This is a version of a conversation between the two of us that took place in Whitelock’s Ale House, Leeds, in October 2021. We may have had a few drinks in us before we got to this point.
B: I’m calling it – I think this goes into our Best Pubs in England list.
B: Based on just this one visit? Wow. But I see what you mean – a real city centre Timeless Institution. Like the City Arms in Cardiff.
B: That thing where it feels traditional and unchanged but has actually morphed slowly through the ages. So it’s just about on trend, but doesn’t feel trendy.
B: The range of beer is just great, isn’t it? Something for everyone. Local standards, some more experimental stuff, and a couple of regular beers.
[Editor’s note: from Five Points, which currently has custody of the pub.]
B: Why aren’t there more of these kinds of places? Every city in the UK ought to be able to support at least one. You know – the pub you recommend to everyone. The pub everyone recommends. Beer Twitter, CAMRA, your mate who’s lived in the city for years and doesn’t even really drink beer but just likes the atmosphere…
B: You need a bit of food to soak up the booze but it shouldn’t be a food place. It might not even really be a beer place. It’s a meeting place. A bolthole. Get away from shopping, take the weight off your feet, escape the weather, whether it’s too hot or too cold…
B: BANQUETTES! These places definitely have banquettes.
B: A sort of historic interior is important – even if a lot of it is fake.
B: So where are the other examples? Is London too big to have one?
B: It feels as if, with London, you’re lucky to get two out of three of: atmosphere, beer quality, universal welcome. There are definitely some great pubs in the centre, like The Harp, or those mews pubs – they probably get the closest – but the best ones are often standing room only and can feel a little cliquey.
B: Bristol doesn’t have one, does it? And dare we opine on Manchester?
B: No, don’t think we know it well enough. But I bet if we asked Twitter “which pub in Manchester would you recommend as a must-visit” you’d get some suggestions.
B: Probably the same with Sheffield, right? So does the existence of the Universally Recommended Timeless Institution type of premises actually mean that drinking options are more limited? Do places like Whitelocks and the City Arms become great because of a lack of competition? Makes it easier to keep hitting the sweet spot.
B: That feels a bit unfair to Leeds though – there are clearly other atmospheric city centre pubs with good ale. Why has this particular place managed to gain and keep this reputation? It’s not even as if it’s been in the same continuous ownership.
B: I’m going to start wanging on about genius loci if you’re not careful… What are you having next?
After a week in Leeds, we’ve decided Kirkstall Brewery belongs in the top rank of UK breweries.
What sent us to the brewery tap on our first night in town was, frankly, panic. On a Saturday night, even in these strange times, Leeds city centre is a lively place – all hens, stags and overflowing pubs. The Kirkstall tap was the first place we could find that was (a) open and (b) beyond the Big Night Out circuit, beyond the ring road.
And what a beyond it is – under the concrete of the A58, past casinos and hotels, past wasteland and the derelict remains of the Arla Foods HQ, just before the vast studio where ITV films Emmerdale.
Set into a square-edged modernist building in gleaming black and glass, showcasing stainless steel brewing kit, the tap itself is like an oasis: warm light, warm brown wood and the smell of pizza on the air.
A sort of magic has been worked in the space with greebling and structure magpied from elsewhere. Antique mirrors and enamel signs add depth and a sense of history, set against panelling, screens, stained glass and engraved glass salvaged from long gone buildings.
It feels like a pub. Or maybe more like a German beer hall. Perhaps a touch too bright, perhaps a touch too open, but certainly somewhere that invites you in and makes it hard to leave.
The range of beer is impressive, too, with five cask ales, and eight or nine on keg, as well as a handful of outside brews. The styles available range from traditional (bitter, pilsner, imperial stout) to modern – ice cream sour and blood-orange hefeweizen.
On our first visit, we zeroed in on Kirkstall Pale Ale (bitter, £3.60/pint), Three Swords (pale and hoppy, £3.80/pint) and Pilsner (£4.20/pint). All three share a precision and clarity that says this is a serious brewery with serious quality control.
