London’s Rake Bar has stolen all the good Cornish beer for the August bank holiday weekend. Amongst others, their Cornish beer festival features rare up-country outings for two of our favourite local breweries, the Penzance brewing company and the Driftwood Spars.
But… why can’t St Austell make some of their fancy beers more readily available in bloody Cornwall? By drinking endless pints of Tribute (or Proper Job if we’re really lucky) we subsidise the production of amazing-sounding beers like Smuggler’s Grand, Proper Black and Big Smoke, so that the urban beer bloggerati can get shitfaced on double IPAs. Not fair.
6 replies on “A plug and a rant”
Family and Regional brewers rarely like to erode their core beers in their home territory. God knows the logic, but they put it down to local preference. I doubt that entirely, though it has a bit of truth to it.
Much more complex than you’d think.
We tried Proper Job Black (yes nice) and the Smugglers one (extremely nice) at their brewery after the tour. You can buy bottles from their brewery shop but not as you said in their pubs.
Alas, you join the throngs of Cuban locals who smoke miserable cigars, the Columbians who cannot get a decent cup of coffee, and the Persians perched with numb buttocks on rug-print lino. As someone nearly said, “it’s the stupid economy.”
Tandleman — and yet, in Belgium, you have to go the gates of the brewery and beg if you want to try the really special stuff, cos it’s reserved for monks and locals…
MFB — yeah, brewery shop or mail order is what we keep getting when we ask breweries where we can get their beer in pubs. We don’t *hate* drinking bottles at home but we’d rather drink in a pub if we can.
Dan — true, true. Good examples. (PS. You keep putting the wrong address for your blog when you comment.)
Fixed. (browser auto-complete is worse than a spouse for not forgetting your mistakes). Thanks.
Interesting – I fall off my chair when we get a decent Sharp’s or St Austell beer in Leeds – looks like you guys have the same issue!