Categories
Beer history

Serve short measures, face eternal damnation

alewife

As well as a lot of great pubs and a couple of breweries, Salisbury in Wiltshire also boasts one of the finest medieval church Doom paintings in the country. The huge mural at St Thomas’s Church depicts a sort of Biblical apocalypse — a world overrun by devils, dragging people down into Hell.

Of course, there’s something of interest to beer geeks here, too: the ale wife (pub landlady) who faces eternal damnation for her habit of serving short measures.

Why don’t CAMRA make more of this threat in their ‘Take it to the Top’ campaign?

Categories
pubs

Two contrasting pubs

Salisbury has lots of nice pubs but, in the short time were there last weekend, we knew we had to visit these two.

haunchofvenison

The Haunch of Venison

The ‘Aunch is the kind of heritage boozer (like the Old Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street) we’re quite pleased to see tourists in. Not a tourist trap, but a bona fide tourist attraction. The tiny, warped old bar is very weird — pumps are mounted over the cellar stairs and on knackered old wooden boxes. Not that it has an effect on the beer, with the Summer Lightning being served in absolutely perfect condition. We drank it in one of the tiny panelled partitions, sitting on a pew that looked as if it might well have been there since the pub’s medieval founding.

hiddendepths

The Chough

At first glance, this looks like a Carling-and-alcopops party pub, but it’s actually the main outlet for the Hidden Brewery. With eight or so Hidden ales on offer, ranging from weak and yellow to strong and black, it was an exciting find. Sadly, some of the beer wasn’t in good condition — maybe there were too many beers on offer for the small number of ale drinkers? Hidden Depths, however, was one of the juiciest, tastiest cask stouts we’ve had in a while and made it all worthwhile.

Categories
beer in fiction / tv pubs

P.G. Wodehouse on the pub trade

Having bought his tobacco and observed the life and thought of the town for half an hour… he made his way to the Emsworth Arms, the most respectable of the eleven inns which the citizens of Market Blandings contrived in some miraculous way to support. In most English country towns, if the public houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the innkeepers blaming the Government.

From Something Fresh (1915)

Categories
beer reviews

How can beer be peppery?

rushymede

Beer reviewers like to use certain words time and time again. ‘Peppery’ is one that we’ve seen a lot but which has left us nonplussed — what are they on about?

Red Rock’s Rushy Mede organic ale (bottle-conditioned, 4.4%) helped us to get our heads round it.

It’s something like Hopback Summer Lightning but with a spicy, tongue-tingling edge. Nettles? Medicinal herbs? Although we’re not always impressed by organic beers, we really loved this and found it not only illuminating but also a very convincing imitation of a cask ale.

Categories
Beer history

Things have changed

ushers

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.