The venerable Speaker, on Great Peter Street, Westminster, is having a Somerset beer festival from today.
This is a great idea and bound to appeal to homesick bumpkins like me.
I’ll admit that Somerset beer isn’t amongst the most exciting in the world, on the whole, but there are tons of small breweries in Taunton, Berrow, Frome, Yeovil, Wiveliscombe, Ashcott and elsewhere. I just hope their beer travels well.
The Speaker itself is a curious place. It’s the traditional haunt of old-school civil servants with a fondness for liquid lunches, and the windows are full of passive-aggressive signs (“This is a real pub! We don’t have music…” and so on). But for all that, it’s rather charming, with surprisingly friendly staff, and a deep commitment to serving a variety of interesting real ales from around the country.
Bailey
8 replies on “Somerset beer festival in central London”
From the last two posts, I can see someone’s got a hold of the latest London Drinker, I see!;-)
Seriously, it’s excellent for finding out about pub festivals in London, which are far more frequent than people realise. 45,000 copies are now printed – a large number of them for Wetherspoons – which is frankly astonishing for a local CAMRA publication.
Yeah, we linked to it in the first post. It’s a good read. We usually pick one up in the Pembury, but the Castle had a few out on Friday.
You should write something for them… I think your stuff fits the tone perfectly, particularly your posts with a historical angle.
Well, thanks, that’s very sweet of you.
Unfortunately, we barely have time to do the blog justice at the moment, let alone do other things. And Ron and Zythophile have rather raised the bar when it comes to writing about the history of beer.
Every time I think of writing something historical I have a pang of insecurity due to Messrs Pattinson and Cornell.
I am pleased to see I’ve prompted a love-in on this thread, as opposed to the slightly bad tempered exchange on the last-but-one post (sorry bout that).
[…] We popped along to the Speaker last night. All their guest beers this week are from Somerset. We tried Cotleigh Barn Owl (pleasant), Moor Revival (great) and Newman’s Wolvers Ale (funny tasting, but drinkable). As Tandleman pointed out, this pub is from the 70s — there’s a big tin of Henri Winterman’s cigars behind the bar, ploughmans were on offer, and there was a man drinking at the bar who looked like Peter Sutcliffe. […]
[…] night, we over-indulged, drinking an ill-advised six pints of Coach House Gunpowder Mild (3.8%) at the Speaker despite it being a school night. Today, we were as right as rain. That’s the wonder of the […]