No sooner do we have a go at their selection of beer than the owners reinvent Eat17 in Walthamstow as a sort of lounge/bar/cafe/restaurant kind of thing, with its own locally brewed house beer.
Eat17 IPA is made by Brodie’s of Leyton, a brewery we want desperately to succeed, although the beers aren’t always to our taste. With this beer, they’ve really struck gold — it’s very pale, spritzy and floral and really very much like a cask ale.
We’ll stop going on about Walthamstow now.
A while back, we were excited to discover that the Sweet William brewery in Leyton/Walthamstow had reopened. Last night, in search of a dartboard for Bailey’s Mum and Dad, we ended up back at the William IV (the brewery tap) and took the opportunity to try a few more “Brodie’s Beers” while they chucked some arrers.
The range of beers on offer is expanding. In fact, it’s getting silly. We’re full of admiration for their adventurousness (Jamaican stout! 7.2% porter!) although, like a lot of smaller breweries operating without state-of-the-art, robotically controlled, artificially intelligent equipment from Munich, they have the odd quality control issue.
In the case of their bottled London Lager, poor quality control created a happy accident — a sour, cloudy beer that should have been called London Geuze. Delicious.
The bottled wheat beer (called simply Wit) was the star of the night, though. It poured with a huge ice-cream-like head that lasted, and lasted, and lasted. We didn’t pick up particularly on Cascade aromas, but they perhaps created some of the authentically continental fruity aromas? It’s a real beer geek’s product — one for everyone who’s ever said: “I love German wheat beer, but I wish it was a bit more bitter.” We got through quite a few.
The photo above is from Brodie’s Beers’ website, which is another thing they’ve done a good job putting together.
We like to get out and about looking for new pubs (although the evil of work has prevented this a bit recently).
Sometimes, we just chance our luck and hope that we’ll stumble on somewhere good. We’ve got quite good at peering through pub windows to see what’s on offer and have become pretty adept at turning on our heels and walking out of pubs that turn out to be rotten once we”re inside.
More often, though, we do a bit of research beforehand, using various resources.
We do have a copy of the Good Beer Guide (2007 edition) which we refer to, but as we’ve mentioned before, its focus on consistently good cask ale, rather than on interesting beers across the board, sometimes leaves us uninspired. Also, it could be better at clearly flagging pubs in a given area which stock locally brewed beers.
We like Beer in the Evening, but a number of our regular haunts don’t score above average (usually because a few Internet trolls have dragged the rating down). But the comments often give us a good idea of whether we’d enjoy the pub or not, regardless of overall rating.
These days, though, we’re most likely to survey our favourite blogs before visiting a new area. If several bloggers like the same pub, it’s probably worth a look. Over time, we’ve also developed a sense of which bloggers like the same kinds of pubs we do, so we rate their opinions more highly. It’s the next best thing to a personal recommendation.
We had a nice afternoon in one of our favourite London pubs soured on Saturday when we were more-or-less asked to leave to free up the table for a reservation. When we queried whether it had to be our table, given that there were lots of others without reservation signs on, we got a very stroppy response from the bar manager.
The practice of moving people or hurrying them along to squeeze in a second sitting is annoying even in real restaurants, however sensible it might be from a business perspective. But the questions of whether you should be able to reserve tables in pubs at all is a sensitive debate for many British people — it’s a level of formality that seems somehow to undermine the very idea of what the pub is about.
People in Germany seem to cope with it, but maybe that’s because there the reserved signs appear (often with profuse apologies) four hours in advance of the booking, so you’ve got plenty of time to finish up, or just choose another table. In the Greenwich Union, we were given an hour — hardly enough time to eat desert and have another drink.
In the couple of hours we were there, we enjoyed cask conditioned Meantime IPA (7.5%, and not as good as from a bottle) and gained a new appreciation for the fruity, sherbety draught Meantime Helles (4.1%).
So, the Union continues to be both brilliant and annoying. God knows we love the beer, but it might be a while before we go back.
These are our final words on Cornwal, which we’re sure is becoming a boring topic.
Ten great Cornish beers
Five disappointing Cornish beers
Two decent Cornish pubs
1. The Castle Inn, St Ives — looks a bit rough around the edges (those “drugs will not be tolerated” signs send all the wrong signals) but was full of old men and guest ales when we went on a weekday lunchtime.
2. The Ship Inn, Mousehole — probably cheerier in season, but has a very friendly and efficient — he earwigged when we were deciding what to have and the drinks were lined up on the bar before we got there. Our mates’ kids tell us the Ribena Fruit Shoots were well kept, too.
Next time, we’ll check out the Blue Anchor and the Tinner’s Arms at Zennor.