Pale Ale provides what you want from Tetley’s: somehow both simple and complex, with malt you can get your teeth into, and a finish that makes you sigh with satisfaction. It’s as hoppy as it can be without the hops breaking out and making a fuss. It was the best beer we drank all week, we think, and might be a contender for beer of the year.
Pilsner came a close second, with a fresh green quality that took us back to Franconia.
Three Swords, by comparison, was merely a bloody good example of the type of beer also produced by Saltaire, Ossett and any number of other Yorkshire breweries. But note – bloody good.
You might have rolled your eyes at the mention of ice cream sour above. Well, guess what – that was also a rather brilliant bit of work. It’s called Gelato Tropicale and is one of those rhubarb-and-custard beers: sugar, a touch of acid, lots of vanilla. It prompted a ‘same again’ from Jess.
It wasn’t all perfect. We didn’t enjoy Black Band porter as much as the others. It struck us as a bit harsh with too much coffee and an aggressive bitterness that made getting to the end of the glass a challenge. But we suspect others might love it and it certainly wasn’t badly put together.
On our second visit, the night before we left Leeds, we had to try the 12.4% imperial stout, Drophammer, at £4 for a third of a pint. Our immediate impression was that someone has been playing around with historic Courage Russian Imperial Stout recipes. We were impressed but, still, it prompted some debate: at that strength, at that price, it should be something pretty special, but we weren’t sure it quite reached those heights. Almost, though – almost.
As a side note, it’s worth noting that Stuart Ross, late of Magic Rock, is now brewing at Kirkstall. Not much fuss has been made about this – we picked it up from Twitter – but he’s a brewer who knows what he’s doing.
And another note, while we’re at it: we also drank a couple of Kirkstall beers at Whitelocks, where they tasted similarly fantastic; and at Bundobust in Leeds, where they didn’t. So don’t be surprised if you encounter it at your local and struggle to match our gushing above to your experience. No beer is bulletproof, especially not cask ale.
Disclosure: in 2014, when Brew Britannia was published, Kirkstall brewed a beer for the launch event at North Bar. We didn’t pay them, they didn’t pay us.
A while ago someone on Twitter said they’d like to read a history of the Leeds beer scene. We wanted to read one, too, but didn’t feel it was our place to write it. Then we recalled the success of a couple of pieces we’d written ‘in their own words’ and decided that at least we could facilitate.
What follows is based on emails and interviews, some dating as far back as 2013 (John Gyngell and Christian Townsley), others from the past month or so, with light editing for sense and clarity.
We’ve also used a quote from Richard Coldwell’s blog because we get the impression he wouldn’t want the mere fact that he sadly died in July stop him contributing on a subject about which he was so passionate.
Ian Garrett Drinker and CAMRA activist I first drank in Leeds in the early 1970s, when I was a student in Bradford and visited the city to go to gigs at the University. The only pubs that beer lovers talked about were The Victoria Family and Commercial Hotel, and The Whitelocks. Leeds was awash with Tetley pubs and I remember when doing a PGCE in Leeds the wonderful aromas wafting over the city centre as they mashed in. I guess the ‘beer scene’ in Leeds had a few faltering starts. There was the CAMRA owned pub The Eagle which always seemed to be struggling whenever I ventured there. Then, in the 1980s, The Fox & Newt brewpub opened and, of course, The Felon & Firkin where Dave Sanders first plied his trade.
Barrie PepperBeer writer and veteran CAMRA activist
Leeds had a beer explosion came around the turn of the century. I think Ian Fozard – now the Chairman of SIBA – had quite a bit to do with it. The amazing success of his Market Town Taverns company, which he started in the mid-1990s with the Long Boat in Skipton, like Topsy, just grew and grew. His policy was to sell a good selection of cask beer in pleasant surroundings to accompany good food. There were also continental beers and a fine wine list. The estate grew to ten pubs – all in Yorkshire, five in Leeds – and by the issue of the 2008 Good Beer Guide, every one of the ten pubs was in it. There were some other factors of course. Tetley’s opened a few brew pubs and was developing its Feast group and some Festival pubs which had guest beers on their bars. Other breweries followed suit. A couple of small breweries located at pubs opened with prize-winning ales. The city’s drinkers had an impressive choice.
