Categories
london pubs

Exploring craft beer in the age of track and trace

Is it fair to judge a bar or pub under current circumstances? Until recently, we’d have said a firm no but after a week in London we find ourselves thinking that if they can handle this, they can handle anything.

We were staying at Westfield in Stratford, East London, on the edge of the site of the 2012 Olympic Games, primarily for family and work reasons, but also because it’s a part of the city we find fascinating.

When Jess was growing up, and when Ray moved to London in 2000, there wasn’t much here at all – railways lines, flyovers, canals, marshes, overgrown woodland, relics of industry. You could spend hours trying to get from A to B in the absence of bridges or footpaths.

Then the Olympics came and it was transformed into a sort of Teletubbyland European Exposcape, followed by a phase of residential building designed to create several new ‘quarters’. The so-called East Village, the one that’s progressed the furthest, was right on our doorstep and is where we ended up spending a lot of time.

Categories
bottled beer london

Decent beer at the flicks

andyrob_stratfordpicturehouse

Our nearest cinema is the Stratford Picture House, next to the 2012 Olympic site in East London. Last night, we were pleased to see that Hoegaarden was back on offer in the cinema bar, after a period of absence. We were even more excited to see that bottled London Pride had turned up in the fridge. And more excited again when we clocked (no pun intended) a shelf full of Meantime beers.

Their brand is the perfect match for the Picture House chain — classy, cool and ever so slightly pretentious. The pilsener, which hadn’t impressed us much before, triggered a vivid taste memory of a sunny afternoon in a cafe garden in Nuremberg, and is our beer of the week. The pale ale was nicer than on tap at the Britannia last week.

If we’d been so minded, we could even have taken our beers into the film with us. How’s that for civilised?

Photo from Andyrob at Flickr, under Creative Commons.