Categories
beer in fiction / tv

Saturday Kitchen — why no beer?

saturdaykitchen
Chef James Martin and his trademark lecherous leer.

Inspired by Pete Brown’s excellent letter to the Independent, we decided to drop the BBC a line and ask why their hugely popular Saturday Kitchen cookery show hardly ever mentions beer. With the 350 characters we were given, we said:

Saturday Kitchen is great and I’m a regular viewer. But I’m getting frustrated because, while wine is discussed every week, it’s very rare to hear anything about beer. There are loads of interesting, complex beers around, that go well with food; and lots of people in the UK prefer beer to wine. Please suggest some beer and food pairings in future.

With hindsight, we don’t think “great” is quite the word we were after, but we always like to start with something positive when we’re writing nutty letters of complaint.

Seriously, though — would it kill them to schedule five minutes every couple of weeks for someone like Pete to talk about beer? We’d much rather have beer treated as part of the mainstream like that than sit through another Oz and James cackfest.

We don’t hate wine or people that drink wine but we are much more interested in beer.

Categories
beer in fiction / tv pubs

Pub Nightmares

teddybear
A giant singed teddy bear in a pub. Why?

When you’ve got a nice office job like us, you have feedback directed at you left, right and centre. But if you run a pub, who is there to give you frank and constructive advice?

Beerintheevening.com and other ratings sites offer some feedback from punters but, in most cases, it doesn’t look all that helpful: “the managers no help, he should get a job at pickfords, cos moving the furiture is all he’s good for”.

Gordon Ramsay’s TV series Kitchen Nightmares might look like yet another example of contrived, confrontational reality drama but, underneath all the shouting and would-be tense music, there is an experienced businessman reviewing his peers’ business practices. The changes he suggests are almost always small things and often common sense but they make a big difference and are exactly the kinds of change someone who’s too close to their own business would never dream of.

For example, Ramsay almost always tells restaurant owners to shrink and simplify the menu. Wouldn’t that same advice translate to a lot of pubs, too: you don’t need five boring lagers, just two. Or, that other classic: “Why are you buying fucking crab from Vietnam when your restaurant is on the seaside?” Pubs in London that only sell beer from Yorkshire (unless it’s a Yorkshire theme pub) are missing a trick, surely? Ditto pubs in the West Country whose only ale is London Pride.

Ramsay also redecorates the restaurants he visits. Invariably, they look tons better. The phrase “fresh pair of eyes” springs to mind. Lots of pubs could do with this: “You know what? You should lose the weird skeleton made of lacquered cigarette ends. It’s quite creepy. And that giant singed teddy bear by the fire…?”

So, who is out there to give the people who run pubs the same kind of guidance?

Just to be clear, we’re not volunteering for the job. We like pubs, but we’ve got no idea how you run one. We’re also not asking Channel 4 to make Ramsay’s Pub Nightmares or the BBC to give us Oz, James and Neil Morrissey Bicker with Landlords.

Categories
london pubs real ale

Fuller’s Hock

Last night, I had a pint of Fuller’s Hock in the Red Lion on Duke of York street in central London. Hock is the seasonal special, apparently, and very nice indeed. It’s great to see a 3.5% dark mild in a normal pub — and selling like hotcakes, too.

Not a bad pub, either.

Categories
pubs

Porter in the pub

porters

I wish more British pubs had a porter on tap, at least between September and March. More as in all.

I’ve been weaning my brown-beer-loving Dad onto dark beer for a few months now. He was bowled over by Sam Smith’s Taddy Porter at his birthday dinner; loved their Imperial Stout when he tried it in London; and had his socks knocked off by a particularly impressive bottle of Meantime’s London Porter on Christmas Day.

On Boxing Day, he sighed and said: “I might go to the pub if they had a nice porter on, but they won’t, will they?”

Knowing the pubs in my home town, I had to agree that the chances were slim of finding a dark beer other than Guinness.

It was with some excitement, then, that he reported his discovery of a pub in Plymouth (the Thistle Park Inn, where his band were playing) which was serving Sutton’s Plymouth Porter. It sounds delicious — Dad said treacle; Adrian Tierney Jones suggests it’s made with Cascade and/or Bramling Cross hops. It made my Dad’s day.

Categories
Uncategorized

Galway Hooker in London

In a comment on our New Year’s wish list Beer Nut has kindly alerted us to the fact that Galway Hooker will be available at the Porterhouse in London’s Covent Garden this week as part of a festival of independent Irish breweries.

We’ll have to give it a go, crowds of Lynx-drenched teenagers nothwithstanding.

On which subject, if any landlords, brewers or boozers want to let us know about interesting beers on offer in London, we’d be grateful.