Passing Through Brentford

For reasons too boring to explain, we spent the last night of our holiday in Brentford, West London, where we set out to satisfy a craving for Fuller’s beer.

There are two Fuller’s pubs on the high street — the Beehive and the Six Bells. Though both are ornate palaces to booze c.1910, we chose the Beehive for the perfectly sensible reason that its exterior tiling and lettering is the more eye-catching.

Inside, we were bumped back down to earth by football on the telly and bright, functional lighting. It’s what you might call a community local — that is, people who actually live nearby drink there regularly enough to know each other and the staff by name — and we did get stared at just a little bit, even after we’d retreated to a table in Billy-no-mates corner with the lone crossword puzzle solvers and plastic bag clutchers.

The beer? ESB tasted good, though not as good as at the Jugged Hare on Vauxhall Bridge Road earlier in the same week, and the Pride was very decent, too. It is also the kind of pub that has Fuller’s Pale Ale in tiny brown bottles (we’ve not seen this since the Plough in Walthamstow c.2007, now a convenience store) and something we couldn’t resist trying: keg Chiswick bitter. We can’t recommend it, but that probably won’t surprise you.

When we Tweeted about keg Chiswick, we got into a conversation via private messages with a local expert who told us that (a) he’d been told never to go into the Beehive if he valued his life and (b) that the Magpie & Crown just up the road was a must-visit pub.

Now, here’s a thing: we’d instinctively taken the fact that the M&C is a freehouse in London as a warning sign. If it was anything other than on its last legs, wouldn’t a brewery or pub company have snapped it up by now? And it does look a bit tatty from the outside — has any item of pub livery aged worse than those Watney Combe Reid roundels? But we took our correspondent’s advice, left the Beehive, skipped the Six Bells, and went to the Magpie.

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We found something that looked like a classic ‘real ale pub’ — resolutely un-trendy and, like the Pembury Tavern in Hackney, with shelves full of paperback sci-fi novels. Metal-band-T-shirt-and-pony-tail rather than ironic-moustache-and-no-socks territory. The clientele seemed to be made up mostly of Brentford’s hidden middle-aged, middle class, with the odd walk-in pub-crawler.

At second glance, we noticed a dangling sign advertising ‘Craft Keg’, as well as a decent lot of Belgian and American British bottles. We were after cask-conditioned beer, though, and loved what happened when we scanned the pumps: the chap behind the bar said, “Hello!” and then, pointing at each in turn, “This one’s good; this one’s very good; this is good but will be better tomorrow; good; very good.” This bit of showman’s patter found the sweet spot between a know-it-all lecture and complete indifference — much more helpful than (shrug) “They’re all nice.”

All the beers we tried were in good nick and well-made, and if we didn’t especially like a couple of them, it was purely because they weren’t to our taste. (We weren’t taking notes, hence no specifics, but there were beers from Thornbridge and Hardknott among others.) It’s certainly no surprise that the local CAMRA branch loves the place.

It won’t appeal to everyone — pubs with personality never do — but it might just be your new favourite. If you find yourself out West, it’s surely worth a bus ride and the price of a pint to find out.

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We got another pass at Fuller’s on the way out of London with our now traditional pre-train lunchtime session at the Mad Bishop & Bear at Paddington, where we can report that cask Chiswick tasted better than ever. What a great beer.