Do you have a favourite bar…

Do you have a favourite bar…
…where you can play pool with strangers
Maybe wear some lipstick and not be in danger
Of getting beat up in the men’s room

Feeling safe is important in a pub. (Being safe is, too, but in the nature of things you only generally find out if that’s not the case a lot later.) I generally do feel safe in pubs these days, but then (a) I’m White, male and middle-aged and (b) I very rarely go anywhere even slightly rough (Holt’s pubs in the suburbs, on CAMRA crawls, are probably as close as I get). I can remember being in a few places where I felt it would be inadvisable to stay for another, but this is going back a bit – I think at the time my youth was as much a factor as being a posh Southerner. I also think one effect of the general decline in pub-going – and the broader decline in all-male socialising – is that it’s harder to find pubs that are likely to get seriously lairy, or at least easier to avoid them.

But of course, safety in general isn’t what those lines are about. I’ve never felt any desire to wear lipstick, or been in any real danger of being queer-bashed (although as a kid obviously I was called ‘queer’ a few times, what with the long hair and the book-reading and so on). All the same, my favourite bar for a few years in the early 1990s was Manto. This was partly because of the decor, which was ‘café bar’ at a time when café bars were places you went to in France – a decorative tiled floor, small tables, plate glass for natural light – and partly because of the atmosphere, which was chilled (as we didn’t say at the time). This in turn was largely down to the door policy, which was ‘mixed’.

Yes, Manchester’s first overtly gay bar… wasn’t overtly gay. However that policy came about, in that time and place it was a stroke of genius: this was a bar you could go to if you were gay or if you weren’t. As indeed I weren’twasn’t – but I’d spent some time in Brighton and got used to the feeling of being in a venue where it wouldn’t have mattered if I had been, and I’d found I rather liked it. Ironically, as time went on and Canal Street turned into what we know now, Manto got less inclusive – viz. more gay – and I guess it was always heading that way. (I first got this message, ironically, from a flyer advertising a lesbian night and featuring a full-length nude – which I guess was the kind of thing you’d find in a pub that welcomed straight blokes at one time, but looked a bit different in that context.) On the other hand, pubs in general are a lot more inclusive now – society is much more inclusive now – and I’d find it hard to specify exactly how your average 1990s Manchester boozer exuded compulsory heterosexuality, or indeed exactly how it bugged me. An inclusive venue just felt better.

I do not play pool with strangers, though, or indeed with anyone else. The last time I was prevailed on to pick up a cue (“I’m terrible at it!” “Ah, go on – I’m terrible, we’re all terrible, it’ll be fun!”) my prowess at pool reduced first my opponents and then my partner to helpless laughter. Well, I did warn them.

Do you have a favourite bar…
…the bartender’s German
He only understands the names of liquors and the German language
Doesn’t watch the TV, ’cause it’s over his head
But he was in the Olympics
You can ask him

I’ll have to pass on this one. “The landlord’s a real character” is a phrase that for me inspires dread rather than enthusiasm, tending as it does to be followed by “doesn’t suffer fools” or words to that effect. As I wrote back here about “Pub Landlord Humour”, it’s “a combination of hearty welcome, assertive jokiness and veiled menace”,  often with the emphasis on the third rather than the first of these; it’s interesting that by 2023 the pub I was writing about  – the Maltings in York – was “proudly referred to as the ‘strictest’ pub in the UK”. At the risk of overthinking this, I wonder if what’s going on here is that we know at the back of our minds that running a pub is a tough and unrewarding job, so that we have a sneaking sympathy with anyone who takes it out on the punters – especially if they do it in a witty and showmanlike way, and if the particular punters they take it out on aren’t us. Not really my thing, anyway (although to be fair I did have some excellent beer at the Maltings).

As for bartenders like the one in the song – someone who actually is a ‘character’, in the sense of needing a paragraph to describe him – I’m coming up blank. I could name any number who do or did a great job, from Dom at the Beech to Alex at the Beer House, but nobody with European origins and an international athletic record, or anything so exotic. At least, as far as I know – it may be my ignorance talking.

Do you have a favourite bar…
where you can drink yourself under the table
And they know you’re there, so they won’t lock you in
They won’t take all your money
When you’re completely insensible
They leave you your dignity
You can play The 5th Dimension on the jukebox

One mark of a ‘favourite bar’ is – as the song says – that you can get absolutely mortal without any fear for your safety, possessions or dignity; another is that you like the place (and its beers) enough to want to, from time to time. So I suppose I’d better own up. Have I ever drunk myself under the table? No. But have I ever reached the state of the guy I saw in rather a nice bar in Edinburgh once, who drank up and then quietly folded his arms on the table, laid his head down and went to sleep? No, although I can’t say I’ve never been tempted. (The bartender came over and woke him up. He tried to persuade her that he was fine – and, to be fair, he wasn’t disturbing anyone – but she wasn’t having it.) OK then, have I ever left a pub in a state where walking in a straight line requires concentration, while Radiohead on headphones sounds like the meaning of life? More particularly – since the song clearly isn’t talking about visiting multiple bars – have I ever left a pub in the aforesaid state, having gone in sober?

Well, all right, yes, once or twice. OK, five or six times. Seven or eight, maybe. Ten at the very outside. And on all, or very nearly all, of those occasions, the bar has been the Petersgate Tap, noted hereabouts for its tap takeovers and tastings – both of which frequently involve beers that are very strong, very dark or very both. Which works for me.

The Petersgate Tap does not have a jukebox, however (not that I’d put on The 5th Dimension if it did). The thought of jukeboxes takes me to other bars: the New Oxford and the Friendship, whose otherwise unremarkable machines introduced me (respectively) to the later work of Steely Dan and the Pet Shop Boys’ Introspective; Keg and Cask, whose jukebox’s default selection was so good that nobody ever put any money in, which unfortunately led to it being taken out; and, head and shoulders above the rest, the Crescent. What a pub that was, back when I was doing my doctorate at the University of Salford in the 00s: four rooms, two bars, 8-10 cask beers, one real fire, one cat, and one excellent jukebox. I used to visit in the afternoon and try and get as much music out of a quid as I could manage; the jukebox had both Astral Weeks and Let it Bleed, so the five tracks I selected generally included “Madame George” (or “Astral Weeks” itself) and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. Happy days.

Do I have a favourite bar? The Crescent and Manto are out of consideration (and they’d both changed for the worse some time before they closed). I had a definite fondness for the Hillary Step for a while, but under the new management – specifically, with the new, darker, decor – not so much. (Something similar goes for the Beech, only not so much ‘darker’ as ‘open-plan with TVs everywhere’.) I’ve been going to the Beer House since it opened – which must be getting on for 25 years – and I still find it a comfortable and welcoming place to drink, most times of the day or night; I still wish they’d put on a few more dark beers, mind you. (Bring back McKenna’s Revenge!)

But my current favourite has to be the Petersgate Tap. It’s just a shame it’s hidden away in Stockport – it’s not on the tram, you know…

 

In Dorset? I’ve only been once!

A week’s holiday outside term time seemed like an ideal way to capitalise on my retirement from academia and our kids both being adults. What we didn’t factor in, after a long and dry summer, was that once you’re out of term time you’re liable to be getting into autumn.

And so it was that we saw Swanage in the rain for most of the week we were there. Or rather, didn’t see Swanage very much at all, after a shopping trip on the first day led to the realisation that my cagoule was more ‘shower-proof’ than actually, you know, waterproof. A couple of sunny days at the end of the week were both welcome and frustrating – when you make your second sight-seeing trip on the last day of the holiday, you can’t help feeling like the rest of the week’s been wasted. Still, we completed most of the 1000-piece jigsaw we brought, and fitted in a game of Monopoly – which I won, for I think the first time ever – so it could have been worse.

