Tag: Manchester

Categories
Belgium london News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads 18 August 2018: Bartram’s, Belgium, the Barley Mow

Here’s everything published on beer and pubs in the past week that grabbed our attention, from teetotal tendencies to the extraordinary nature of ordinary pubs.

First, some trademark thoughtful reflection from Jeff Alworth at Beervana who asks ‘What If We Just Stopped Drinking?’

[What] if we just keep drinking less and less until we’re consuming it like our old auntie, who only pulls out the sherry for special occasions? This won’t happen immediately, but the trend lines are pretty clear… A dirty little secret of the alcohol industrial complex: it relies on very heavy drinkers, many of them alcoholics, for the bulk of sales. Among drinkers, the median consumption is just a couple drinks a week. That’s the median–some “drinkers” basically don’t drink at all. That means, of course, that someone’s doing a lot of drinking…

A Belgian Brown Cafe.

There’s a new links round-up in town: Breandán Kearney at Belgian Smaak has put together a rather wonderful rattle through all the Belgian beer and bar news from the last few months. How can you resist a 15 item list including such headers as CHINESE HOEGAARDEN and BEAVERTOWN GOES BELGIAN?

The mad collection at the Prince of Greenwich.
SOURCE: Deserter

For Deserter the pseudonymous Dirty South gives an account of a day spent trying to entertain a sullen teenager in the cultural pubs of South London:

The Prince is run by Pietro La Rosa, a Sicilian who has not only brought Italian hospitality and splendid Italian food to SE10, but opened a pub full of curios that he and his wife Paola have collected from their travels around the world. An enormous whale’s jaw bone hangs over various objets d’arts, a rhinoceros’ head protrudes above an antique barber’s chair, surrounded by artwork from afar.

‘It’s mad,’ concluded Theo.

The Bridge Inn, Clayton.
SOURCE: John Clarke.

Here’s something we’d like to see more of: veteran CAMRA magazine editor  John Clarke dusted down a pub crawl from 30 years ago and retraced his steps to see how time had treated the boozers of Clayton, Greater Manchester:

The Folkestone was closed, burnt out and demolished. New housing now occupies the site. The Greens Arms struggled on and then had a brief existence as the Star Showbar… The Grove also continues to thrive as a Holts house and the war memorial remains on the vault wall. No such luck with the Church.

The Barley Mow, London.
SOURCE: Pub Culture Vulture.

Ben McCormick has been writing about pubs on and off at his Pub Culture Vulture blog for a few years now and a recent flurry of posts has culminated with what we think is a profound observation:

[The Barley Mow] must be the best Baker Street boozer by a billion miles… I was on the point of writing there is nothing special about the place, but stopped abruptly on the grounds that’s complete horseshit. There ought to be many, many more examples of pubs like this dotted around central London and further afield. But there aren’t.

Any pub, however, ordinary, becomes extraordinary if it resists change — that makes sense to us.

A bit of news: Bartram’s, a brewery in Suffolk, seems to have given up brewing (the story is slightly confusing) which has given the local newspaper an opportunity to reflect on the health of the market:

Now Mr Bartram is currently no longer looking to export overseas, and is not producing any beer. “There are about 42 breweries in Suffolk – when I started 18 years ago, there were just five,” he said. “There is a lot more competition. The market is saturated, it’s ridiculous.”

Another Suffolk brewer, who declined to be named, claims overcrowding in the marketplace is true of the cask ale industry that Mr Bartram is part of, but not the key keg ale market.

Also unclear: the key market for keg ale, or the keykeg ale market? Anyway, interesting.

If you want more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s Monday round-up and Alan McLeod’s regular Thursday linkfest.

Categories
News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads 24 March 2018: Glitter, Ilford, AK

The bar at the Pirate Inn, Penzance.

Here’s everything we’ve read about beer and pubs in the last week that excited us enough to hit the bookmark button, from glitter beer to Kölsch.

And what a week it’s been — a positive flood of interesting writing, lots of it on the hefty side. We’ll never work out the rhythms. It’s just odd that some weeks we post five links and think, well, that’s it, we’re done, and then on other occasions… Well, brace yourself.

Madeleine McCarthy (L) and Lee Hedgmon holding glasses of glitter beer.

