Categories
pubs

Top Ten Cornish Pubs (So Far)

Vintage sign at the Blue Anchor, Helston.

UPDATED APRIL 2013: a new list of our favourite Cornish pubs is now available here.

As more beer geeks start to plan summer trips to Cornwall, we’ve been getting odd one-off queries about breweries, beer and pubs and so thought we’d put together a couple of posts with advice for visitors, of which this is Part the First.

The following list is of Cornish pubs we like and can recommend a visit to, if you’re in the area. Those we’ve starred are worth going out of your way to get to.

Note: we’re based way out west, so our choice is influenced by that.

The Driftwood Spars, St Agnes*
You often have to choose between great beer and a great view, but the Driftwood Spars does both. It’s a fabulous old, multi-room building with its own brewery, overlooking a beautiful secluded cove. A must visit. (Blog post.)

Star Inn, Crowlas (Penzance)*
Home of our beer in the year for 2011. The on-site brewery produces clean, precise and characterful real ales; both those and guest beers, usually from up north, are perfectly kept. You’d be mad not to drink Pete Elvin’s own stuff, but it’s also your best chance of getting non-Cornish beers in Cornwall. (Blog post.)

The Front, Falmouth*
Friendly staff, great range of ales and cider, bring your own food — what’s not to like? (Blog post.)

The Dock Inn, Penzance
Our usual choice in Penzance — one of the few places you can get Spingo beers other than at the Blue Anchor, often in better condition than on their home turf. Friendly welcome and good food, too. (Blog post.)

The Blue Anchor, Helston*
The beers brewed on site might be an acquired taste, tending towards West Country sweetness; and they reportedly had a bad patch a couple of years ago (but before our time); but this is nonetheless a Cornish institution, and a truly characterful pub. (Blog post.)

The Watering Hole, Perranporth
The beer is by no means great (it’s fine) but this is a pub on a beach. Not overlooking a beach, or near a beach — on a beach, with tables on the yellow sand. The teenage staff were a bit diffident last time we went but we can’t help but love a pub which feels so unusual and relaxed. (Blog post.)

Logan Rock Inn, Treen
A St Austell joint selling almost the full range; cosy in bad weather, with a bona fide beer garden for nicer days. A good place around which to plan coastal walks.

Old Ale House, Truro
Recently taken over by Skinner’s, this is the place to try their beers and stand a chance of enjoying them. It’s a nice cosy pub with some lovely old furnishings. Free peanuts too. (Blog post.)

Hand Bar, Falmouth
Where we go for an indulgent treat. Cornwall’s only craft beer bar. Classics from USA and Belgium are supplemented with occasional specials. If you’re from anywhere else in the country, you will probably have easier access to a better selection at cheaper prices, but we don’t, so it makes our list. (Blog post.)

St Austell Brewery Visitor Centre, St Austell
The obvious place to try St Austell beers, which occasionally offers the opportunity to try Roger Ryman’s experimental brews. For best results, go on a Friday afternoon when the staff knock off: there’s a great buzz and you might get to discuss your pint with the people who made it.

If you’ve got other first-hand recommendations, feel free to mention them in a comment below. If you’re a publican wondering why we haven’t mentioned your pub, why not drop us an email?

Categories
Blogging and writing bottled beer

Points of View

Our post about sink-pour gift shop beer prompted a few responses from other bloggers which we thought we’d round up here.

First, Jenni Nicholls of the recently closed Northcote Brewery wrote a helfpul and positive piece highlighting some beers from Norfolk that she thinks are worth drinking.

Nate rightly identified that our post wasn’t really about Norfolk and then got angry at people who chose to take it that way. (Much anger in this one, there is.)

Tandleman found himself thinking about his own approach to naming and shaming and (like us) decided that it was a matter of judging each case on its own merits, but that no-one deserves a public humiliation on the basis of one bad bottle or pint.

Kristy McCready questioned our suggestion that bigger or better established brewers are fair game for public criticism, suggesting that the best approach is always to focus on the positives. Being ignored, she suggests, is punishment enough. She also gave an excellent summary of the point we were trying to make — that we suspect a handful of brewers are driven by a desire for a slice of the tourist take rather than a love of beer.

Although we’d write that post differently today, we’re glad, at least, that it gave other people food for thought.

Categories
Belgium Generalisations about beer culture

How Can Belgian Beer be so Cheap?

The price of Belgian beer gets tossed into arguments on pricing like a Trappist-made hand grenade: how can newer craft breweries charge so much for their product when a classic, ‘world class’ beer like Saison Dupont can be bought for £1.80 a bottle?

Even in bars with leatherbound beer lists, Trappist beers like Westmalle Triple can be bought for several pounds less than beers of equivalent strength from hipper breweries. We have, in fact, found ourselves choosing Belgian beer in British bars to save a couple of quid.

Are monks less ruthlessly capitalistic than some other producers, as Jeff ‘Beervana’ Alworth suggests here?

From reading Stan Hieronymus’s BLAM! our suspicion is that it’s actually to do with the efficiency of longstanding brewing operations. Kinks have been ironed out, fermenting/conditioning times optimised (without compromise), and quality control processes perfected. They are also not shy with the cane sugar (15%-20% of some brews’ fermentables) and hop extract.

But is there more to it? And will their prices eventually creep up?

Categories
marketing opinion

A Household Name

A lot of what The Scottish Brewery does only makes sense when it occurs to you that they have one aim: to become a household name.

They simply don’t care if they’re loved or loathed, as long as they can break out of the beer geek ghetto and become the kind of brand that ‘normals’ have heard of. Their eyes are fixed firmly on the goal.

It explains their partnership with Tesco, which otherwise compromises their ‘punk’ brand, but gets their products and logo seen alongside Carlsberg et al; it explains their attention-at-any-cost approach to PR stunts;  and it explains this needy tweet which emerged at the height of the Diageogate PR triumph yesterday, when their story was trending worldwide:

We have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, what they’re doing to get where they want to be is pretty much constantly irritating; on the other, we’ve yet to see a British ‘craft brewery’ crossover into mainstream consciousness. If they make it, it might be a good thing in lots of ways, as long as they don’t pull the ladder up behind them.

Categories
beer reviews Belgium bottled beer

Starts out Belgian, Finishes American

Elliot's Brew

One of our missions on our spree last Saturday was to find a Mikkeler beer — any Mikkeler beer. The output of this Danish brewery has come to represent for us all the continental holidays we’re not having now Eurostar is less handy; and all the exotic beers we left behind in the bars of London.

And, of course, everyone is always bloody on about them. (Word of mouth marketing works, it turns out.)

When we enquired, the barman at the Hand Bar in Falmouth, helpful as ever, produced a bottle of Elliot Brew, told us the price and waited for us to recover from our faint before opening the bottle.

It’s supposedly a double or ‘imperial’ IPA but, being brewed at De Struise, and bearing only their name and logo on the label, is a peculiar, hard-to-fathom creature which defies labelling and seemed to metamorphose dramatically as it warmed up from fridge temperature.

Those first mouthfuls: faintly funky, dry and dusty, stale in a good way — just what we expect from a hoppy Belgian beer. But perhaps a little disappointing given the IPA billing, if we’re honest. (More fodder for the ongoing pondering about what IPA means, there.)

Then the second half: the dust dissappeared, the beer rounding out, getting fatter and jammier until, as we drained our glasses, it had somehow become American in character.

It was a remarkable trick, like the transformation scene in a werewolf movie, which made us want another, just to see if we could work out how it was done.

Don’t ask us how much it cost. Too much. We’ve blanked it out. More than our train tickets to Falmouth, at any rate. Shudder.