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Beer history london pubs real ale

Historic Pub Crawl in the City of London

Map of pubs in the City of London, 1968.

Having accumulated a nice pile of old pub guides, we decided to use them as inspiration for a pub crawl in the City of London last week.

Though the 1986 East London and City Pub Guide put together by the local branch of the Campaign for Real Ale is an entertaining read  (among other signs of its age, it notes which pubs are ‘popular with gays’), we found it too comprehensive for our purposes.

Instead, we turned, once again, to Tony White and Martin Green and their 1968 Guide to London Pubs. A compact paperback, for each region of central London (the authors weren’t much interested in anything beyond Zone 2) it offers a map and a short list of recommended pubs.

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Beer history

Today in Beer History: Marching in Stone

The march at Stone, 3 November, 1973.
Christopher Hutt in front of the words WHO NEXT? Source: The Stone Newsletter, 9 November, 1973.

On 3 November, 1973, around six hundred members of the Campaign for Real Ale descended on the Staffordshire town of Stone to protest against Bass Charrington’s plans to close the local brewery, Joule’s.

The march was led by CAMRA Chairman Christopher Hutt, author of The Death of the English Pub, and organised by Terry Pattinson.

Joule's of Stone beer crate.

They were joined by locals, members of the Transport and General Workers Union, and the town’s brass band. The march was scheduled to begin at Westbridge Park at 3:15 p.m, and, after a circuit round the town centre,  wound up at the cinema, where Hutt gave an impassioned speech.

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Beer history opinion pubs

Session #81: Scary Beer Feminists

Floor mosaic advertising a pub lounge bar, by Duncan C, via Flickr.
Source: Duncan C, Flickr Creative Commons.

The beer blogging Session is hosted this month by Nitch who has asked us to consider women and beer.

Having written a long piece about women in British brewing and beer campaigning in September, and about the sexualisation of female bar staff here, we decided to focus this time on women as pubgoers.

Women drinking beer and visiting pubs is by no means a new thing.

Thanks to the splendid Mass Observation study The People and the Pub, we have a very good idea of how many women were regularly using pubs in Bolton, Lancashire, in the nineteen-thirties, for example.

(January)

Town centre pubs

Main road pubs outside town centre

Weekdays

Weekends

Weekdays

Weekends

Males

667

532

418

513

Females

140

184

39

94

% females

17.4

25.7

8.5

15.5

We also know what they were drinking: relatively expensive bottled beer, and especially Guinness, with a further surcharge applied because they drank it in the ‘lounges’ and ‘parlours’ with their pot plants and soft furnishings, rather than the bare-bones ‘vault’ (public bar).

Though they were usually escorted to the pub by their husbands, the men usually drank standing in the vault where the beer was cheaper. On the rare occasions men did sit in the lounge, they were expected to wear Sunday best and wash behind their ears.

In the lounge, among themselves, women were free to get drunk, swear, tell dirty stories and otherwise misbehave without the threat of violence or the risk of unwelcome sexual attention from men.

These days, lounges have all but disappeared from pubs, in part because they came to be seen as a sign of snobbery and social segregation; and women entering pubs alone are no longer assumed to be prostitutes or ‘asking for it’.

Nonetheless,  pubs still too often feel like male spaces where lone women are, if not made to feel unwelcome, then at least the subject of stares and comments.

The idea of the lounge — a safe space in the pub ‘owned’ by women — should not sound as appealing as it does in 2013.

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Beer history london pubs

The George Inn, Southwark, 1895

Illustration of the George Inn, Southwark, from Our Rambles in London, 1895.

The latest addition to our collection of dusty old walking guides is Our Rambles in London by E.S. Machell Smith, from 1895.

It’s a fairly bland book altogether, and nor are its illustrations (as you can see from the above) especially exciting. It does, however, contain an account of a visit to the George Inn which acts an interesting footnote to Chapter Twelve of Pete Brown’s Shakespeare’s Local, concerning Mrs Amelia Murray, her daughter Agnes, and Joey the parrot:

[We] turned in under an archway over which was written The George Inn, where we were greatly cheered by the sight of a double tier of bedroom galleries, with old wooden balustrades ornamented by flower-pots.

After consulting a policeman standing at the entrance as to whether he thought it was a place ladies could lunch at, and receiving an answer in the affirmative, we walked in, and were met by a fair slim woman, who, in reply to our request for refreshment, said ‘she was afraid she could do nothing for us just then, as all her gentlemen were lunching, but if we cared to walk upstairs and look round we were heartily welcome.’