Christian Townsley (left) and John Gyngell at North Bar c.1997.
Zak AveryBeer writer and retailer
John Gyngell and Christian Townsley from North Bar were pioneers, doing the beer thing before craft beer existed.
John GyngellCo-founder of North Bar
People thought we were making a mistake opening a bar on Briggate. This was kebab alley. I remember driving past here with my Mum and showing her the site and she just said: “What the hell are you doing?”
Christian Townsley Co-founder of North Bar
I was 22 when we opened on 26 June 1997; John was a bit older. It was really quiet for the first six months, or something like that. At first, the beer wasn’t anything special, largely because of the brewery loan from John Smith’s. Back then, that was really the only way to finance something like this, if you didn’t have a rich mummy and daddy.
John Gyngell
I can’t remember if we approached James Clay or they approached us, but that’s how we started getting more interesting beer. We’ve always had a great relationship with them, and we became more-or-less their brewery tap. Brooklyn, Goose Island, that kind of thing.
Christian Townsley
Erdinger Weissbier was an early one. We were the first place in the UK to sell it and I guess we’re a bit proud of that. In bottles, we had the Chimays, Duvel and Anchor Liberty, when they were pretty hard to find. We’d been drinking Liberty at the Atlantic and at Mash. That was a real landmark beer – probably where, for me, something clicked.
Matt Gorecki Owner of Zapato brewery, industry ‘face’
The first Belgian beer I had was a Hoegaarden in some terrible pub down lower Briggate and I almost smashed a tooth on the huge glass. The same night I was introduced to North Bar by a friend and marvelled at the freely flowing pints of Erdinger. When I started working at The Cross Keys [part of the North chain] I was educated by Mr Christian Townsley in the beauty and subtlety of some of the imported US, Belgian and German beers that were available at the time from James Clay. Leeds at that point had a few stand-out venues but interesting cask ale was only really just starting to take hold. My first ever beer purchase as manager was casks of Marble Ginger – the first time over the Pennines!
Ian Garrett
Special mention must go to the original BeerRitz which was a wholesale-retail warehouse where it was possible to pick up some great Belgian beers by the bottle or case.
Zak Avery
After university, I was working on a PhD with the Open University and also writing music. I was living in Headingley just round the corner from BeerRitz and one day in 2000 they put up a sign advertising for a part time shop assistant. Eighteen months in, I was managing the shop and a couple of years after that had launched thebeerboy.co.uk to host beer tastings as corporate events. The shop went from strength to strength – best independent beer retailer 2003 – and I started writing beer-related website content. In my mind, it was before blogging was really a thing, but I might be wrong about that. From 2008, I started doing video beer reviews – I’ve been blamed for the whole phenomenon by various people – and get chosen as Beer Writer of the Year by The British Guild of Beer Writers. 2009 saw the blog Are You Tasting The Pith? launch and in 2011 my business partner and I bought out Beer Paradise and BeerRitz.
Neil WalkerBlogger, later employed by CAMRA and now SIBA
Dean at Mr Foley’s was the guy that dragged Mr Foley’s into the 21st century, got good keg beers on the bar and modernised what they were all about. It was always a good ale bar but 2011 was when it started to get really interesting.
Dean Pugh Head of European bar operations for BrewDog
I moved to Leeds for university in 2003 and was working part time at Wetherspoons. I had a shift manager there who taught me everything about cask ales and cellar management. I moved into management and different Wetherspoon locations in Leeds, always taking on the responsibility of the cellar and organising real ale festivals. I had a friend who was running the tap room at York Brewery and they were purchasing a bar on the Headrow called Dr Okells. I joined as general manager and the bar was rebranded as Mr Foley’s, opening in 2007. My initial aim when opening Foley’s was to become the best cask ale pub in the city, and we were named Leeds CAMRA pub of the year in 2008. Around the same time I joined Foley’s in 2007 I was also discovering American craft beer, mostly through visits to North Bar. I remember Brooklyn Chocolate Stout being one of the first beers that really grabbed my attention and showed me a different side to beer. I brought this back to Foley’s, beginning with an extended bottle list, but soon convinced my bosses to hand over that draft lines too.