But what about the beer, I hear you yawn. What indeed? Swanage isn’t a big place, but it’s big enough to have a decent selection of pubs  – seven of them within a half-mile walk, plus another couple further out of the centre (which I didn’t get to – so I couldn’t verify that the amenities of the Royal Oak include a “miniature Stonehenge”, sadly). I checked the handpump situation in all of them, and concluded that Swanage has something of an identity problem, beer-wise. We’d settled on Dorset in preference to Cornwall so as to make the drive more manageable, and I’m sure we weren’t the first or last people to make that calculation; still, it was a bit surprising to see so much Cornish beer on sale. It’s not just that there was Doom Bar everywhere – there is Doom Bar everywhere, after all. In Swanage, you could get St Austell Proper Job as well, or Tribute, or even Sharp’s Sea Fury.

I passed on all of those, and skipped a few pubs where they were all that was on offer. In the Black Swan – a food-led pub with a really good menu, for what it’s worth – I had a pint of Dorset Brewing Company Dorset Knob, a darkish, full-bodied bitter that tasted stronger than its 3.9%. (Not really local, but Dorchester’s a lot closer than St Austell.) I was rather more impressed by the Isle of Purbeck Fossil Fuel at the White Swan; this was another dark bitter but stronger and with a lot more depth and complexity. (Nice pub, too; very ‘pubby’, giving the air of pitching mainly to locals – which, speaking as a tourist but not one who was always in the market for a sit-down meal, I rather appreciated.)

As those familiar with Dorset geography will realise, the Isle of Purbeck brewery actually is local to Swanage; so too is Hattie Brown, whose Moonlite I had with a meal at the Ship. The meal was fine, but the beer was excellent – a light, pale yellow, loose-headed hopmonster that reminded me of nothing so much as Hophead. A general store on the front was selling a range of Hattie Brown‘s beers, which I stocked up on to bring home; tasting notes to follow!

The only other pub I went into was the Red Lion, which I’d walked past several times before finally venturing in; they appeared to have Proper Job and Landlord on hand pump, but they also appeared to have menus permanently propped up against the said handpumps, giving the strong impression that they weren’t in use. As, it turned out, they weren’t: when I ordered a pint of Landlord, the bartender disappeared into the back room and came back with a full pint glass. There were three cask beers, it turned out – Proper Job, Landlord and Siren Lumina, of all things – and seemingly they were all on stillage. Unless there was a back bar that I didn’t notice, but that doesn’t seem likely: I looked quite hard for somewhere to sit and don’t think I would have overlooked it. The Red Lion was evidently trying to split the difference between the two main customer sectors in the town, as most of the space that wasn’t given over to tables for dining was taken up with a pool table. But I found a seat and got myself comfortable, and would probably have stayed there for some time with my pint of Landlord (which was in good nick), if it hadn’t been for the arrival of a second bartender. She was the chatty type, and marked her entrance by doing the rounds of the bar area, saying hallo to all her friends and telling the entertaining story of how that morning she’d woken up really really hot and sweaty, I mean really hot, then I went out in the garden and I was just really cold, shivering and everything, I think I must have a really high temperature, worst I’ve ever had, I think, but apart from that I’m absolutely fine, no, I’m not going to take the day off, I feel fine… I sunk my Landlord before she had the chance to breathe in my direction.

And that was it for the beers of Swanage, although not quite it for Dorset. On our penultimate day the sun shone and we took the steam train to Corfe Castle – a ridiculous way to travel, which I recommend unreservedly. The castle was quite something, too, although I was a bit disappointed at how Royalist the National Trust signage was; I guess the Parliamentarians did wreck the place, to be fair. Corfe Castle (the town) gave a distinct impression of long memories and old grudges; there’s a prominent plaque in the main square that was put up in 1978, commemorating the assassination of “Edward, King and Martyr” by his mother Queen Elfrida (or Ælfthryth), at Corfe Castle in 978. Justice for Eadweard! (I do feel a bit sorry for the kid – he was only 16.)

In among all the history, we paid a visit to the Bankes Arms, where we found the service disconcertingly, well, servile – an impression made all the more unsettling when I chanced to look straight at the guy who’d just been giving us the Sir and Madam treatment: a colder and more hostile stare you never saw. So I wouldn’t entirely recommend the pub on that basis. More importantly, they serve beer from Palmer’s of Bridport, a little way down the coast. I had a pint of the Pale Ale – a great example of an old-school English PA (which is to say, neither hoppy nor indeed pale) – and one of the strong bitter, 200, which was excellent.

So that’s Swanage: not really a beer destination. (Or a cider destination; I noticed that the White Swan was advertising a ‘cider festival’, but on closer inspection this amounted to six bag-in-box ciders, four Lilley’s and two Thatcher’s.) There is some nice beer to be found, though, as the forthcoming Hattie Brown bottle review will hopefully demonstrate.

Update 28th November

The Hattie Brown bottled beers were… fine. Really, they were fine; there wasn’t anything wrong with any of them, although the fierce bittering of the session pale, Moonlite (see above) did come close to making me wince. There were some more, less aggressive, pales – Kirrin Island, Mustang Sally and Herkules (at all of 5%); there was a full-bodied, caramel-heavy stout (Crow Black); and there was a strong traditional bitter (6%) called Dog on the Roof (“Named after our dog – full of character, irresistible and often to be found on the roof”). They were good, I’d get them again; nice label art, too. They just didn’t quite rise to the level of deserving their own post.

Niche/Chain

Always nice to hear from Melt Banana, and that particular waxing goes by the name of Niche oblique stroke Chain, good heavens…

At the end of a working day there’s not much I like better than stopping for a pint, or else a half of something silly, on my way home. And if by ‘working day’ you mean ‘those hours that I’m obliged to spend in the workplace, before sodding off home to get on with my day’ – meaning that the timing of the ‘after-work’ drink comes forward to 3.00 or 4.00 – well, so much the better. Day-time pubs are quiet pubs, and (as I said here) there’s something I particularly like about the atmosphere in a quiet pub – especially a pub that feels as if it’s going to get busy later. (Incidentally, I think that feeling – that there is a buzz here, just not right now – is the key to the ‘dead vs quiet’ question. To turn it round, a ‘dead’ pub is a quiet pub that feels as if it won’t get busy – later on, or in some cases ever again.)

But I am a CAMRA member – and generally in favour of small and independent bars and breweries – and I realised recently that my after-work stops weren’t taking me to real ale pubs, or even to anywhere truly independent. I confess: I’d got into the habit of stopping for an after-work drink at BrewDog. Reasons not to drink at BrewDog are legion; I promptly resolved to break the habit, and go to an independent bar for my next daytime drink. I won’t name the bar, because (spoiler) the comparison wasn’t entirely in its favour.

Still, going somewhere that isn’t plastered with corporate signage, and offers cask beer, seemed like a good idea in principle; the first question I asked myself was why I hadn’t done this before. The answer that came back was, because this place wasn’t open the last time I was passing at this time of day. At the moment I’m sometimes in the market for a homeward-bound drink around 3.30 on a Friday and sometimes at the same time on a Monday, and the bar I was in – like a lot of independent pubs and bars – rations its daytime openings in the early part of the week, when people generally are more likely to use it.

That day was a Friday, though, so no issue there. After I’d sat down the room started to fill up, and soon it was clear that POETS day was in full swing (ask your Dad). The sound of the background music soon mingled with the sound of conversation and the sound of the bartender explaining something to a punter (he seemed to like explaining things; perhaps he’d been on his own all day). It all combined to produce an atmosphere in which… in which it was quite hard to concentrate on my LRB, actually. Some like people-watching, some like striking up conversation with strangers, but when I go to bars on my own I go for two things, apart from the beer: (a) to read and (b) to zone out and let my mind wander. The problem, I realised – or, if not a problem, the area where this bar was getting outperformed by those nouveau-corporate Scots gits – was that the music wasn’t loud enough: it was at ‘polite background for when conversation flags’ level, rather than the level of ‘unignorable bordering on in-your-face’. There are those who prefer silence by way of background, but personally I like a bit of background music, as long as it’s not a genre I particularly dislike (gangsta rap, hair metal…). Whatever it is, though, it does have to be loud enough. Not too loud – certainly not loud enough that people have to shout (hello, Society! HELLO! I said… oh, never mind). Just loud enough to be unignorable, and to put up a bit of a barrier to the other ambient sounds (Friday evening crowd chatting, bartender explaining things, etc) – because then it’s also loud enough to create an atmosphere in which the solitary punter can lose him- or herself.