Gladly availing ourselves of this permission, we went up some low wooden steps and found ourselves on the first balcony, on to which all the rooms open, their occupants’ only mode of exit and entrance being by this way.

More stairs brought us to the next floor; we peeped into some of the rooms, whose windows and doors also opened on to a picturesque wooden gallery, which, like the first, overlooked the yard below, and must, therefore, have been very convenient for watching the plays that used to be acted in the yards of the old Borough hostelries. The bedrooms, though dark, were far from uncomfortable, and contained some nice pieces of old furniture.

It was altogether very fascinating, and we imagined ourselves staying there, and wondered if any one would ever think of searching for us in such a retreat.

As we came downstairs and were about to thank our hostess, she came forward and said that, if we didn’t mind waiting in her room (where she was dispensing cigars and sodas to some of her gentlemen friends), she would have a lunch laid for us in her own back parlour. Accordingly we seated ourselves, keeping our eyes discreetly fixed upon our guide-books, in which, on all occasions and in all places, we find quite as much protection as Unda ever did in her lion.

Meanwhile our fair friend held her little court, and it was charming to see the deference and respect with which she was treated, as she graciously inquired after the health of this one, how the other was getting on with his work, where So-and-so thought of going for Christmas, &c., &c.

Soon and elderly lady (presumably the landlady) announced that our repast was ready, and were conducted into a tiny little sanctum, rather dark, but very snug and warm, with a fat retriever asleep under the table, and a green parrot close to the fire.

And a footnote to a footnote: we think E.S. Machell Smith (or Machell-Smith…) was Christopher Isherwood’s grandmother, Emily, and this passage was probably written by his mother, Kathleen.

Categories
Beer history beer reviews

Ancient Adnams’ Tally Ho

Adnams' Tally Ho c.1977.

When we saw the tiny 275ml bottle in the window of an antique shop, we couldn’t resist spending £1 on a bottle of Adnams’ Tally Ho that we guessed was at least thirty years old.

“Whatever you do, don’t drink it,” said the man in the shop.

Having consulted various authorities, including current Adnams’ Head Brewer Fergus Fitzgerald, who may well not have been born when this beer was bottled, we decided to ignore the shopkeeper’s advice, not least because of the opportunity this presented for a sensory encounter with the period of British beer history in which we have recently been so immersed.

Tally Ho is a bottled beer produced in draught form for a few outlets at Christmas. It has an original gravity of 1075.

CAMRA Good Beer Guide 1980

In the early nineteen-eighties, there was some controversy among beer geeks over Adnams’ yeast: their Bitter, once held up as an example of what ‘real ale’ should taste like, began to seem bland. The brewery eventually admitted there had been problems, especially with infections in their yeast in the summer of 1983 (letter from John Adnams, What’s Brewing, Feb 1986). The beer was cleaner and more consistent thereafter, but did it have the same character?

And was our antique bottle of Tally Ho a chance to get a glimpse of the old, dirty, more interesting Adnams?

We got our yeast from Adnams… it was really Whitbread B yeast, and they’d got it from Lacon’s in Great Yarmouth…

Patrick Fitzpatrick of Godson Freeman & Wilmot, recalling 1977

We’ve drunk old beers before, but those had been ‘cellared’, and we had no idea how this one might have been kept. We were delighted, therefore, to hear an assertive hiss on popping the cap: it was neither flat nor a ‘gusher’. Its condition was remarkable given its age, and a fairly compact, sandy-coloured head formed on top of a near-black body. An aroma reminiscent of raisins steeping in brandy — distinctly Christmassy — enveloped the glass. There was plenty of life in it. 

In the course of thirty years, it had thinned out, and so felt rather watery for its (supposed) strength. It also seemed a little slick. We noted a tongue-numbing clove or Szechuan pepper quality; a streak of rubberiness; a snatch of nail polish; a passing suggestion of rotting veg; some port-wine fruitiness; and an aroma that reminded us of leather-bound books decaying under a coat of dust. Extremely complex, in short, but not all that pleasant.

As for the yeast, we concluded that it was remarkably similar to the Harvey’s strain, which we’ve got to know quite well from the case of their strong beers we bought last year. Does anyone happen to know if Harvey’s use Whitbread B or a descendant thereof?

This has been educational, and we’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for more old bottles of barley wine or imperial stout on our travels.