First, a story we didn’t expect to care about but which did something interesting: it actually changed our minds. Glitter beer is the latest Oh, Silly Craft Beer! trend, easy to dismiss out of hand, but Jeff Alworth made the effort to go and try some and was won over:

What you can’t appreciate from still photos is that glitter exposes how dynamic a beer is. The tiny flecks ride the currents in bands and whorls, following the convection of released carbon dioxide or the motion of the drinker’s hand. As you look down into the glass, you see it roil and churn. It’s riveting. Beyond that, imagine drinking a green, shimmering Belgian tripel and trying to make it track to the taste of, say, Westmalle. It’s an object lesson in how much appearance factors into our mental formulation of “flavor.” The slight breadiness and vivid effervescence have fused in my mind with the qualities that define a tripel; looking at Lee’s beer, I was forced to go back to the basics of what my palate could tell me.

We’re not saying we now desperately want to drink a glass of sparkly pale ale but if we see one on sale, we’ll definitely try it, which is not what we’d have said last Saturday.

Continue reading “News, Nuggets & Longreads 24 March 2018: Glitter, Ilford, AK”
Categories
pubs

Further Reading #3: Boddies and Opening Times at Manchester Library

Map with marker pen: "PH" (public house)

Researching 20th Century Pub we spent time in some great libraries and archives with rich collections of pub- and beer-related material. This is the third in a series of blog posts intended to highlight great resources we hope you’ll go an look up yourself.

Manchester’s Central Library feat. Archives+, as we think it is formally called, is on St Peter’s Square opposite the famous Midland Hotel. It’s a grand building constructed in the 1930s but in classical style and is round with a dome. You’ll find most of the important stuff on the ground floor — not only reference material on open access but also the archive reading room.

We found accessing the archives a bit of a bureaucratic ordeal, if we’re honest. Newspapers on microfiche are available on site along with a certain number of reference texts but the stuff we were after — brewery records, local planning documents — had to be ordered well in advance, a few at at ime. That’s fine if you happen to live in Manchester but travelling from Penzance as we were at the time it was rather limiting. Still, the library staff could not have been more helpful, not least in pointing us to alternative sources for some documents such as this online archive of historic planning publications.

City of Manchester Plan, 1945

Via those off-site stacks we did manage to get access to some beautiful hand-drawn and coloured city planning maps the size of bedspreads, their text applied with stencils or rub-down lettering. They were a nightmare to handle and not actually all that much use in the end though there was certainly a thrill attached to seeing PUBLIC HOUSE or PH marked here or there. (See main picture, above.)

The best things we looked at — again, not much of which actually informed 20th Century Pub — were records from Boddington’s Brewery. Of course we looked up recipes in the brewing logs, though Ron Pattinson has done a much more thorough job of processing those since we tipped him off to their renewed availability. We also ploughed through board minute books which were crammed with fascinating details — notes on specific pubs and publicans, industrial accidents, local politicking and the birth of the national Beer is Best campaign in the 1930s, to name but a few. There are also lots of inserts like this:

Report on the 1966 hop crop.

Outside in the main reference library, into which you can wander from the street more or less whenever you like, for as long as you like, and help yourself to material from the shelves, there is a real treasure trove of useful stuff.

First there’s what would seem to be a complete set of the beer and pub history pamphlets published by Neil Richardson. Most are about the size and weight of a standard magazine and have the appearance of fanzines with coloured card covers, roughly reproduced photographs and word-processor-formatted text. The quality of the contents varies too but the best among them, e.g. The Old Pubs of Chorlton-upon-Medlock, are treasure troves of oral history and foraged fact. (Some are now available for Kindle at reasonable prices if you fancy a quick taster without travelling to Manchester.)

The Old Pubs of Ancoats

Then there’s the bound set of editions of the local Campaign for Real Ale magazine Opening Times running from 1994 to (we think) the present day. Manchester was an interesting place on the beer front in the 1990s with Brendan Dobbin’s pioneering experiments with New World hops, the birth and evolution of Marble, the coming of Mash & Air, and the arrival of the biggest pub in Britain. Opening Times recorded all this as it unfolded so that over the course of a few issues you can see, for example, advertisements for Dobbin’s ales followed by worrying reports of the health of the business and, finally, a notice of its closure. It was also rather startling to come across the article below among the pub crawl reports and tasting notes:

Headline: "THE BOMB".

Finally, there are numerous local history books and memoirs which, though not exclusively about pubs or beer, touch upon them at various points, often at length. We were particularly interested to discover Jeremy Seabrook’s 1971 book City Close Up which was based on interviews and conversations with people in Blackburn, Lancashire, during the summer of 1969. There are several sections touching on pubs and drink including one chapter called ‘Evening in the Wheatsheaf’ in which three young men, engineering apprentices, discuss ‘going out’:

ALAN: You start drinking when you’re about fifteen, pubs around [the centre of Blackburn], nobody stops you. There’s nowt else to do. When you first start drinking, you sup a right lot of shit, you don’t know what a good pint is. They’ll serve you anything, they’re just making their money out of you when you start.