What about the beer, though? The bar I was in certainly had the jump on BrewDog in terms of cask beers, but everything on handpump was in the same kind of area (pale and around 4%) – and that afternoon I was in the market for the aforementioned half of something silly: an imperial stout, a barleywine, a tripel, a quad… This is an area in which the bar owned by the dodgy plastic punks excels, frequently offering a choice between two or three of the above styles. The bar I was in had a number of interesting-looking keg offerings, including an impy stout at a fairly daunting ABV; however, they also had a strong NEIPA produced by everyone’s favourite Finnish brewery, Pöhjala, in collaboration with a Bulgarian brewery. I’m not crazy about NEIPA as a style, but I am a bit of a Pöhjala fan – and besides, I was intrigued to find out what a Finnish/Bulgarian take on NEIPA would taste like. So I ordered that. It turned out to taste like a mango and passionfruit smoothie with added yeast-bite, or in other words like every other NEIPA. (But I could have had the 12% pastry stout, so really that one’s on me.)

In short, the bar owned by the CAMRA-baiting headline-chasers in bed with private equity delivered a better, more reliable and more consistent experience than the independent bar which I’m not going to name, and it did so precisely because it was a larger-scale operation with a more ‘corporate’ style: longer opening hours, multiple lines devoted to ‘silly’ options, in-your-face music, staff who keep shtum when they’re not trying to sell you something. My experience reminds me, to my embarrassment, of the South Park episode where the residents boycott a new chain coffee bar in favour of the longstanding independent coffee shop, only to find out when they actually try “Harbucks” that its coffee is far better (“Hey, this doesn’t taste like mud!”). There are some things that a chain bar (and let’s not kid ourselves that the bars owned by those staff-abusing fake rebel millionaires are anything other than a chain) can actually do better than an indie, and filling a particular, oddly-shaped niche is one of them. JDW’s (for all their flaws) are the real ale pubs where you can always get a cheap meal with your kids, should that be what you want; BD are the craft beer bar where you can always get a half of something silly, with musical accompaniment by the White Stripes or Fat Freddy’s Drop, on a weekday afternoon, if that‘s what you’re in the market for.

(Starbucks coffee is rank, though.)

 

 

 

Could it be Magic? (4)

This is the fourth of four posts about Mild Magic, CAMRA’s annual campaign to promote mild around Manchester.

A trip to Stockport – combining mild ticking on my part with craft-related shopping on my other half’s – got off to a decidedly inauspicious start. We missed the bus from Chorlton by making the rookie error of arriving only a minute or two ahead of the scheduled time, by which point the bus was already moving off. Necessity was the mother of invention: rather than wait for the next bus to Stockport, we decided to get the bus to Levenshulme and start the day’s mild-drinking at Fred’s Ale House. Fred’s was closed, however, and not because we were there too early; a phone call to the number on the hoarding revealed that the manager was ill and that the bar wouldn’t be opening that week, let alone that day. (Best wishes for a speedy recovery to, well, Fred, I guess.)

We soon managed to get a bus for Stockport, although the journey was interrupted by an abortive attempt on my part to make the route more interesting by starting with Romiley. I forget exactly what was wrong with this route, but it looked a lot less attractive once we were waiting for the relevant bus. Eventually we decided to knock it on the head and just go to Stockport, as originally planned. The Crown on Heaton Lane was a welcome sight when we finally got there – I was actually quite thirsty, apart from anything else – but no mild was to be had. The beers that were on weren’t bad at all – I had a half of Pictish Jarrylo – but there weren’t very many; the bar had something like a 1:2 ratio between pumps with anything on and those without. Nor was there much custom to speak of, that sunny weekend lunchtime, apart from a guy making a delivery who stayed for a chat with the bartender. The Crown has a lot of positive memories as well as some sad ones, and I’d love to see it busy again; I can’t see it at the moment, though.

We were on coffee at the Café San Juan, where we had an absolutely stonking lunch at a very reasonable price (even for Stockport). Nothing to do with Mild Magic, but this Colombian café is well worth a visit if you’re in the area.

I made for the Angel next, where the bartender didn’t seem very keen on serving halves, or else he wasn’t very keen on me personally. (Or maybe he’d just bitten his lip.) Anyway, Distant Hills Dark Mild was fine but rather surprising; it was on the malty side for dark milds, but also in the ‘light-textured, fresh-tasting and not particularly dark’ area. If there was such a thing as a light dark bitter, or a mid-brown mild, this would be it. I’d recommend seeking it out if it weren’t for the recent sad news about the brewery.

My itinerary took me next to the Grove Alehouse, the only bar I’ve been to during Mild Magic (or in the last couple of years) that didn’t take card payments. Cash duly located, I settled down in a corner with a half of Elgood’s Black Dog – the first time I’ve seen that one – while the bartender had a chat with some friends; the small scale and laid-back atmosphere of the Grove made this a much more pleasant experience than it had been at the Crown.

Into each life a little rain must fall, and no Mild Magic would be quite complete without one of my very least favourite beers, Coach House Gunpowder Mild. Still, the George and Dragon – one of those rambling open-plan multiple-seating-area pubs with every area dominated by a large screen TV – deserves credit for having a mild on, even if it does taste of liquorice water. The Milliner in Davenport – a small, laidback bar with a playlist somewhere between “contemporary indie” and “Greatest Hits Radio” – couldn’t stretch that far (although I’ve since learned that it had had the Distant Hills dark mild on earlier). And the RedWillow Noble Pale was rather good, to be fair.

Back to town, then – well, back to Stockport – and where better to finish than the Petersgate Tap. Tatton Pennine (light mild) was very nice. RedWillow Double Heritage Porter (yes, on cask) was very nice indeed. And Thornbridge Pardus (Sticky Toffee Pudding) was very silly indeed, and really rather good. After that lot I was back on the bus; I put the lid on the crawl with a half of Steelfish Running With Believers at the Ladybarn Social Club, while watching the end of the City game. I’ve used ‘laid-back’ as a term of approbation a couple of times, and there’s not much more laid-back than the Ladybarn Social Club; it was a really nice way to finish the day. (And I don’t even support City.)

Entering the Grove in Clayton, a week later, I was transported back to Manchester pub-going in the 1980s – old boys sat behind half-empty pints on upholstered benches, obscured by clouds of… steady on, that’s not tobacco smoke, is it? An unexpected aspect of the spread of vaping has been that you very rarely smell tobacco any more; I’d assumed people would want to replicate it, but apparently not. But there evidently is at least one vape liquid out there that produces clouds of tobacco-scented vapour (and double-takes). There was a surprisingly lively discussion going on, on the surprising topic of spelling:

“Course I know how it’s spelt! O, U…”
– Eulogy doesn’t begin with an O, U! I’ve googled it – it’s E, U, L, O, G, Y! It’s not f.ing ougley!
“Will you f.ing shut up?” [this from another part of the room]
– Who?
“You!”

A bit livelier than I was expecting for 12.00 noon.; the pub had been open since half eleven, though. The person shouting the (correct) spelling of ‘eulogy’ across the room (and being told to shut up) was the bartender, I should mention. Anyway, I asked for a half of Holt’s Unmistakably Mild and got one from the standard Mild tap (they had one of each). Since then I’ve heard of pubs putting the Unmistakably on instead of the standard Mild rather than alongside it. The one I had was a fairly big and complex beer (and very nice, I should say), so the chances are it was the Unmistakably.

Further down the tramline, the bartender at the Silly Country wasn’t aware that Mild Magic was still running (it was the final weekend, to be fair). Not seeing anything labelled ‘mild’, I ordered the darkest thing on the bar, which turned out to be a sweetish, full-bodied dark mild with an interesting roasty edge. (It was Lord’s Black Gold, and it was in fact a stout. Nevertheless.)

