Categories
london pubs videos

MUSIC: Pub Crawling Blues

We were tipped off to this by a documentary about British blues music Lenny Henry made for Sky Arts.

It’s from a 1969 LP called Black London Blues which is pretty great from start to finish and is available on Spotify, iTunes, and to buy on CD.

And, yes, that is Ram John Holder as in Pork Pie from the 1990s sitcom Desmond’s, who turns out to be a very interesting bloke.

I had ten pints of bitter at the volunteer of Gloucester Place.
I’m pub crawling… I’m the Ram.
I’m pub crawling… I’m your man.

Categories
News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads 14/11/2015

Here’s the beer news and commentary that most interested or amused us in the last seven days.

→ For Belgian Smaak, Breandán Kearney writes at length about a collaboration between Irish and Belgian brewers:

A hard-nosed Belgian farmer arrives at the historical brew house in the Flemish village of Bokrijk on an old Dexta tractor to pick up the spent grain… Rob Hynes makes a bee line for the tractor. “That’s a thing of beauty,” he says. “I used to own one years ago but I sold it. I regret that.”

→ Des de Moor has been exploring the Midlands and wrote a long piece about Black Country breweries for his website, Beer Culture:

The name dates from this period: contemporary accounts talk of a blasted land of spoil heaps and perpetual twilight, overcast by factory smoke in the daytime and lit by furnaces at night. J R R Tolkein, who grew up in south Birmingham, based his chief villain Sauron’s desolate domain in The Lord of the Rings on this landscape. Its name, Mordor, even translates as ‘black country’ in the author’s invented languages.

→ In the age of ‘crowd-funding fatigue’ Seth Fiegerman’s take for Mashable, under the headline ‘Crowdfunding may not create the ‘next Facebook,’ but it’s great for craft breweries‘, is an interesting one. (Via @BeerAttorney.)

Categories
pubs

A Vivid Memory

When I was at nursery and just starting school, my parents ran a pub in Exeter and many of my earliest memories are from this time.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the day I ‘helped’ my taciturn Lancastrian Grandpa with the stock-take.

I don’t remember it all that clearly — I was four — but there are few almost still images and short fragments of playback, cut together in a montage.

The weather was grey but must have been warm because I’m sure I was wearing shorts. I’m also sure I was sat on an upturned crate, in the yard by the cellar door.

The cellar itself was whitewashed, cold and damp, with spores on its breath.

Gramps was wearing his black Harrington jacket with the red tartan lining, grumbling as he shifted bottles around with yellow-stained, tough old hands. He was probably smoking — he was always smoking — but I can’t remember for sure.

There was a blue plastic crate full of bottled beer with blue labels — light ale, I suppose — right next to me for a long time. The caps were bright blue and smooth, pretty and button-like, and I remember coveting them.

Then a crate full of root beer in glass bottles landed in front of me. I asked what it was — is it like cola? He told me. I pestered him to let me try it. Eventually, he grumpily popped open a bottle and then went into the bar, still muttering, to pay for it.

But I hated it so much it made me cry. (Which is probably why I remember this moment at all.)

Categories
Beer history pubs

A Quick Quiz Question

The Windsor Castle by Ewan M.
The Windsor Castle by Ewan M, used with permission. Thanks, Ewan!

Why would the above pub be a particularly suitable place to drink during November?

We’ll post the answer at the end of the day.

UPDATED 14:55

Well done, Andrew — the Windsor Castle is the current headquarters of the Handlebar Club which celebrates moustaches with ‘graspable extremities’. Appropriate, we reckon, for ‘Movember‘.

We first came across mention of the club in a 1947 issue of LIFE magazine accompanied by this picture:

The Handlebar Club, 1947.

The American magazine describes the venue for the meeting as ‘the Temple pub’ but we haven’t been able to work out where exactly that was. (Possibly actually a restaurant?) Jimmy Edwards is in there somewhere — third from left, or is that him at the far end of the table on the right?

Here’s another pic from the same article, captioned ‘Boozer’s Droop’, and featuring a cameo from a ten-sided pint glass:

A moustachioed man with a pint glass.

Categories
Environmental stuff opinion pubs

Climate Change and British Beer

The Guardian today features a story about the Cantillon brewery in Brussels which, owner Jean Van Roy says, is suffering as a result of climate change:

“Ideally it must cool at between minus 3C and 8C. But climate change has been notable in the last 20 years. My grandfather 50 years ago brewed from mid-October until May – but I’ve never done that in my life, and I am in my 15th season.”

This reminded us of an exchange we had with a senior figure at one of the larger British breweries last year who said that climate change was among their biggest long-term worries.

In particular, they suggested, cask ale still relies to a great extent on naturally cool pub cellars. (And, as a result, warm summers can already be a problem for cask ale quality.) If those summers last longer, and get hotter, traditional British beer will struggle. Cellar refrigeration is already common but might become absolutely necessary, even in pubs that haven’t needed it in the past.

That’s on top of concerns over how it might affect hop farming and malting barley; a nagging sense of guilt over the amount of water used in brewing; and about the amount of energy used to ship it, and its ingredients, very often under refrigeration.

We’d be interested to hear from others involved in brewing and the pub trade: is climate change on your ‘risk register’?