once that if a table near me opened one to share it would spoil my whole evening, and thinking I’d just described a perfectly normal reaction. And I think it is, in a way – a normally distorted reaction, tainted by lack of money, and more specifically the sense that you can’t afford that bit of high value and never will.

Having a bit of money to spare changes everything. (Well, not everything – I still don’t like big bottles, but that’s because I don’t often have someone to share them with.) I know how much beer costs – and still think a fiver a pint is a bit much – but I don’t baulk at paying… well, paying what they ask. I buy what I like, I pay what they ask. Simple as that!

Well, not quite. I’m still conscious of the ‘high value’, ‘expensive but worth it’ idea of value – although now without the resentful overlay of not being for me – and there’s another idea of value that’s relevant, too. For instance, I’m happy to pay quite high prices for unusual beers at the BrewDog bar I go to – more for a third, very often, than I’d expect to pay for a pint at my local. Is it worth it? In the sense that it’s even better – the £6.75 third is half as good again as the £4.50 pint? Sometimes, maybe, but generally not. In the sense that (a) it’s a really good £6 third and (b) I don’t mind paying what they’re asking? Yes, definitely: you get what you pay for, not so much in the sense that it’s twice as good as something half the price, but in the sense that it’s a high value item, so you’re only going to get it by paying (that much) for it. And, if you’re lucky enough to have disposable income, that can be a waste of money that’s worth indulging in.

But, as that last phrase suggests, the ‘high value’ idea of value is always shadowed by a different idea, the idea of ‘decent value’. I could afford to sit in a BrewDog bar and get drunk on £6.75 thirds; I don’t (think of the hangover!), but the money isn’t the main factor. By the same token, I could afford to sit all evening drinking £6.75 pints – but I don’t, because that would be wrong, and anyone trying to get away with flogging me a £6.75 pint would also be wrong (averts eyes from higher reaches of BrewDog menu). Cask beer (as I have believed all my adult life) is a good thing, and one of the ways in which it’s a good thing is that it’s affordable: it’s decent value.

Decent value vs high value; decent value and/or high value. Take (finally) another of Ding’s examples, imported beer. Belgian beer in Belgium is eye-waveringly cheap: they sell Chimay in six-packs at the supermarket, with prices to match. Those same beers go for crazy prices over here – they don’t look like crazy prices to our eyes, but check out the listings at Carrefour and whoa, Nellée. A couple of years ago I discovered that, using a bit of ingenuity, a bit of dogged persistence and if all else fails a bit of A Level French (you’d be better off with Dutch, but wie spreekt dat?), you can order Orval Westmalle Rochefort de Ranke Dochter van de Korenaar ect ect directe à la maison, paying the actual original price (plus shipping)! Good beer and decent value – it’s the dream!

The only problem is that, ever since 52% of my country decided they wanted whatever the hell it was they wanted, this has become substantially harder and more expensive: a higher shipping rate, a more complicated set of taxes and (unsurprisingly) many fewer suppliers. It would still be possible to make an overall saving, were it not that – as I discovered last time I tried – HM Revenue and Customs are also now liable to impound packages from Europe for a random length of time and demand more information about them, after which an “additional duty” charge becomes payable along with an additional “impounding for a random length of time” charge. All of which performed the minor miracle of meaning that it would have been cheaper to get Westmalle Tripel at £4.25 a bottle from a British beer merchant than to try and get it from Belgium, where it goes 6€ for four (=£5.12) in the supermarket.

But I don’t want to end on a sour note – not least because I did after all end up with a garage full of Belgian beers, some of which I couldn’t have got any other way. In other words, I value my imported beers because they’re decent value, up to the point where (thanks to Brexit and HMRC) they aren’t – and at that point, thankfully, I’m in a position to value them as high value.

All good. Just don’t talk to me about 75cl high-abv bottles… (Unless you fancy sharing one, of course. That could work.)

By Phil | Posted in CAMRA Man, Chinstroker, Going down the pub, Small brown bottles, The Session, The workers' beer | Comments (0)
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