In previous years I’ve had Bridge beers at the Austin Powers drinking den that is Tapster’s in Ashton-under-Lyne, but the lineup that Saturday was all Settle – and no mild. (The bitter I had was pretty good, though.) Before leaving Ashton I paid a visit to the old market hall for something to eat (viz. a cheese and onion pie), and fitted in a half of Brightside Manchester Magic Mild at the Ash Tree (JDW) while I was waiting for my bus.

Onward to the final stop, Stalybridge. That Saturday afternoon, the streets of Staly were doing their usual impression of the Mary Celeste. (Maybe things pick up in the evening.) I didn’t get a chance to test my theory about Hyde’s 1863; the White House only had Hyde’s Dark Ruby in the way of milds, and the Q Inn (to give it its full name) didn’t even have that. But the best (of the day) was yet to come: at Bridge Beers, Bridge Golden Mild was so good that I stayed for a second half. This is only the third light mild I’ve had this year, and – like the Tatton example – it was excellent; no issues with condition, either, which is impressive in a bar serving multiple beers on stillage. One small negative: listing all your draught beers on the blackboard whether they’re available or not, and having a bartender tell each customer in turn which ones are on, represents excellent customer service with a personal touch, but lacks something in terms of speed and efficiency.

Journey’s end – and, for me, Mild Magic’s end – was the Buffet Bar, where I had a very nice half of RedWillow Dark Ruby Mild. And a very nice half of Zapato Frambozen (on keg). And listened to some very nice music in very nice surroundings while eating a very nice pork pie… It was that stage of the day, let’s face it. And finally Esther, a half of Serious Goldrush (Belgian yeast, it’s the future!).

Fourteen pubs, ten milds, ten breweries. Overall, that makes 49 pubs, of which 38 had at least one mild on (nine Holt’s pubs, seven Hyde’s, five Spoon’s and 17 independent or ‘other’), and 22 milds from 19 breweries (viz. Bank Top, Beartown, Blackjack, Bridge, Brightside, Coach House, Distant Hills, Dunham, Elgood’s, Empire, Holt’s, Hyde’s, Only With Love, Peerless, RedWillow, Rudgate, Steelfish, Tatton and Titanic).

I considered listing the places that didn’t have a mild on here, but in many cases I think they genuinely were ‘between milds’ or had under-ordered – or, in the case of JDW’s pubs, had over-ordered on ‘festival’ beers. I will say that one or two places seem to have severely under-ordered (no sightings of mild at Wine and Wallop any later than mid-April), and the mild which visitors to the Famous Crown were repeatedly assured was on order never seems to have arrived – and I didn’t get the impression that those in charge at the Beech had ever had any intention of putting a mild on.

Still, that’s only a handful of refuseniks out of 49 pubs – and they can be set against the successes represented getting milds into places like the Milliner or the Head of Steam. Many thanks to everyone involved in organising this year’s Mild Magic, and to the brewers and publicans who entered into the spirit of it; it was a lot of fun.

Could it be Magic? (3)

This is the third of four posts on the 2023 iteration of Mild Magic, CAMRA’s annual campaign to promote mild around Manchester.

A trip to Sale and Altrincham started out at the J P Joule (JDW), a spit away from the Metrolink, where a survey of the pumps revealed no milds; I wasn’t particularly sorry to settle for an Acorn Gorlovka. (Perhaps the reasons for it aren’t entirely admirable, but I do appreciate JDW’s policy of putting on 6% stouts at the same price as every other guest beer.) When I asked for a sticker the bartender pointed out that they did in fact have a mild on – Titanic Dark Mild was lurking at the top end of the bar along with Ruddles County and Greene King Abbot. There was no objection to giving me a sticker, “but I didn’t want you going away and saying we didn’t have a mild on”. Duly noted.

Down the road, the Volunteer was its familiar big, slightly basic, partially-carpeted self, and not one but two Holt’s milds were on the bar. I ordered the standard mild, and – it being 3.2% as compared to the 4.3% Unmistakably – pushed the boat out and had a pint.

We could see the bus stop across the road from where we were sitting, meaning that we could tell we’d missed the hourly bus to Altrincham without getting up. That wouldn’t have been so bad if the other hourly bus to Altrincham hadn’t been scheduled for all of two minutes later. (Sort it out, Andy!) We trekked back to the Metrolink and headed for Alti that way. The Unicorn (JDW) also had Titanic Dark Mild on, and this time I did order it. It was turning into a bit of a day for pints, unusually for Mild Magic trips; we were eating, and I couldn’t bring myself to order a half to go with my meal. Not only that, but they were for some reason selling off Rudgate Ruby Mild at an MUP-busting 99p per pint, and I could hardly pass that up.

Lastly we went to Costello’s. What is there to say about Costello’s (other than that it’s twice as big as the last time we were there and has a music policy that falls on the right side of eclectic*)? What’s there to say about Dunham Dark, or Dunham Porter, or Lymm Lymm Dam? Great beers, great bar.

*nothing later than the Kaiser Chiefs, earlier than the Sex Pistols** or more mainstream than New Order
**sorry, Matthew

A trip to Salford, Eccles and points beyond might have been in this post, but that I couldn’t work out how to start it from the cathedral area, and it seemed absurd to ‘do’ Salford without the New Oxford. So I just made a trip out from town to the New Oxford on its own. The bartender was in expansive form and told me that I’d just missed the Moorhouse‘s Black Cat Reserve, which he’d hoped would last Mild Magic out. I think he may also have told me that they hadn’t got it in for MM but had had it sitting around for ages (possibly even since before lockdown?), as they didn’t believe in throwing away good beer if they could help it, and if it hadn’t been opened it wasn’t as if it would go off, but it’s possible I misunderstood that bit. (If anyone had the Black Cat Reserve and found it a touch punchier than the advertised strength, though…) Anyway, I had a half of RedWillow Heritage Porter and another of Cloudwater Dusk, a 4.6% stout with cacao and vanilla; I was intrigued to see how a drinking-strength stout coped with additions like that, but the answer turned out to be “by dialling them right down”. The RedWillow porter, on the other hand, was superb; I haven’t been blown away by the HP in cans, but on cask it was something else. As indeed was the New Oxford, whose beer range I’ve been a bit lukewarm about in some previous years; there were some nice-looking beers on the list, and the mid-table sluggers of brewing were much less in evidence. Hopefully I’ll get back there before this time next year.

The Lord Nelson in Urmston is another big, open-plan Holt’s pub, and it also had both milds on the bar. I commented to the bartender that most places only seemed to be selling the Unmistakably Mild; he said, “that’s because most places don’t sell mild,” and walked off to the other bar. The Holt’s Mild was in good nick, and the pub was – if this doesn’t sound too ridiculous – an old man’s pub in the best sense of the word: everything was immaculate, from the wood and leather to the placement of beermats, and on that Saturday afternoon the pub had just enough custom to make you think it was going to be absolutely buzzing later on. This is probably the biggest difference between old-school working men’s pubs and Spoons’, which often look considerably less than immaculate and give the impression that it’s going to be a bit lairy later on. (And yet my wife and daughter consistently prefer them to Holt’s pubs. Must be the menu.)

Enough amateur sociology, and onward to the Prairie Schooner, which was already absolutely buzzing – so much so that I couldn’t find a seat. H’mph. Brightside Manchester Magic Mild (is somebody looking for a sponsorship opportunity?) was a good example of the malty end of the mild spectrum, although I think 5% is a bit top-end for a mild; I didn’t feel like stopping for another, though.

Finally, a trip to Cheadle and environs gave me further data for my theory about Hyde’s 1863. At the Horse and Farrier they seemed to be shifting a lot of it – well, they seemed to be shifting a lot of everything – and it was… fine. Not really my favourite beer, judged from that half – a light, thin-bodied bitter with pronounced bitterness and sharpness and not much else; you’d certainly never take it for a light mild. And then there was the James Watts. Seeing the name, I looked at the Spoons app on my phone to see what they had on, but it’s not a Spoons at all. The pub’s own Web page explains all:

To satisfy an interest in craft ale and for those looking to explore beers from the far flung corners of the globe, the James Watts is the place sample the wares.

