Mildly interesting

A few last words on Mild Magic 2015.

Good beer
Brightside MMM, Cryptic 1049 Dead, Dunham Light, Moorhouse Black Cat, Timothy Taylor’s Golden Best, Titanic Nautical Mild and Wentworth Black Diamond were excellent. So were Adnams/Sixpoint Make It Rain, Blackjack Solitaire, Dunham Gold, Howard Town Hope, Marble Brew 900, Partners Tabatha and Rossendale Hameldon, which I had as substitutes or second halves.

Good pubs
The Crown and Kettle, Fred’s Ale House, the Harewood Arms, the Jack in the Box, Live Stockport, the Spinning Top and the Sportsman will all be worth a detour in future.

What do points mean?
What points mean, this year at least, is that low-scoring pubs are a lot less attractive. So some very familiar pubs got omitted, including some which are only really familiar from CAMRA crawls – no sticker this year from the New Oxford or the Knott Bar, or in Stockport from the George, the Crown or the (Portwood) Railway. On the other hand, it was good to be motivated to seek out new and interesting venues, a category which for me included most of the places I listed above.

How did it go?
Pretty well, all in all. Eight pubs (out of 48) didn’t have any qualifying beers on; three of those had either had a mild on or had one on order. Very few places failed to supply a sticker, and in at least one case (the Spinning Top) it was because they’d run out. Only one place (Wine and Wallop) claimed not to have had the stickers, and nobody denied all knowledge of MM; in both respects this is an improvement on previous years.

The light and the dark
As my last post indicated, light mild is really on the ropes; I only had fourthree (as against 21 dark milds), and one of them may have been one of the other three under another name (see comments). I guess the underlying problem is the dreaded M-word: ‘mild’ got a name as an old men’s drink forty-odd years ago and it still has it, despite the fact that a lot of the people who turned their noses up at it back then are old men now. If you make a dark, sweetish, lowish-strength beer but don’t call it ‘mild’ – as Hyde’s, Lees and Thwaites’ don’t (and Robinson’s didn’t) – in a sense there’s no harm done: it’s still going to sell to the kind of people who like that kind of beer. A pale session-strength beer, though, will struggle to differentiate itself from pale session-strength bitters – I’d been drinking Golden Best for years before I realised it was a light mild. (And it’ll struggle all the more if the brewery puts the word ‘bitter’ on the pump clip, as Hyde’s have done with 1863.)

Mild oddity
What is “Hyde’s Light Mild”, as served at the Plough in Ashton on Mersey? I’ve had it twice now – both times at the Plough – & liked it a lot. Is it just 1863 (of which I’m not a huge fan) plus auto-suggestion?

Discoveries made
One thing I’ve discovered is that there’s no substitute for an A-Z; the map on my iPod got me thoroughly lost in Stalybridge, and very nearly did the same in Broadbottom. Another is that you need to cut your coat according to your cloth: if you don’t think you’re going to have time for pubs 7-9, stop at 6 and go home. (On reflection this isn’t so much a new discovery as something I knew all along and forgot in the, er, heat of the moment.) Lastly, I made the surprising – but perhaps predictable – discovery that pub lunches are basically a thing of the past: there are Spoons and there are high-end bars serving equally high-end food, but in between, and outside the city centre, there’s pretty much nothing. I guess that workplace puritanism has grown, and lunchtime drinking declined, to the point where serving actual lunches no longer makes sense for most places; the cheap and cheerful pub meal has gone the way of the cloche of curling sandwiches or the jar of pickled eggs.

And finally,

Free beer
As well as looking forward to picking up a Mild Magic sweatshirt (no polo shirt for me!), I am now the proud owner of eight – count ’em – tokens, each exchangeable for a half of mild at the Stockport Beer and Cider Festival. I’m heading over there tomorrow evening. Obviously(?) I’m not planning to put away four pints of mild, so free halves will be available on request to anyone who knows me (and isn’t also walking around with a pocketful of tokens). First come, first served.