Mild by Northwest 4

Final scores

About 2/3 of the pubs I went to had a mild on (although in a couple of cases this took multiple visits). 32 out of 48 is lower than in previous years, but there does seem to have been a bit of a timing clash, and perhaps some miscommunication, on the Spoons front. Also, I have been a bit more selective in some areas – I visited fewer Hyde’s pubs than usual and only two Holt’s.

Dark mild: some good stuff from Brightside, Dunham, Moorhouse, Poynton, Salopian, Stockport, Tweed and a couple of less familiar breweries, as well as old friends from Hyde’s and Holt’s; Moorhouse and Tweed were probably the best of the bunch. Not so many actually labelled as ‘mild’, though.

Light mild: just the one, from Hyde’s – and the pump clip calls it a ‘session ale’. (Which, for once, is probably an improvement on calling it a bitter.) If mild’s endangered, light mild should be on a watchlist.

State Of Pub-Going: generally seemed fine, to be honest; there were a few tumbleweed venues, but much fewer than on my last round of MM outings, particularly at weekends. Perhaps it was just something about 2018.

Pubs where I was sorry not to be stopping for more than a half: Briton’s, Four Kings, Jake’s

Pubs where a half was plenty: Cocked Hat, Oxnoble

Old favourites: Petersgate Tap, Stockport Arch 14

New favourite: Reasons to be Cheerful, Tweed Equinox

Rediscovered old favourites: Stalybridge Station Buffet Bar, Moorhouse’s Black Cat

The pay-off

All this boozing earned me – what else – beer tokens, for use at the Stockport Beer and Cider Festival; enough for six halves, in fact. Since they weren’t restricted to the purchase of mild, I decided to spend them each on a different style of beer – subject to a strength limit of 5%, which ruled out going for a swift half of a 12% barrel-aged imperial stout. In the end I had:

Boudicca Spiral (stout)
Five Points Railway Porter (really good)
Stockport/Bar Nouveau Mild Mannered Victorian (mild; it was good, but how did they miss the obvious name?)
Twisted WTF (bitter; supposedly a biscuity old-school bitter with masses of hops, but I wasn’t sure about the hops)
Thirst Class You can call me Hal (pale)
Moorhouse M/44 (saison; really nice)

After that, I spent my own money on some >5% beers (in thirds):

Marble Different Dobber (nice, but I’d need to taste them side by side to verify the ‘different’ part)
Lacon’s Audit Ale (recommended by Dave Pennington, to whom many thanks; a terrific old-school barley wine)
Serious Gold Rush (a golden ale with Belgian yeast)
Cloudwater Henry’s Last Call (a cask pale from Cloudwater, got to be worth a bash – and it was)

The Lacon’s was my beer of the festival, although – slightly to my surprise – that Moorhouse saison wasn’t far behind. Great festival, great beers.

Many thanks to everyone who gave up their time to organise both the Mild Magic trail and the Festival; your work is really appreciated, at least by this punter.

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Mild by Northwest 3 – Way Out East

Mild Magic 2019: the Eastern leg

The ups…

I’d been to Marple before, albeit only in search of beer and quite briefly at that; train in, head for the Samuel Oldknow, bus out. I saw a bit more of it this time, for two reasons. One was that Marple as a destination had been joined on the Mild Magic map by Marple Bridge, itself divided into ‘North’ and ‘South’ areas. The other was that I got the wrong train. The map on my phone suggested to me that Rose Hill Marple was only a little way out of town; I was impatient to get going, so I caught that train rather than hang around for the Marple (proper) service a quarter of an hour later.

This turned out to be a bad idea. I’m not one of life’s ramblers, but if there’s a hill to be climbed I’ll climb it without complaint. A long and gentle uphill slope, though – particularly one that continues uninterrupted for the best part of a mile – is not my idea of fun. This, though, is what lies between Rose Hill and the centre of Marple. At least it gave me plenty of opportunities to look at Marple. I concluded that Marple – like so many other places – is coming up in the world, not least because – like so many other places – it now supports at least three different craft beer outlets (including one that also specialises in craft gin). The longest-established is the Samuel Oldknow, an unassuming shop-front bar with hidden depths; I had Stockport Arch 14 mild, which was rather good (although admittedly I was thirsty by this stage).