With an array of over 100 beers to choose from, we have something to keep you interested as you seek out your new favourite tipple.

Enjoy some time with friends in a laid-back atmosphere with a glass of wine or a masterly crafted beer.

If there’s one thing I like even more than a beer from the far flung corners of the globe, it’s a masterly crafted beer. So I had high hopes when I headed for the James Watts – well, no, to be honest I didn’t have high hopes at all, but I was intrigued; I had no idea what I was going to see on the bar. So it was a complete surprise to see a cask lineup consisting of Hyde’s Original, 1863, Dark Ruby and Hopster. Exactly what Hyde’s are trying to do with that pub, or why they’re trying to do it in Cheadle, I don’t know, but I think they need a rethink. The 1863, on the other hand, was really nice – pleasantly bland, slightly sweet, very much a light mild. Work that out.

My last port of call in the area was a genuine, and rather pleasantly spartan, craft beer bar, the Wobbly Stamp. They were playing Erasure and serving Empire Moonrakers’ Mild – a ‘ten malt mild’ from a brewery in Slaithwaite, and one of the best milds I’ve had this year; I enjoyed both of them.

Ten pubs visited, nine of which were serving seven different milds. Overall, that’s 35 pubs visited and 15 different milds, from 13 breweries. Avanti!

Next: I make it to beer city (Stockport) and reach the end of the road (Stalybridge)

 

Could it be Magic? (2)

This is the second of four posts on the 2023 iteration of Mild Magic, CAMRA’s annual campaign to promote mild around Manchester.

A trip down Oxford Road started badly at the Ford Madox Brown (JDW) in Rusholme. Nothing wrong with the pub – quietly buzzing on a weekday afternoon, so no surprises there – but there was no mild to be seen (although stickers were present and correct). Back on the bus, then, to Fallowfield and the Friendship, a pub where I remember spending a lot of time in the late 1980s, although as I was living in Chorlton at the time I can’t for the life of me think why. It hasn’t changed much, anyway – still huge, still pulling in enough drinkers not to feel it. I had a half of Hyde’s 1863 and moved on to the Victoria in Withington, where I had… another half of Hyde’s 1863.

About which, as I may have mentioned, I’ve got a theory. Ahem.

My Theory About Hyde’s 1863

Come with me, if you will, back to (wobbly dissolve) the 2010s…

In 2013 I visited the Plough in Ashton-on-Mersey and found that

“Hyde’s Light Mild was … a lot nicer than I remember 1863 being – is this a rebadge or a new (old?) recipe?”

In 2015 in the same pub,

“they were serving something – with an official-looking pump clip – called Hyde’s Light Mild. It was no Golden Best, but it was really rather good – and, I thought, quite different from the 1863″

I’ve had a few halves of 1863 this time round, and I can report that, in the Friendship and the Horse and Farrier it was… fine. Actually ‘fine’ would be stretching it – it was just a light-bodied pale amber beer, thin, sharp and bitter. (But cheap.) In the Vic, the Grey Horse and James Watts, on the other hand, it was something else – something much closer to what I remembered from the Plough; closer, that is, to a light mild.

So here’s my theory: that Hyde’s 1863 needs careful handling, and doesn’t always get it.

How you would actually get a light, sweetish light mild and turn it into a thin, elbowy low-end bitter I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem like the same kind of cellaring issue that has some pubs serving Landlord green or Batham’s bitter loaded with diacetyl – and neither of the pubs where I had it in (arguably) poor condition were having any trouble shifting beer generally. But it seems like it must be some kind of cellaring issue – and one that, if my travels this year are anything to go by, is hitting the 1863’s potential sales.

The 1863 in the Vic was the good stuff, anyway. Recommended.

If you head down the road to Burton Road, you may as well carry on to Lapwing Lane, where you’ll find Wine and Wallop. Where there was (alas) no mild. A sticker was forthcoming, though, and Brightside Maverick was pretty good. Further down the road in East Didsbury I was pleasantly surprised to see a mild on the bar at the Head of Steam. The Only With Love Merlin’s Mythical Mild wasn’t great, to be honest – I think they’d had a slow start – but it was good to see them give over a pump to mild (and they had Beartown Quantock on a return visit). Excellence in Customer Service Dept: a shout out to the bartender who took my follow-up order for a third of a Magic Rock cherry sour and assured me that a third was probably the right measure – “it’s good but it is sour”. I went back to my seat feeling vaguely flattered, then heard the bartender asking her colleague “what’s that sour like?”.

Onward to Didsbury. I hoped to test my 1863 theory (see above) at the Fletcher Moss, but they were only serving Hyde’s Dark Ruby – and not very much of it, to judge from the condition of my half. Hey ho. That was better than the Famous Crown, where the bartender expressed ignorance of the entire Mild Magic concept and had to have the whole thing explained to her. Needless to say, they were ‘between milds’; there were three hand pumps, serving Wainwright, Landlord and Boltmaker, the last of which she pulled through for me.

There was no problem with mild availability at the Gateway (JDW), where they had both Titanic Mild and Bank Top Dark Mild on. I had the latter, which was very nice indeed. There are (at least) four distinct types of dark mild – fruity, stouty, malty and liquorice-water – and this was a good example of the third. As indeed is Holt’s Unmistakably Mild, although the half I had at the Griffin (Heaton Mersey) was a bit tired – my experience suggests that Holt’s aren’t having any trouble shifting it in pubs where they don’t have mild on normally, but that selling it alongside the standard 3.2% Mild is a challenge.

And finally for Didsbury and environs: Reasons to be Cheerful had RedWillow Dark Mild and, as ever, much else. I followed up my half with a third of something whose details I honestly forget, other than that it was a bourbon barrel-aged stout and 11%. It’s a hard life being a connosse conoisue connoissuer boozer.

Ten pubs visited, seven milds. Running total: 25 pubs, ten different milds from nine breweries. Onwards!

Next: Urmston and Gatley and Sale, oh my!

Around Manchester on a pint of mild (3)

One more post on Mild Magic, CAMRA’s annual campaign to promote mild around Manchester.

When I started this blog back in 2010, one of the first things I posted was a series of posts on “my local” – I was lucky enough to have four pubs and bars to choose from. All four are still trading, although with the exception of the Wetherspoon’s they’re all under different management. Of the other three, two – the Beerhouse and the Hillary Step – are more or less recognisable as the same place they were, with a formula that the incoming management have altered but not overturned.

The Beech, though, is an almost completely different pub, with the snug opened out and large screens – and piped music – in every room. Not, I have to say, my cup of tea. Still, at all but its very lowest points the Beech has been dependable for beer quality, with a longstanding association with Timothy Taylor’s, and I’m happy to say that both of these are still the case. I didn’t stop long enough to find out if the Landlord and Boltmaker were as good as I remember them being, but I can report that the Brightside Umbra was in good nick. It’s an odd one for a dark mild, with a lot of roasty bitterness and very little sweetness; if you’d told me it was a light stout I wouldn’t have argued. Good stuff, though.

I had the Beech, and its many screens, more or less to myself on this Friday afternoon, but as I approached the Bowling Green things looked decidedly more lively. In fact it was buzzing. Actually it was a bit too busy, and what was that? a sign asking customers to place all orders at the desk? I approached close enough to the lad on the said desk for him to accost me and ask whether I was with the funeral. Ah.

Fortunately there was another pub handy, in the shape of the Horse and Jockey. In its latterday form as a gastropub, it was deserted and rather unwelcoming. I took my pint of Holt’s mild outside; it was fine, but no more than that.

On another Friday afternoon, the bus took me to Urmston and the Lord Nelson – a pub I’ve only ever visited in daytime, and which always looks as if it’s going to be a lot livelier in the evening; not in an unwelcoming way, though. The Holt’s mild here was excellent, for what that’s worth.

