Does anyone know why Fuller’s have apparently decided not to release London Porter in cask-conditioned form this year?
Their website boasts that it is “widely regarded as the World’s finest porter” and it’s certainly a personal favourite of ours. It’s also had rave reviews from other beer bloggers.
So, why drop this one but continue to push the mediocre Jack Frost?
Fuller’s London Pride from a cask mixed with Fuller’s bottled London Porter makes a cracking half-and-half.
My Dad has developed a deep affection for Fuller’s beers and, when he’s in London, always finds an excuse to drop into one of their pubs. On his most recent trip, he’d only been off the train five minutes when he had us installed in the Mad Bishop and Bear at Paddington Station. (“Best wait for the rush hour crowds to pass.”)
Another of his favourite things is mixing his beers. At home in Bridgwater, it’s a necessity — every third pint of Butcombe Bitter down there is a bit stale and he relies on Mann’s Brown Ale to rescue them. On this occasion, he insisted on mixing Pride and London Porter, not because the Pride was bad, but because he really wanted a pint of mild and that, in his view, is the next best thing.
Usually, I find mixed beers are less than the sum of their parts, but this really was very drinkable, and offers yet another reason for more pubs to offer a good bottled stout or porter.
Bailey
Egon Ronay’s 1990 guide to pub and bar food is a fascinating read, having become something of a historical document.
For each pub he includes, he lists the beer available, and many of the brands have now disappeared: Ind Coope, Watneys, Charrington, Usher’s and Eldridge Pope crop up repeatedly. And whatever happened to Fuller’s K2 lager?
One the whole, things seemt to have improved. Even the best pubs in the 1990 edition seem to be there largely because they offered two real ales rather than one, and there was a lot of Webster’s Yorkshire Bitter on offer. The White Horse was rated as the best pub in London but, by current standards, sounds pretty run-of-the-mill.
But this passage from the introduction still rings true:
Have you ever walked into a pub full of people and immediately felt totally isolated? This can happen when most of the clientele already know each other and may have unwittingly sat in old Joe’s favourite chair by the fire. Fine if you are a member of the ‘club’ but not so pleasant if you are a stranger… On their travels, our inspectors are invariably strangers and gauge a pub on how well they are received and looked after as such. There is no point in recommending an otherwise lovely old inn somewhere in the wilds if visitors to the area are not going to feel welcome once inside.
Last night, I had a pint of Fuller’s Hock in the Red Lion on Duke of York street in central London. Hock is the seasonal special, apparently, and very nice indeed. It’s great to see a 3.5% dark mild in a normal pub – and selling like hotcakes, too.
Not a bad pub, either.
This month’s session is hosted by Musings Over a Pint, who’ve asked us to share a tripel.
Now, we share nice beers with each other all the time, so to make it more interesting, we thought we’d try to share a tripel with someone else. Unfortunately, beer blogging Friday came round quickly and we were left trying to incorporate the session into our post-work Friday drink.
Bailey made a valiant effort by getting his workmates to go to the Old Monk, which used to have Belgian beer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t anymore.
Tripels aren’t that easy to get hold of in your average pub (even if you accept that they exist as a style) so I thought about it a bit and decided that we could perhaps get the spirit of The Session if not the exact beer and took one of my very best friends to the Jugged Hare on Vauxhall Bridge Road to share a bottle of Fuller’s Vintage Ale. That makes it the second time this special beer has featured in a Session post.
This was from the 2007 batch; despite being relatively “young” the flavour was well-developed and rounded. Malty biscuits and marmalade were beautifully balanced with a slight musty hop flavour. My friend said; “that’s lovely. Fruity, syrupy, like wine”.
I prefer Vintage Ale to any tripel I’ve had yet, and more to the point I got some quality time with a very good friend. So, mission accomplished. Bring on the weekend.
If you want older vintages, the Mad Bishop and Bear at Paddington station are selling 2005 bottles. Bailey and I got wasted on them just before Christmas while he was waiting for a train to Somerset. Anyone spotted any older vintages in pubs in London?
Boak
A few weeks back, we went for a riverside walk in the East End and blogged about various pubs there. This time, we went Surrey side, starting at Tower Bridge.
While the tourists were busy snapping the bridge, we were photographing the remains of the Anchor brewery. Or rather, one of the Anchor breweries. There were (at least) two on the south side of the Thames. The arguably more famous one was further upstream, on Bankside, and was home to Barclay Perkins.
The Anchor Brewery at Tower Bridge
This month’s session is hosted by The Barley Blog, and we’ve been asked to knock back a limited edition anniversary beer and blog about it, perhaps explaining our choice.
Well, the reason for today’s choice is quite easy – the only candidate we had in was a Fullers’ Vintage Ale from 2005. Is it more common on the other side of the pond to have limited edition beers? I can’t think of many British breweries that do it.
The trouble with these limited edition, made-for-aging beers is deciding when to drink them. The longer you’ve had them in, the harder the decision gets. You need an occasion to justify it, and what better occasion than raising a glass to fellow beer-bloggers across the globe. Oh, that and the promotion one of us got this week.
The aroma of this 8.5% beastie was overwhelmingly of alcohol, specifically a sweet sherry or Pedro Ximénez. Like PX, it coats the tongue with sugar and fruits – we got hints of apricot and cherry. We didn’t notice a lot of bitterness at the end, and in fact the finish was a little on the sour side.
I’m not sure our tasting notes bear any resemblance to what Fullers say about this vintage, suggesting perhaps that it hasn’t aged that well — or that we, and the people we bought it from, haven’t aged it very well.
Still, it left a pleasant warming feeling in the belly.
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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