Neil Walker
Mr Foley’s felt like the common room for the Leeds beer scene. Its ample space and relative cheapness made it ideal for events and beer-gatherings – bottle-shares, beer launches and so on. We even had a beer dinner there with Garrett Oliver [of Brooklyn Brewery] pouring Ghost bottles of wine-lees aged saison paired with buffalo chicken wings and pulled pork prepared by Tyler Kiley.
Dean Pugh
I think towards the end of my time at Foley’s we had around six to eight rotating taps for craft beer, two BrewDog taps, ten cask ales, bag-in-a-box real cider and probably up to a hundred bottled and canned beers.
Neil Walker
One of the early, key moments for me was IPADay in 2011. It felt like an important moment – everyone seemed to be there and everyone remembers it. As well as the international beer list there were some great offerings from British brewers and I remember Zak Avery and Dave from Hardknott making impassioned and semi-incomprehensible speeches on the style. My first memory of feeling like I was in a beer scene was the Brewdog IPA is Dead launch at North Bar. There were just so many bloggers there and at that time it felt a little bit competitive, albeit in a friendly way, and I remember writing up my tasting notes at about 6 am the next morning to make sure I was first to press.
Zak Avery
I was shit broke in 2010, really struggling to make ends meet, managing the shop, trying to go freelance, a new parent. I was selling things to meet mortgage payments. I wrote a really well-paid advertorial for Guinness. It wasn’t all totes craft amazeballs, you know?
Mike Hampshire Former local CAMRA chair, owner of Mike’s Tap Room
The single key turning point in Leeds beer has been the closure of Tetley’s Brewery in 2011. As sad and difficult as it was, it effectively hit the reset button on the Leeds beer scene. The US craft revolution was well underway and lots of micro-breweries started popping up, seeing the huge gap in the Leeds market for traditional ales and US-influenced modern styles.
Ian Garrett
In its heyday, Tetley’s was one of the biggest breweries in the UK, Tetley’s Bitter was the best selling beer in the UK, Leeds drinkers knew what to expect from a good pint of Tetley’s, and they drank it by the gallon.
Leigh Linley Retired blogger, author of Great Yorkshire Beer
The buzz around the first Leeds International Beer Festival in 2012 was fantastic. A real independent beer festival in Leeds, a shift toward keg being not only accepted but expected.
Maria Estibaliz Organiser of the Leeds International Beer Festival
We wanted to create a festival that celebrated and embraced the independent craft scene in the UK as existing beer events weren’t really recognising the amazing things that were going on in the industry and a lot of new, great breweries were being overlooked. We also wanted to create something that was a lot more accessible and inclusive for younger audiences, particularly women in this age group, as the industry and festivals at the time were incredibly male dominated. We also wanted the brewers themselves to attend the festival, meet audiences and talk about their beer – and at the same time we encouraged audiences not be afraid to ask the brewers questions.
Leigh Linley
I recall sitting behind my desk at work eavesdropping on a group of colleagues who had no prior interest in beer who had got tickets for the Festival excitingly detailing what beers they were going to try. That felt different, for sure.
Zak Avery
The first LIBF, held in the city centre at the glorious town hall, marked a point where the scene started to properly cross over into the mainstream.
Leigh Linley
Leeds hosted the European Beer Bloggers Conference in 2012 – an event that probably passed a lot of non-bloggers by but the importance of having that many journalists, bloggers, writers and retailers in the city can’t be overstated. I think a lot of influential writers went away rethinking what Leeds was about. We did the city proud.