A walk into the centre brought me to the Prairie Schooner, the Music for the Soul secondhand record shop, and – more to the point – the Tim Bobbin (JDW), where I had another pint of Brightside Umbra (for about half the price the Beech had charged). The sticker sheet had gone walkabout, so I returned to the bar afterwards to get a signature, only to be stuck behind an old bloke who was having a pint of Coors dispensed from the slowest keg tap you have ever seen. And a slightly lairy-looking guy who lunged up to the bar, counted out some coins, said something about ifmyturncomesroundandI’mnotherecheersta and disappeared out of the front entrance, presumably for a smoke. (The bartender, still drawing the endless pint of Coors, ignored this approach completely and rolled her eyes as he left.) Then it turned out that the old bloke with the Coors wasn’t just ordering the one pint; in fact I had to wait until the bartender had pulled four of them, by which time there was a small crowd waiting and I felt quite bad about monopolising the bartender’s attention. Still, I seized my moment and got… the bartender’s initials in the box on the form. (This was actually the only place I came away from without a sticker this year.) Outside I met ifmyturncomesround guy, although as it turned out he wasn’t smoking; in fact he was riding a pushbike in circles on the pavement. He asked if there was still a queue at the bar, then answered himself (ahyouwouldn’tknowwouldyou) and headed inside to find out, wheeling the bike. JDW’s, all human life is there.

There was no drama at the Prairie Schooner – not least because it wasn’t on the MM list – but I’ll talk about it anyway. There was an opportunity to compare and contrast Loch Lomond‘s single-hop DIPAs Lost in Citra and Lost in Mosaic (verdict: the Citra works better than the Mosaic, unless you like an undertone of burnt toast with your fruit cocktail). Also at the Schooner, a wall entirely covered with past pump badges; I was able to count 20 different TicketyBrew beers, half of which I never had, alas. (Also a few from Cryptic – and doubtless from other former breweries of quality.)

And then to Didsbury. Wine and Wallop and I have (slightly tetchy) history with regard to MM, so it’s nice to be able to report that they had a mild on, and that it was a very nice pint. It’d be even nicer if I could remember which mild it was. I blame their bizarre decision to operate on table service only, while still having draught beers on the bar (and not on a menu, blackboard etc, at least as far as I could see). I distinctly remember thinking, halfway down the pint, what is this again? and straining to read the pump clip from my seat (I appear to be drinking… Binny Stritchly’s Dank Mick… can that possibly be right?). I don’t distinctly remember what I eventually worked it out to be, sadly. Still: they’re serving mild – and giving out stickers – so fair play to them.

There was more nomenclatural (it’s a word) consternation at the Fletcher Moss, which turns out to have been the only Hyde’s pub I visited on this year’s MM. Despite sponsoring MM, Hyde’s seem determined not to sell anything actually called Mild. As I understand it Hyde’s light mild is still on sale as 1863 (although as Hyde’s currently badge it as a “chestnut session ale” I wonder if it’s as light as it used to be), but the dark mild is no longer Owd Oak or even Old Indie; it’s… (You have to imagine this entire paragraph playing out, with increasing rapidity, in my head as I studied the pump clips at the Fletcher Moss.) In the end I plumped for Dark Ruby (“a very dark ruby red beer”), as much on the basis of its strength (3.5%) as anything else. A pint of it in the beer garden went down quite nicely.

Lastly to East Didsbury and the Gateway (JDW), where they were between milds. As remnants of their ‘beer festival’ were still visible, I took the opportunity to settle a question from the Waterhouse – where

There was a pump for Rudgate Ruby Mild, which is what I duly ordered, but I didn’t see the server draw it – she disappeared to the other end of the bar and came back with my pint some minutes later. (I checked afterwards and there wasn’t another mild tap at that end.) Maybe she had it ‘banked’, although I can’t imagine why.

The only other dark beer it could have been was an Italian porter – Foglie d’Erba Hot Night at the Village – which, as luck would have it, was on the bar at the Gateway. So I had a half. It was good, but it was definitely a porter – which means I did have the Rudgate mild. Nice to get these things settled.

There was very nearly a problem with the stickers at the Gateway, albeit an unusual kind of problem – I overheard two members of staff debating whether, considering they hadn’t had a mild on, I should have been given a sticker. Fortunately they didn’t confiscate it for being obtained under false pretences. They were also pulling through Titanic Classic Mild at the time, and as I’d only had a half of the porter it seemed rude not to have a half of that as well.

Six pubs and one bar; seven venues, seven milds, six stickers. Overall, 23 out of 24 were giving out stickers and – more importantly – 20 out of 24 had mild on. Several old favourites it was nice to visit again – Costello’s, the Stalybridge Buffet Bar and of course the Tap – and four places I’d never been before (Ladybarn SC, Tapsters, the Halfway House and Bridge Beers). (And I really must get back to Reasons one of these days.)

Many thanks to the organisers for making Mild Magic possible, again – it’s good to have it back.

Around Manchester on a pint of mild (2)

More on Mild Magic, CAMRA’s annual campaign to promote mild around Manchester.

One of the pleasures of Mild Magic is connecting up assorted pubs and bars in a single route – particularly when it means getting to somewhere you don’t usually go without having to make a special trip. It doesn’t always work out; this time round I decided not to fit Reasons to be Cheerful into my Didsbury trip (of which more anon), but never managed to work out another route it would fit into. What I did manage this year, courtesy of a £10 all-you-can-eat bus/train/tram pass, was Stalybridge via Droylsden and Ashton.

At the Silly Country my notes have let me down; I could tell you what was on two of the handpumps (viz. two different flavoured ciders); I could draw you a map of the layout and tell you where I was sitting; I could even name several of the books on the bookshelves, but I can’t tell you the name of the dark mild I had. It was pretty good, though. (It definitely wasn’t Pomona Mild Peril, which TSC had had on, as that’s 6% and I would have (a) remembered and (b) had a half.) The Silly Country – a craft beer bar in a shopping-centre unit, in Droylsden – wouldn’t have been on my list of Bars Most Likely To Succeed, but it’s been there four years now and seems to be doing OK (and the mild, whatever it was, was in good nick). Good luck to them.

Back on the tram to Ashton, where I decided to tick off the (restricted-opening) Halfway House before trying anywhere more central. I’m not sure where it’s halfway to, but it would have to be pretty good if you were going to get me doing the other half on foot. I did get a bus part of the way, but ‘part’ was the operative word – the usually-reliable Moovit app suggested that my best route was “get on bus, sit down, count to ten, stand up, get off bus, walk uphill through terraced streets for 15 minutes”, and like a fool I believed it. The Halfway House turned out to be a back street pub on the old “large detached house” model, with three rooms, three customers and two handpumps. They had had a mild on, apparently, but no longer; I had a pint of Bass, which was perfectly fine.

Then back into the centre, which took a while – that side of Ashton isn’t really optimised for foot traffic – and took me down a lot of streets where all the shops were closed and there was nobody around but bored teenagers. As it was a Saturday lunchtime this seemed odd, to say no more than that. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by living in Chorlton. Fortified by a couple of pies from the covered market, I went in search of Tapster’s, and found… a nightclub. A nightclub from the 1970s or 80s, specifically – chrome, deep pile carpets, black leather, low lighting… And, er, cask beer. There was no mild on, so I had a half of Bridge Beers Galaxy. The bartender told me they had a Bridge Beers mild, but it was still settling; we had a bit of a chat about the brewery, who he rated highly.