Cornwall is a rotten place if you want to try new beers. In short, if you don’t like St Austell, Sharps or Skinner’s, you’ll have to work hard to find a pint to your taste.
St Austell in particular seem to have the county in a Darth Vader-like grip. Their golden castle logo is on every second pub frontage, and their bottled beers are in every gift shop, off licence and convenience store.
In some ways, it’s not such a bad thing. Tribute is becoming one of our all time favourites and is reliably good in St Austell pubs in Cornwall. Proper Job IPA and Admiral’s Ale are two of Britain’s best bottle-conditioned beers, in our humble opinions.
Sparkler spotters may be interested to know that St Austell beers were served by default with a sparkler in all the St Austell pubs we visited. So it’s not just a northern thing, then?
It was in Regensburg, Bavaria, in 2007, that we first decided to start blogging, so excited were we by a glass of Spital Pils. On our recent holiday, we scheduled a one night stop-over to break the long train journey back to London, and had the chance to see if our opinions of the city had stood the test of time.
In 2007, we enjoyed Kneitinger Bock. We were nervous this time — what if it wasn’t as good as we remembered? It was, although Boak found it a bit too sweet this time. This time, though, we also tried the pils, which was a revelation, and one of the best beers of the holiday (“Good enough to be Czech,” we noted).
Our plan to re-drink all the beers we tried first time round was derailed, however, when we came across a new brewpub right in the centre of town which was crammed and lively. The Regensburger Weissbrauhaus was set up around a year and a half ago (despite a cheeky “Anno 1620″ claim based on the age of the building). They make a standard wheat beer, a dark wheat beer, and dark and light lagers. The light wheat beer was pretty exciting (modelled after Schneider, we thought, and really juicy) although a good part of its appeal was probably its freshness. The others were not so impressive — yeasty, sweetish, with the hops missing in action.
But, what the hey — it’s got to be good that the number of breweries in this beautiful city is increasing, right?
We’ve been down on Badger beer since a holiday in Dorset last year where we struggled to find a decent pint of anything, and where even Badger’s own pubs in the area were serving dish-watery, boring, stale beer which made us feel a bit sad.
But the Mason’s Arms (recommended by Jeff “Stonch” Bell here) is a Badger pub which knows how to look after its ale. The seasonal beer, Pickled Partridge, is a dark, 4.6% ‘winter warmer’ and very, very drinkable.
The emphasis is on fruitiness and hop flavour, with very little bitterness — just enough to make it moreish. There might be some spices in there somewhere, but subtly done, with none of the overwhelming cinnamon and cloves that have ruined so many Christmas beers over the years.
In short: a nice cosy, quiet pub, and a very nice beer! Badger are back in our good books.
We’ve spent a fair bit of time on Seymour Place recently, for no particular reason. The Mason’s Arms, the Carpenter’s Arms and the Austrian Imbiss are all good reasons to visit if you’re in the area.
Want to get some of that Franconian village Hausbrauerei action without much of a hike? Then Brauerei Trunk is for you. Because it’s behind the monastery at Vierzehnheiligen, there are frequentish buses and short, well-signposted walking routes from Lichtenfels and Bad Staffelstein.
Being next to a tourist attraction, the Alte Klosterbrauerei (as it’s also known) is open every day, so you don’t need to worry about going all that way for nothing. Our Wanderfuerer makes some kind of snotty remark about “viele Senioren-Busreisen” (lots of old people’s bus excursions) but we thought it was quite nice to go somewhere where there were some other people.
It’s a lovely beer garden, which overlooks the Basilika. The beer’s pretty good too; we had the Dunkles-Export and the “Ernte” Bier. The latter (“harvest beer”) is made with three types of grain including rye and was very tasty, with a wonderful fruity aroma and hints of cherries in the taste. There are also snacks available. It’s all self-service, with a deposit on the glasses.
The obatzda is so dirty. Mmmmmmmmm… dirty obatzda.
Notes
Lichtenfels and Bad Staffelstein are on the main Bamberg-Coburg railway line; more trains stop at Lichtenfels. To pick up the path from Lichtenfels, turn right out of the station and keep following Bamberger Strasse until the town runs out — it takes a while, but don’t give up. There’s a MacDonald’s on the outskirts, and about here you’ll see a sign off on the left to the monastery. It’s a 30-40 minute walk in total from the station. Or you can get a bus or taxi.
Basilika Vierzehnheiligen itself is architecturally significant and built by Balthasar Neumann. If you’re into baroque tat, you’ll love it.
We're a pair of beer geeks who live in London in the UK. Bailey is a man, Boak is a lady. We've been writing this beer blog since April 2007 and it's taken us all over Britain and Europe in pursuit of the perfect pint.
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