Gareth PettmanBlogger
Friends of Ham opening in 2012 was the game changer for me – one of those ideas that a lot of us had dreams of, but not the ability to execute. Tyler Kiley took over as head beer buyer there and under the Kitchings it was unbelievably rammed almost every night of the week.
Leigh Linley
Here was a bar that embraced beer culture but offered something totally different. It was a tiny, well-put-together bar with good beer but also more than that. It bridged the gap between beer and food (although it really wasn’t beercentric – it sold plenty of wine and sherry, too) in a way that really shook up the bar scene. And it did it in a ratty part of Leeds that’s thriving now, due to keystone businesses like FoH.
Richard Brownhill Little Leeds Beer House, Brownhill & Co
Claire and [Anthony ‘Kitch’ Kitching] really raised the bar in terms of quality in Leeds when they opened. It coincided with my move to Leeds and their focus on service and the originality of their concept was a real scene-setter at the time.
Zak Avery
Even though Friends of Ham has been through ‘financial restructuring’ which left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (metaphorically rather than literally, of course) I don’t think their importance can be overstated in changing the Leeds beer scene. It was qualitatively different from anything that had gone before, and set the blueprint for much that followed
Richard Brownhill
It was a real shame what happened with Friends Of Ham. I think their struggles just show the fragility of small independent businesses, regardless of reputation or standing in the industry. It’s an ever crowded market out there and it’s very easy for offerings to become diluted. It’s great that they managed to strike a deal to stay operating, and it’s starting to get back to it’s best – they have some great new people in there who have a real passion for the product.
Gareth Pettman
I arrived quite late to the scene itself and without friends who shared my burgeoning interest in beer, it wasn’t until Simon Girt, AKA ‘Leeds Beer Wolf’, organised a Twissup in 2014 that I actually made an effort to get to know people in Leeds and beyond. So for me, personally, the period between 2014-2016 was when the scene was at its peak, with regular bottleshares, mostly organised by Rob Derbyshire, AKA Hopzine, and held at Little Leeds Beer House or Northern Monk. The opening of Northern Monk was the next big leap forward in itself – without a significant number of breweries in Leeds this was probably the kick up the arse that others needed.
Russell Bisset Northern Monk Brew Co.
I started Northern Monk in a parent’s cellar in 2013, launching at The Sparrow in Bradford the summer of that year. Originally operating as a cuckoo brewery, we built our own brewery in a listed mill just outside the centre of Leeds, which launched in October 2014.
Matt Gorecki
Northern Monk are absolutely up there and their rate of growth and mastery of the market has been astonishing. Their beers have helped put the UK on the map across the rest of the world and especially in the US. Kirkstall’s cask offering and extremely solid expanding range of beers has been quietly winning hearts all over the place. Kirkstall have also breathed life into two pubs that had gone to the dogs and managed the importation of so many of the gateway brands and exciting US beers – the entire scene owes a lot to Steve Holt and Dave Sanders. There are also scene leaders and crossover successes like Bundobust, Little Leeds Beerhouse and the team behind Whitelocks – Ed Mason of Five Points and Ash Kollakowski – who’ve put this venerable pub back at the heart of the scene.
Richard Brownhill
Leeds Beer Week was started by myself, Matt Gorecki and James Ockelford from Refold Design in 2016 – both to complement the very popular Leeds International Beer Festival but also to have a week where the many venues of Leeds were all under one umbrella and in the spotlight. I had found as both as manager of Tapped Leeds in 2014 and at the fledgling Little Leeds Beerhouse in 2015 that although LIBF brought many people to the festival at the town hall, the impact was quite insular. The first couple of years were tough but we’ve now expanded the team to include more than ten people and it is 100% independently funded. We have so many amazing venues in Leeds who sponsor the week financially every year, and James produces world class design for our yearly guide which promotes all venues, big or small. I am particularly proud that we have built a model which is not for profit – we are paid a little for our time each year, and we pay our committed team, but every other penny from sponsorship, advertising and merchandise goes back into the festival to help it grow each year. Which is a good job as Matt’s bunting fetish knows no bounds.