Next stop was the aforesaid bridge – viz. Staly – and my first call was Bridge Beers itself, where the brewery’s beers are served on gravity, from nines behind the bar. I had a half of Bridge Beers mild, which was really good. Ordinarily I would have either made it a pint or stopped for another half or two – I’d enjoyed the Galaxy & was quite tempted by the “Galaxy Export Strength”, even though “export strength” turned out to be 5% – but.. Well, it’s a social distancing thing, or rather an ‘enclosed space’ thing. I’d managed to mute, or at least snooze, my inner Covid Alert in all the places I’d visited so far – “well, it’s quite airy”; “well, it’s quite a big place”; “OK, it’s a small place with no windows at all, but… actually it’s quite big, and anyway there’s hardly anyone in”… But Bridge Beers was (a) tiny, (b) packed (there must have been eight other customers in there, maybe even ten) and (c) frankly a bit stuffy – you know how, when you’re in a crowded room, after a while the air starts to feel a bit moist? That.

So I regretfully supped up and moved on to my last stop of the day, the Buffet Bar. I went there 28 years ago to my certain knowledge (and that may not have been the first time); it hasn’t changed a lot. Sadly there wasn’t a mild to be had, but as they had Jaipur on cask I didn’t feel too hard done by. A half of that was followed by a half of Thornbridge/Neon Raptor Pandora’s Box, an 8% DIPA (on keg, naturally). Which was fine – lots of tropical fruit, lots of alcohol – but no more than that; I should just have had a pint of Jaipur, or maybe two.

Another trip out took me to Sale and Altrincham – not an actual train trip, admittedly, although it did involve travelling on a railway line.

In Sale I decided against trekking up the A56 to the Volunteer, and went to the J. P. Joule (JDW) next to the stationtram stop. It was early in the day, so I broke my rule and had a half, of Phoenix Monkeytown Mild. It was a fairly light-bodied dark mild, not particularly sweet, with a slightly stout-like bitter finish. I wasn’t bowled over, but it would probably work better over a full pint.

In Altrincham I went to the Old Market Tavern. I’ve seen it buzzing in the past, but that was at night. On this particular Saturday lunchtime, this big, open pub, a bit outside the town centre, not serving food (despite signs claiming otherwise), was about as busy as you’d expect. I imagine food service was a casualty of the pandemic, as I think was also the case for the Buffet Bar. Bringing it back would be a big step, but without it a place like the Old Market has lost a lot of its appeal, at least during the day. They also didn’t have any mild on, but a pint of Lees‘ MPA was very welcome.

Then it was over to Costello’s, where I was back on halves; the Dunham Dark would have been well worth a pint, but there was the Porter to fit in (malt extract and tobacco smoke), not to mention the Lymm Lymm Dam. There’s a certain kind of beer of which I always want to say that it “rings like a bell”. I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that(!), but it’s usually an old ale, an abbey beer or a top-end strong bitter; Ticketybrew Pale qualified, for example. It’s a certain combination of body, fullness of flavour (without cloying sweetness or cough-mixture heaviness) and strength. Anyway, that half of Lymm Dam absolutely rang like a bell. (And the Dunham Dark was a very good mild.)

Three pubs and five bars – or if you’re being picky, three pubs, four bars and one micro-pub; quite a variety of places, anyway. And eight venues got me eight stickers and five milds – a bit less impressive than the 8/9 scored by central Manchester and Stockport (see previous post), but not bad.

Next: making some local calls.

Around Manchester on a pint of mild (1)

Mild Magic – CAMRA’s annual campaign to promote mild around Manchester – is back for 2022; slightly to my surprise, I’m even taking part myself. (“Look how the figures are falling at the moment” did battle with “Look at all the people who’ve been posting pictures of their positive tests”; it wasn’t a foregone conclusion, but optimism eventually won, thanks in part to an intervention by “it’s not as if I’m not going to the pub already”.) 24 pubs, 24 different areas, mostly on weekday afternoons (being a part-timer has its benefits) – it’s been fun, and hopefully it hasn’t been excessively risky.

The main difference with previous years, as far as I’m concerned, is that I’ve decided to have a pint where possible. The weekday afternoon trade tends to be slack, for obvious reasons, and in previous years’ MMs I’ve sat in quite a few pubs and bars that were otherwise completely empty. If I was going to be the only custom a bar had in half an hour, I didn’t want to seem like a cheapskate into the bargain – especially post-pandemic. Also, it’s mild – a good mild should be pintable, even to the point of being a “disappearing beer“.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the first instalment of pubs on this year’s MM itinerary, covering central Manchester and Stockport.

I started at the Briton’s Protection, a landmark pub with reliably good and interesting beer, now sadly under threat (petition here). The mild they had on was 4Ts Old School, which was… fine. To be more positive about it, it was – as the name implies – an old-school dark mild: malty, sweetish, light-textured, absolutely nothing striking or unexpected about it. Which meant that it went down very easily.

I had an odd experience at the Waterhouse (JDW). There was a pump for Rudgate Ruby Mild, which is what I duly ordered, but I didn’t see the server draw it – she disappeared to the other end of the bar and came back with my pint some minutes later. (I checked afterwards and there wasn’t another mild tap at that end.) Maybe she had it ‘banked’, although I can’t imagine why. It was a nice mild, anyway – fruity and full-flavoured, with a lot of body.

Also in – or near – the city centre are the New Oxford and the Piccadilly Tap; I know I had a mild in both places but I didn’t make a note of it, sadly. Both places had a big range of beers on tap, as ever – and, as ever, an impressive range of Belgian bottles at the Oxford – but nothing that made me feel the need to stop for another.

A city-centre pub that wasn’t an old haunt of mine – I think I’d only been in once before – was the Lower Turk’s Head. There are pubs that, when you see them in daylight, look as if they come into their own at night, and the Turk’s Head was definitely one of those. The Holt’s Cherry Mild was excellent, though – not especially sweet or fruity, but a big, complex flavour, far superior to the standard mild.

As for the Stockport leg of my MM journey, that began at the Ladybarn Social Club. I was initially foxed by the “entry by key fob only” notice on the door and considered going elsewhere, before reasoning that it must be possible for non-members to get in and trying the door buzzer. Of course, it was fine – just a matter of signing in as a guest – and I had a pint of Dunham’s Chocolate Cherry Mild, which was really good. The signing-in process took a bit of a while to organise, as did the hunt for the MM stickers, and I was slightly concerned that I was going to miss the next bus. Once I’d got my pint, I realised I needn’t have worried. The flavour of the CCM is just as big as the name implies, but the chocolate and cherry notes don’t feel bolted-on – it just tastes like a dark mild that happens to taste of those things. (Cf. Ticketybrew’s “Frankenstein beers” with hops-and-barley flavour profiles duplicated – and heightened – by the use of additions.) And it goes down extraordinarily easily. After this and the 4Ts, I started to wonder if the roster of disappearing beers needed to be updated to include traditional dark milds (and some less traditional ones).

In Stockport itself, the recently-revived Crown didn’t have a mild on, but only because it had run off the previous night, when (the licensees were keen to impress on me) the place had been rammed. It was Sunday afternoon, just after lunch; I had a half of Brimstage Oystercatcher stout, and I didn’t see another soul while I was there. It’s hard to come back from closure, and I wish the new licensees luck with it.

The Cocked Hat, by contrast, had a good complement of regulars, a word which here means “person sitting at the bar who looks round at you suspiciously as you come in” (an experience I’ve had in there before, although oddly enough the pub was under different management). It also had big screen sport with the sound off, together with piped music – a weird and unappealing combination (also seen at the Lower Turk’s Head). I decided to break my pint rule and had a half of Timothy Taylor’s Dark Mild – a fairly rare bird, which I’ve enjoyed a lot in the past. Either it’s not as good now as it used to be or the half I had was in poor nick; I wasn’t impressed, anyway.

Lastly, I broke the pints rule again at the Petersgate Tap, but this was because they had Ashover Victorian Ruby Mild on – and it’s 7%. There’s no reason to imagine that a Victorian time traveller would call it anything but a mild – and matching Victorian styles to anything we’d recognise now is a mug’s game – and  but for what it’s worth this tasted like a strong old ale or a light-ish barley wine; it was terrific, either way. (But a half was enough.)

Counting the Ladybarn SC as a pub – and it’s certainly the pubbiest social club I’ve ever seen; I could name pubs that look more like a social club – that’s seven pubs and two bars; nine venues, nine stickers, eight milds.