And once you’re done with Manchester there’s always Bolton a short train ride away where you can find copies of the raw notes from the Mass Observation pub observation project of the late 1930s, or the Greenall Whitley papers at Chester.

Categories
beer reviews bottled beer

QUICK POST: Alphabet Brewing Co Flat White Breakfast Stout

Flat White Breakfast Stout.

This beer was part of a batch ordered from Beer Ritz and paid for by Patreon subscribers like Simon Branscombe and Jared Kiraly — thanks, chaps!

We chose this particular beer because it came up as a suggestion in last year’s Golden Pints. A 330ml can at 7.4% ABV cost £3.19.

The can is rather cool looking and the name is appealing: breakfast is a lovely word for starters, and flat white (a small amount of smooth steamed milk over espresso) is just about hanging in there as the hip coffee preparation of the day even though you can now get them in Greggs.  We can imagine this cropping up in cafes and delis, appealing to people who might not otherwise be that into beer.

We don’t know much about Alphabet other than that a friend of a friend who was in the process of setting up a brewery in Manchester tells us they’re nice people, and that cans of their Hoi Polloi pilsner we tried earlier this year were decent enough.

The name hints at the stylistic gimmick at the heart of this beer: it is a stout but not black as we’ve come to expect. This is idea with some historical basis previously mined most notably by Durham Brewery. One immediate problem, though, is that, though pale for a stout, it is by no means white. In fact, it is reddish brown — the least remarkable colour for beer other than yellow. So an exciting proposition — Wonder At the Freakish White Stout! — is anything but in execution. ‘Pale’ might better have set our expectations but even that would be pushing it. Still, it did look appetising enough on its own terms, clear and gleaming.

The second problem, unfortunately, was a big stale aroma that caused us to recoil rather than to smack our lips in anticipation. Where there ought to have been perhaps a touch of smoke or fruit there was a sort of damp, dirty basement stink — the wrong kind of dank altogether.

Once we’d got past that (aromas recede after the initial encounter) the taste was interesting, definitely dark-tasting (because dark is a flavour in beer), slightly spicy, with some suggestion of cherry, and a lot of burnt cream. The resemblance to coffee, in other words, was specifically to those sweetened, flavoured, very milky dessert coffees that abound at this time of year. We didn’t particularly like it, just as we don’t particularly like that kind of coffee, but we can see how it might appeal to palates other than ours.

Unfortunately that staleness was a deal-breaker. This can was theoretically good for another few weeks, until 17 December, and has been stored in the cool and dark since we bought it, but we’d say it actually expired some time ago. And, once again, like a stuck record, we have to point the finger at dodgy packaging, or packaging processes. We’re getting more and more wary of cans from smaller breweries, especially when they cost as much as a pint of ale at our local. In this case, we feel a bit swizzed.

Categories
Beer history london pubs

The Changing Scene: Watney’s Pubs of 1964

In 1964-64 Watney Mann and its subsidiaries were on a spree of pub building in towns, New Towns and on housing estates up and down the country.

Here are photographs of and notes on those new pubs from editions of the brewery’s in-house magazine, The Red Barrel, published in 1964. Where possible we’ve credited architects and builders. Unfortunately no photography credits are provided in the magazines.

The Kingfisher, Corby, Northamptonshire
Exterior view of a modern pub; interior view of the same.
The exterior of the Kingfisher and a view of its lounge bar.

This pub on the Lodge Park estate was opened in December 1963 by E.C.M. Palmer, the chairman of Phipps, the Northampton brewer Watney’s took over in 1960. It was designed by Phipps’s in-house architects and built by Simcock and Usher Limited of Northampton. The managers were Norman Houghton and his apparently nameless wife.

A feature of the spacious public bar is the woodwork. The seating, the counter front and the ceiling are of fine quality pinewood, and a Granwood floor blend with the general appearance of the room… [It] has that essential amenity, a car park, with space for about fifty cars.

Still there? It seems so.

The Old Swan, Battersea, London

Exterior of the Old Swan from the riverside.

This riverside pub was designed by architects Stewart, Hendry & Smith and built by Siggs & Chapman of Croydon. It replaced an older riverside pub.

A full length continuous window in the ‘Riverside Bar’ overlooks the Thames, and the nautical atmosphere is accentuated by the curved boarded ceiling reminiscent of a ship’s deckhead, and by a ship’s rail for a footrail, while ship’s lanterns and porthole-style windows provide light.

Still there? No, sadly not — it was apparently demolished before 1987 (didn’t even make 25 years) and was replaced with a block of flats that cheekily borrowed the pub name.

Continue reading “The Changing Scene: Watney’s Pubs of 1964”