Ian Garrett
Today’s scene, for me, is overcrowded as all the new bars try to entice the same handful of people. I tend to stick to a handful where I know there’s either excellent cask, well-kept, or a decent choice. Too many have eight varieties of IPA but that seems a common practice. It still looks like a healthy beer scene and new bars still appear, Brownhill & Co being a recent addition trying to do something a little different.
Richard Brownhill
Brownhill & Co is a blueprint for everything Bryony and I love about the drinking experience and is focused on providing relaxed, simple table service in a chilled environment. Ten taps of quality, no filler, and balanced with all sorts of styles – a rotating lager line and rotating cask beers. Many years of visiting Belgium had us wondering why the UK is allergic to table service in pubs and bars. I personally can’t think of anything better than not moving all day while a nice, friendly, knowledgeable person brings me lots of beer. We’re delighted to have been selected to host this year’s Cantillon Zwanze Day.
Leigh Linley
Leeds is still Leeds – there’s still a pub for all tastes within walking distance and the majority of the classic places are still there, doing well. There’s even more choice and it’s hard to not encounter ‘craft’ in most places now, like in any major city. At the risk of sounding like an old man, it’s getting increasingly expensive to drink in the city centre, but the scene itself is thriving – beer is mainstream, there’s no need to guide people anymore. There’s a new generation of drinkers discovering beer and enjoying some incredible venues that we’d have been over the moon to have enjoyed back in the early 2000s.
Richard Coldwell Blogger
There’s no doubt in my mind that Leeds is one of the premier beer cities in the UK and that includes making the stuff as well as consuming it. We just need to shout out and make our mark. I often think Leeds is a bit slow to catch on to self promotion. (2016.)
Matt Gorecki
There’s always something going on and a number of quality breweries are coming through, pushing things forward. Venues are higher quality and you’re starting to see some really good quality and curated selections rather than just a list of questionable hype beers that taste roughly similar. Leeds is at its peak right now.
Photo credits: All ours except the one based on ‘Leeds Town Hall at Night’ by Enchufla Con Clave via Wikimedia Commons and the picture of John Gyngell and Christian Townsley which they kindly supplied to us in 2013.
We’re very grateful to everyone who found time to respond to our questions so fully and frankly, but especially Zak Avery and Leigh Linley. This post was supported by Patreon subscribers like Will Jordan and Peter Sidwell. Please consider signing up, or just buy us a one-off pint via Ko-Fi. Alternatively, you can give us a boost by buying one of our books, or just by sharing something we’ve written on social media. Cheers! Ray & Jess.
After a two-week break, here’s everything that grabbed our attention in the world of beer and pubs, from Autovac mild to pilot plants.
First, an interesting nugget from Birmingham: the long-derelict Fox & Grapes on Freeman Street in the city centre has finally been pulled down as part of high-speed rail construction. Why does this matter? Because it was the last remaining bit of Old Birmingham.
I can’t help but notice how same-y the selection is everywhere; As though there had once been a list of approved Belgian beers that no one has updated since the mid 2000’s. Michael Jackson’s Great Beers of Belgium is that list, and looking at the selection in the dusty shop windows it feels like no one has come along with the gravitas to approve new additions to the canon; it is stuck in amber… Cafe Bebo helps to ease me into the contemporary. It even has beers from breweries founded this century. I order De La Senne Zinnebir and some cheese from the Orval Trappist monastery to snack on.
The artwork is a send-up of the two composite nations – Flanders and Wallonia – and their antagonism of eachother. It employs satire, humour and caricature to make an important point: please dump the baggage of the past and let’s move on… Unlike the easy-goingness of the beer, the label artwork is utterly loaded.
We can imagine this making for an interesting series, reverse engineering the branding process to work out what breweries want us to understand from the small choices they make in their graphic design.
Incorporates 'Philips Radio from the 1970s' by David Martyn Hunt under Creative Commons via Flickr.