Next: two train trips

Is it safe?

Is it safe at this desk? Yes, I think so, although the joke could yet be on reclusive old me – a multi-member household is only as safe as the riskiest place any member visits.

Was it safe when I went to the Font last night? Yes, I think so – we sat outside. I had a NEIPA which I won’t name (it was so long since I’d had the style that I’d forgotten I don’t like ’em) and the ever-reliable Track Sonoma; my companions both had a raspberry sour from Vault City, which was really rather good. (I can recommend the same brewery’s blackcurrant sour, of all the unlikely things. Strong, sour fruit beers – they’re the next big thing, possibly.) The Sonoma was the only cask beer on, incidentally; in the old days there used to be six or eight of them, although admittedly all six (or eight) were generally low- to mid-strength pales. Anyway, given that we were in the open air it did all seem pretty safe.

Is it safe in an enclosed space? There’s a question. As an extension of the ‘open air’ principle, I reckon you’re probably reasonably safe as long as you can feel a bit of a breeze on your face, whether it’s from an open window or from ventilation. On that basis I don’t worry about the tram – though I do still try and avoid buses – and I think the cinema and the restaurant we went to last week were both probably OK. Not everywhere qualifies, though – most pub interiors don’t, for a kick-off. The only time I’ve been inside any of my local pubs this summer, I was sitting so close to an open window I could have poured my drink on the pavement.

Is it safe if you’ve had the vaccine? This is the difficult bit. According to data I’ve seen two shots cut your risk of catching the Delta variant by 60%. What this means is that for any occasion when you would (100%) have caught the virus otherwise, you now have only a 40% chance of catching it. But what that means, as anyone who can do powers of 6 in their head can confirm, is that if you have two opportunities(!) to catch the virus your chance of not catching it goes down to 36%; three, down to 22%; four, down to 13%… Six opportunities to catch it and your chance of missing out on getting infected is down below 5% – which is to say your cumulative chance of catching it is up over 95%.

People I know take the view that if you’ve had both shots (a) you’re not going to end up on a ventilator (or worse) if you do catch the virus, and in any case (b) you’re about as safe as you’re going to get, so if not now, when? I respect those people’s judgment, but I can’t quite share it, for three reasons. Firstly, while the thought of being protected from the worst outcomes is reassuring, I would really rather not get Covid (or pass it on to anyone else); it’s “just like the flu” in roughly the same sense that street opiates are “just like paracetamol”. It has some weird neurological features that we’re nowhere near understanding, and the long-term effects can be debilitating or worse – I knew someone who died from “long Covid”, aged 46. If the choice is to stay at home or roll the dice on a possible infection, it’s going to take a lot to get me out of the door – even with the dice weighted in my favour.

Secondly, I don’t believe we are about as safe as we could be: we’d be a lot safer – we’d be rolling those dice a lot less often – if figures were low and falling, instead of being high and rising. On current trends, the daily case count will match its early-January peak in about a month’s time. The vaccines have been effective to some extent: they’re almost certainly preventing a much steeper rise in cases, effectively providing firebreaks that stop flare-ups spreading. Also, both the proportion of people who catch the virus who are admitted to hospital and the death rate of those who are hospitalised are way down from the January wave. (If the peak case numbers are repeated, we’d expect to see 200 deaths a day in early October, not the 1200 per day we had at the end of January.) But remember that January was in the middle of a lockdown, a tactic that the government has promised not to use again: if we do see 60,000 cases per day in a month’s time, what’s to stop those figures rising even further? (Don’t say ‘herd immunity’ unless you can explain why – given that it clearly isn’t working now – a month’s worth of vaccinations will make it start working.)

Thirdly, the one thing we don’t want to happen is another mutation, making the virus more infectious, more deadly or both. When there’s a lot of viral replication going on, mutations happen all the time; most of them are trivial or non-functional, but sometimes a mutation improves the virus’s chances of surviving and replicating to the point where it out-competes other, existing variants. This is what happened with the Alpha (Kent) variant, and it’s happened all over again with Delta. (If we had nothing to worry about but the original Wuhan version of Covid, the country would probably be Covid-free by now.) The range of possible mutations isn’t infinite, and there may not be much scope for a version worse than Delta – but we don’t know that. Every day when people are getting infected is a day when a new mutation may arise. Every day when large and growing numbers of people are getting infected is a good day to stay well away from becoming a part of the process, if you can.

So, is it safe? Well, I don’t feel safe; I haven’t felt safe since about the time I last wrote on this blog. It was around that time that the government made it clear – to the general approval of their own party’s MPs – that the abandonment of lockdown measures and other restrictions, while it might be gradual, would be irreversible. I don’t know what this actually means, but the mood music is clear enough: the course has been locked in and nothing’s going to change it. Not public concern, not the case numbers, not the medical profession, not people dying on trolleys in hospital corridors. Watching the case figures rise – then fall, then rise again – and watching the hospitalisation and death rates rising or (at best) holding steady, ‘irreversible’ is the very last message I want to hear: it’s depressing, and by depressing I mean ‘nightmarish’. So that’s one reason why I haven’t been blogging lately.

Is it safe to talk about? This is another. As it goes, I’m quite keen on Britain having good trading and political relations with Europe; I’m also a Labour Party member. So there have been plenty of opportunities, in the last six years, for me to learn that other people have strong negative feelings about people and things who I feel positively about. Usually I’ve been happy to stand by what I believe in – where appropriate, which on a beer blog it generally isn’t – and laugh off any hostility. Something about the politics around lockdown, though, has got to me, and made me not want to do anything even slightly like wading in. It’s partly that the topic of lockdown is hard to avoid if you’re writing about pubs and beer, and partly that I genuinely see the way we deal with Covid as… well, a matter of life and death; this makes it hard to engage in a highly polarised debate in a spirit of knockabout fun. And it doesn’t help matters that the effects of the other two big polarisations I mentioned – the effects of what happened in December 2019 and January 2020 – are still very much with us.

Is it safe to go to Spoons? Probably not, quite frankly – and there are plenty of other reasons to give someone else your beer money – but it’s so well-placed for a quick drink after the pictures… Early on a weekday evening, the Seven Stars was half-empty – a good kind of half-empty – but I could see that the staff were stretched, not least from the number of uncleared tables. I scanned the code on our table and found myself ordering through the Website, which rapidly chewed up the battery in my (admittedly ageing) phone. Cask beer was limited – not to one beer this time, but to four decidedly uninspiring house beers (Ruddles, Abbot, Doom Bar and Wainwright Gold). Scrolling the can and bottle menu, I saw several beers greyed out and marked as out of stock; several others which I would have expected didn’t appear at all (no sign of those Sixpoint IPAs, for example). But they had Devils Backbone American IPA (which was fine, although less ‘American’ than I remembered), and they had Tiny Rebel Clwb Tropicana, so… ah. No. In actual fact they didn’t have Clwb Tropicana, or pretty much anything else in a 330 ml can; our server explained that they were switching from cans to bottles (???) and suggested a few alternatives, all of which were 500 ml or more.

As for the safety aspect, I realised as soon as we walked in that we were the only people there wearing masks – and I didn’t see another soul in a mask the whole time we were there, entering or leaving, behind the bar or on the stairs. Ventilation? I didn’t notice any – which probably means there wasn’t enough. (Roll the dice, then.) The other thing I noticed when we walked in was a piece of tape across the main double doors reading ‘Entrance Only’; I didn’t remember that pub having another exit and wondered vaguely which way we’d be going out. When we left I realised I’d misread the sign: it said ‘Entrance Only’ on one of the two swing doors and ‘Exit Only’ on the other. If taped-off one-way routes are security theatre, this was security burlesque.

Is it safe? Some places yes, some maybe, others not really. The real question is, is this as safe as it’s going to get? Come to that, is this as normal as it’s going to get – six cask lines down to one, Spoons running out of craft beer, Nando’s running out of chicken joints (although not halves and quarters), half of the people hating the other half and everyone hating the government?

I really hope not.