Bah, humbug!

CAMRA’s Winter Warmer Wander is going to have to manage without me this year. I got off to a reasonable, if rather belated, start – the Winter Warmer Wander seems to come round earlier every year…! In Manchester town centre I picked up stickers for Titanic Plum Porter at the Paramount, a chocolate and vanilla stout at the Castle and a chilli stout at the Crown and Kettle; a visit to the Petersgate Tap also let me tick off Ashover‘s uncompromisingly-named Liquorice, which I can honestly say is the most liquorice-tasting beer I’ve ever drunk. It’s only a pity I can’t stand liquorice. (Fortunately it didn’t have the (ahem) medicinal effects that I remember from Ticketybrew‘s liquorice-infused Invalid Stout – but then, I did have multiple pints of that.)

After that I was a bit busy for the first half of December, and then I caught my usual pre-Christmas cold, and then there was really no time to fit in enough beers for the 24 stickers I’d usually aim for. I thought I might be able to manage the 12, though, and headed Stockportwards.

The Wine & Wallop had a better dark beer selection than I’ve seen there sometimes, with two to choose from; Yeovil Yeo Ho Ho was a rather nice hoppy stout. From there it was a short – well, no, quite a long – walk to my current favourite bar, Burnage’s Reasons to be Cheerful. I never have a beer in Reasons without seeing one or two others I’d like to try, and this time it was more like five or six.

Stockport was calling, though. A bus journey and short walk later, I was in the Crown on Heaton Lane. I’ve seen pubs in decline before; generally the symptoms include a severely truncated beer range, dilapidated fixtures and fittings, and a pervasive smell of bleach. The Crown looked – and smelt – immaculate: heavy wood furniture, buttoned leather bench seating, etched mirrors and windows, even bellpushes in the panelling; a better example of the old-school multi-room pub you couldn’t hope to find. The beer range had been reduced since the last time I was in, but six handpumps – mostly serving well-respected local breweries – is still more than most pubs can boast. But the heart seemed to have gone out of the place, and the customers seemed to have followed; on a fine Saturday afternoon, the barman and I were the only people in the place. The only dark beer on was Titanic Plum Porter; it’s a good beer when it’s kept well, and it was here.

One of the nice things about coming to Stockport for the Wander is getting the chance to drink Old Tom on draught; there was a time when Robbie’s pubs in Manchester would have a pin of Old Tom on the go at this time of year, but I haven’t seen it outside Stockport in a long time. So I made a beeline for the Swan With Two Necks, where I had a half of Old Tom and eavesdropped on a late entry for Scariest Conversation of 2019: what initially sounded like somebody describing a film (“so he reckoned he had to get his revenge on the drug lord who killed his brother”), but then didn’t (“so I said, I’m not going out there for the funeral, I’m not going anywhere near it – my uncle went in the end, and even he was shit-scared”). Stockport, eh?

One of the really nice things about coming to Stockport for the Wander is getting the chance to drink two halves of Old Tom on draught in succession. The Baker’s Vaults isn’t a pub I’ve warmed to since its refurb – perhaps it’s just me, perhaps it’s just the circumstances in which I usually see it, but it has that indefinable “not entirely welcoming to solitary middle-aged men well on their way to getting thoroughly drunk” air about it. At least since the last time I was there they’ve put in some chairs at floor level, if you see what I mean. Anyway, I was mildly tempted by the 6.5% ‘special reserve’ version of Titanic Plum Porter, but they had Old Tom on – there was no real competition. (It cost about half as much again as it did in the Swan, incidentally.)

I said earlier on that Reasons to be Cheerful is currently my favourite bar; I think it’s because it gets the basics right and doesn’t really bother about anything else. R2BC doesn’t look “craft”, or look anything in particular; it’s a reasonably nice-looking space, with reasonably comfortable seating, and the range and quality of the beer is consistently excellent. Remedy, on the other hand, is quite a lot about the look of the thing; I’ve never actually been to an Edison lightbulb showroom, but I think it would look a great deal like that. I plonked myself down on a railway sleeper and had one of their own beers – Missing Slippers, a 5.5% “marshmallow stout” – which was fine.

And that – apart from an obligatory scoop at the Petersgate Tap (a third of Ashover Moscow, a 9.5% imperial stout) – was it for Stockport. Sadly, with only ten stickers I was obliged to… what’s that, Sooty? I could get the last two tomorrow? I could have gone out today? Yes, well. Even more sadly, the location of those ten stickers is currently not known to me; somewhere between Remedy and Chorlton, the sheet they’re attached to went missing. So I’m back down to zero, with far too little time to get to 12. So long, WWW 2019.

I am going to spin part of it out for a bit longer, though. When planning my 6- to 8-pub route, I did feel a pang for all the further-flung pubs I would normally have tried to fit in – Poynton! Romiley! Stalybridge! So I’m going to hang on to the list and make a personal challenge of it: I’ll tick off all 45 of them, at least once, before WWW 2020 comes round. Watch this space…

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