If you tuned the radio to BBC Leeds at 18:45 on a Wednesday in 1985 you’d hear What’s Brewing, a programme dedicated to beer and pubs.
It was established during the height of real ale mania, in 1975, by a local journalist and CAMRA activist, Barrie Pepper, who worked in the newsroom at Radio Leeds and would go on to become a well-known beer writer. In a later retrospective in the CAMRA newspaper, also called What’s Brewing, for March 1985, he recalled its origins:
[The radio show] made its first appearance… after pressure from members of the Leeds branch of CAMRA. In that programme, though to be a one-off, Tom Fincham and I made the first of our ‘rural rides’ in search of good ale, we defined real ale and Eddie Lawler sang his now famous ‘We’re all here for the real thing’.
‘Famous’ might be overstating it but Eddie Lawler told us in an email that he has performed the song at the CAMRA AGM. He was kind enough to share the version he recorded under the title ‘CAMRAnthem’ for his 2007 album The Baildon Sky Rocket with 1970s references to ‘big-busted barmaids’ and the ‘nattering spouse’ removed. As you might guess, it’s a folky pub singalong with a piano backing:
We’re all here for the Real Thing.
That’s why we’re singing this song, just to show all those
Fancy TV promotions
That the customer’s not always wrong, so you’d better not
Give us pale imitations
Or gas us with chemical beer.
So just give us a pint of the Real Thing landlord
’Cos that’s why we’re bloody well here.
Off the back of that first programme the producer, David Campbell, commissioned a year’s-worth of monthly programmes. In his 1985 retrospective Barrie Pepper described the difficulty in finding topics for discussion and, in particular, the challenge of finding a Pub of the Month every month. (The first was The Greyhound at Saxton.)
Barrie Pepper.
There was also a ‘real ale soap opera’ called Tap Room Tales written by Gerry Garside from Bradford which was representative of the ribald, pantomime humour that characterised early CAMRA culture. There’s an extract from the first episode, broadcast in August 1977, in Barrie Pepper’s 1990 anthology of beer writing The Bedside Book of Beer:
Episode one — the Price of a Pint
The scene is the tap room of The Plastered Parrot, a real ale pub in a working suburb of a West Riding town. The time is half an hour before closing time on a weekday evening.
Let me introduce you to the cast.
Nora Nockers is an occasional barmaid; Yorkie Bale is a retired shoddy merchant, Shufflem Round is the pub domino captain and Barum Hall is the landlord. Charlie Chock, Gordon Spile, Andrew Mallet and Peter Barrel are members of the Campaign for Real Ale. Girlington Gertie is an aging ex-chorus girl and we present Lars Torders, a Swedish Steel worker.
In his 1985 retrospective Barrie admitted that Tap Room Tales ‘might have seemed a bit facile… but it had a serious purpose and was great fun to take part in’.
From 1980 What’s Brewing went weekly and Barrie took over as producer with Mike Greenwood hosting. There was homebrew advice from Bob Blagboro, profiles of Yorkshire breweries, and campaigns against pub closures. ‘[In] the case of the Spring Close Tavern in East Leeds we were able to secure the reprieve by Leeds City Council live on our microphone,’ Barrie recalled in 1985.
Though Barrie insisted the show was independent of CAMRA he was at various points on the Campaign’s National Executive and it certainly seems to have given the local branch what amounted to a mouthpiece funded by the licence payer.
The last episode was broadcast in June 1986 for reasons Barrie explained in an email:
I moved on from the news room at BBC Radio Leeds to become Head of Press and Public Relations with Leeds City council. Ray Beaty, the station manager, wasn’t keen on a non-staffer producing — he didn’t mind a freelance (unpaid) presenter but worried about someone ‘speaking out of turn’ as he called it. In any case I couldn’t find anyone to do the job and the council wouldn’t allow me to do it.
So, that was that.
Thirty-odd years on, though BBC radio only touches on beer occasionally, in the current podcast boom there’s no shortage of beer-related audio. For example, we recently listened to Fermentation Radio for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed it. We’ll send Barrie Pepper the link.
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