Tag: st austell

Categories
real ale

Brown and boring?

View of a motorway from a van.

After he’d driven a 7.5 ton box van from Somerset to Cornwall, via London, while helping us move in, we felt Bailey’s Dad deserved a pint or two and took him to one of our local pubs.

He sank a pint of proper job fairly quickly but didn’t seem 100 per cent convinced. We had a hunch that St Austell’s very popular HSD might be more to his taste, and it seems we were right.

We’ve always been a bit disparaging of HSD — it’s what we’d call St Austell’s brown, boring bitter and, even by the standards of that type of beer, it lacks hop character. A surprising number of people are very loyal to it, however, and a pub landlord here told us us there would be a riot if he were to replace it with the similarly brown but much more flavoursome Admiral’s Ale. “They find it too light,” he said, referring to something other than the colour.

For many drinkers in the west country (and, from observation, south Wales, too) hops are not where it’s at.

Maybe we need to let our lupulin-ravaged tastebuds recover and learn to appreciate these types of beers for what they are.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture

The tyranny of the ticking bug

We’re not Tickers, although we do understand what drives people to pursue an ultimately doomed, obsessive-compulsive mission to drink a bit of every beer in existence — it’s not like we haven’t spent whole holidays haring from one pub to the next, drinking halves of 10 different beers in each and, at the end of it all, wondering if we’d actually had fun.

On holiday in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, last year, it took us a day or two to realise there was no really exciting beer around and just relax. We enjoyed a few pints of Tribute here and there, picked up a few interesting bottles (once we’d stopped looking) and, y’know, made something other than beer the focus of the holiday.

Similarly, on our recent trip to Haworth, we kept coming back to the Fleece for Timothy Taylor. We could have tried a few more beers we’d not had before but, frankly, didn’t want to waste our time when there was something so good right at hand.

The only problem is, you don’t get much ammo for a blog that way.

Categories
breweries

St Austell: Kings of Cornwall

staustelllogo

Cornwall is a rotten place if you want to try new beers. In short, if you don’t like St Austell, Sharps or Skinner’s, you’ll have to work hard to find a pint to your taste.

St Austell in particular seem to have the county in a Darth Vader-like grip. Their golden castle logo is on every second pub frontage, and their bottled beers are in every gift shop, off licence and convenience store.

In some ways, it’s not such a bad thing. Tribute is becoming one of our all time favourites and is reliably good in St Austell pubs in Cornwall. Proper Job IPA and Admiral’s Ale are two of Britain’s best bottle-conditioned beers, in our humble opinions.

Sparkler spotters may be interested to know that St Austell beers were served by default with a sparkler in all the St Austell pubs we visited.  So it’s not just a northern thing, then?

Categories
beer reviews bottled beer

Cornwall and beer on the train

mandscornishipa

We’ve just returned from a week in Cornwall, in the far south west of England, so expect a few posts in the coming days on our beery adventures around St Ives.

We got the week off to a good start on the train from London last Saturday with a few bottles of Marks and Spencer’s relatively new Cornish IPA.

We were pleased to see that the supermarket chain are now crediting the brewers of their own-brand bottle-conditioned beers on the labels (we  beer geeks like to know where our booze is coming from) and that this is a product of St Austell.

We guessed it would be a rebadge of their brilliant bottle conditioned Proper Job, but it’s not. It’s weaker (5% as opposed to 5.6%) and also has a lighter body and drier finish. It’s much closer, in fact, to cask conditioned Proper Job. We thought it was delicious. One of the best bottled beers we’ve had in a long while.

Thanks, St Austell and M&S, for a great start to our break.

Categories
marketing

Weird marketing from St Austell

A vicar in front of a pub

St Austell have taken to spamming us with press releases (a bit annoying, but we do like the beer, so what the hey).

The above photo is part of their latest weird attempt to generate interest in the beer. To cut a long story short, the local vicar did a service in a pub.

Frankly, Stella Artois might taste rancid, but their marketeers know how to make a silk purse from the proverbial sow’s ear. St Austell’s, on the other hand… their beer is fantastic, but now I’m thinking: “It’s what Cornish vicars drink. Great — that’s a lifestyle I aspire to!”

The really scary thing is, when the picture was taken, the vicar was on his own. Those people in the background only showed up when it was developed. He… he sees dead people!