I thought I’d get going reasonably quickly on this year’s Mild Magic – Stockport & South Manchester CAMRA’s annual celebration of this beleaguered beer style. MM 2019 started a week ago today. I can’t match those people who have set about filling their cards inside the first week (in at least one case, inside the first day), but I’ve made an effort to check out participating pubs in the last week, and thought I’d have a reasonable amount of progress to report by now.
The reality? Two stickers.
The first pub I tried – a week ago today – was the Gateway in Parrs Wood. To be honest I wasn’t expecting much success here; day one of MM was also two days after the end of Spoons’ latest “beer festival”, and I expected there would still be a fair few ‘festival’ beers on. As indeed there were. Under the terms of Mild Magic, I could have asked for a sticker anyway, but I felt I’d rather not start my first sheet with a non-compliant beer, so we moved on – or rather, went to our planned lunch venue.
This was the Head of Steam in Didsbury – or at least, it was going to be, until we checked out the chain’s new menu and decided we’d rather go for our fallback option. I stuck my nose in anyway and established that they didn’t have any mild on either. (The bar’s Web site is currently listing Timothy Taylor‘s Dark Mild – a rare beast around here and well worth the detour.)
On a previous visit to the Head of Steam I’d been confidently assured that Cameron’s Strongarm was a ‘ruby mild’. On a previous visit to Wine and Wallop – where we had a rather nice lunch – I’d been treated to a mini-lecture about how mild just wasn’t a very popular style these days, certainly not round here, so even if they did try stocking it it would only end up going off… There’s a grain of truth in there, certainly, but the fact that we were in the middle of that year’s Mild Magic at the time – and that the bar was participating – seemed a bit ironic. Anyway, there was no mild on this time either; that said, several pumps were off, so maybe a mild or two have come on since then. The beers we did have – from Silver Street and Siren – were excellent, but mild they weren’t.
Back in Chorlton I checked the Sedge Lynn, and found that the ‘festival’ was pretty much in full swing. I checked again during the week, and once more last night – when I found that one of the festival beers was being replenished and another couple had only just come on. This, eight days after the ‘festival’ formally ended; it looks rather as if they over-ordered. (The place has been rammed every time I’ve gone in, mind you, as indeed was the Gateway last Sunday.) No mild, anyway. I tried the Greene King ‘Ernest’ heritage beer they had on draught; it was just as dull, woody, brown-bread-y and generally malty-in-a-bad-way as I remember the Suffolk Pale being. I’m strongly in favour of reviving ‘heritage’ beers, but GK are starting to push it.
A trip to Stockport via Levenshulme was more productive, although we got off to an unexpectedly bad start by looking for food on the hip and happening Levenshulme Market. Not that there weren’t food options – there were; there was a variety of ‘perfectly nice’ options and quite a few ‘rather special, at a premium’ as well. Our problem – one I’ve had before, in town – was that as far as we could see the ‘perfectly nice’ options were already at a premium. Levy (as the cool kids were calling it in the 80s) clearly isn’t what it was. Fred’s Ale House was handy – and had the very respectable Phoenix Monkeytown Mild on – but, as I suspected, they weren’t serving food.
We eventually found exactly what we were looking for, foodwise, at the Produce Hall in Stockport, which has adopted the novel approach of selling Mackie Mayor food at Stockport prices. Unfortunately this was every bit as popular as you’d expect it to be, and there wasn’t a seat to be had in the place. We repaired to one of the cafes in the – rather more sparsely populated – Market Hall.
After lunch I looked in at the Baker’s Vaults; I don’t think I’ve had a mild in there since 1892 went out of production, and that day was no exception.
So far my scorecard read like this:
Pubs visited: 6
Milds seen: 1
Milds drunk: 0 (sorry, Fred’s; I’ll be back)
Fortunately my luck was about to change. Remedy had a beer, and in fact a brewery, that was new to me – Northern Monkey Reeny’s Beans, a “coffee mild” that I’d class as interesting more than impressive. (But at least it was a mild!) My next mild stop was the Hope, where the startlingly wide range of Foolhardy ales included Dark Raven, a very solid traditional dark mild.
Seven days, eight pubs, two stickers. A bit disappointing so far, but maybe I’ll have more luck with some of the more traditional pubs on the circuit. (And the Spoons’ ‘festival’ beers can’t last forever!)
Oh Good Ale 