Next, I headed for Marple Bridge, which to my surprise turned out to be at the bottom of a very steep hill, with Marple Station halfway down. (I guess bridges go over rivers, and they tend to be in valleys… Perhaps I’ve been a townie too long.) The mild on offer at the Norfolk Arms – a big old-style pub at the foot of the hill was 4 Ts Old School; the main thing I remember about it is that, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with stickers, I took it and sat down without paying. I reckon I could have got away with it, too, if I’d thrown it back and legged it, but honesty got the better of me.

Further out of Marple Bridge – strung out on the northbound road out of town, in fact – were the Spring Gardens and Northumberland Arms, two more big ‘roadhouse’-type pubs. The Spring Gardens didn’t have a mild on, but I hadn’t seen Abbeydale Deception in yonks, so it was nice to reacquaint myself. The Northumberland Arms had Dunham Dark, a very decent mild & one of those local milds I’d expected to see more of in the free trade. From there I got the bus to Romiley, where the proprietor of Jake’s Ale House (Jake?) proudly exhibited his all-but-empty sticker sheet – “75 new customers!”. Quite how often I’ll be making the trip to Romiley between now and the next CAMRA crawl, I don’t know, but in principle that is very much the idea. (It’s a nice little bar, and the Poynton Dark Side was really good.)

According to my notes it was 40 minutes from Jake’s to my next stop, the Railway in Portwood (covered in the first of these posts); as I remember most of that was spent on a minuscule bus bobbling around through the estates of Romiley and Harrytown. (Yes, Harrytown. Whether there’s any reliable way to distinguish people who come from Harrytown in terms of their accoutrements, I don’t know.) From there it was on to the Petersgate Tap and home (NB two distinct places).

…and downs

Glossop – which is also very easy to reach by train from Manchester, public transport fans – is another place that’s coming up in the world, at least if its craft beer bar quota is anything to go by. After a mildly disappointing start at the local Spoons, I’m afraid I incommoded the proprietor of Bar 2 slightly by walking into the bar at 12.15, at which point he was (as he explained) not only still setting up but still waking up after a very late night and a short night’s sleep. (Sometimes I think how nice it would be to run a little bar, and then I think again.) But there was mild (Stockport Arch 14) and it was in good nick. Bar 2, incidentally, was Tweed 2 until a disagreement with the Tweed brewery over rates and availability; there were no Tweed beers at all on the bar when I went. Finally – for Glossop – Four Kings Cask and Kitchen didn’t have any mild on, but I could forgive them that for the quality of the Four Kings Porter. The food menu looked extraordinary, too, but nothing quite leapt out at me, so I moved on.

You know how places like Marple and Glossop are coming up in the world, proliferation of craft beer bars etc? (It’s not just the old country towns, either – look at Urmston. Even Stretford is loaded with ‘craft’ joints these days – Stretford!) OK, so: Hyde. The centre of Hyde is busy, you’ve got to give it that, and I didn’t notice many vacant sites – but you’d be looking at it for a long time before the phrase “up in the world” occurred to you. (Having a honking great motorway running – at best – right alongside the town can’t help matters.)

Where beer’s concerned Hyde sometimes means the Queens; not this time, though, I reckoned I’d had my quota of Joey’s pubs. But it always means the Tweed Tap, the Sportsman and the Cheshire Ring. The Tweed Tap somehow looks like a craft beer bar which has no intention of bringing the surrounding area up in the world; I’m not saying it’s rough, just a bit… spartan, inside as well as out. Tweed Equinox is badged up as an “English brown ale”; I suppose you could find some echoes of Newcastle’s finest in there if you thought about it, but it was basically a pleasantly complex light-ish dark mild. As for the Sportsman, there is, in all honesty, very little to say that I haven’t said before. Here’s what I said when I visited four years ago, with a bonus callback to two years before that:

The last time I was in there – for 2013’s MM – the place was deserted. Not only was there only one other drinker in there, there was nobody behind the bar … in fact there was nobody in the place at all, apart from some people in the back kitchen preparing food and chatting in Spanish. (I got someone to serve me eventually, but it was a struggle.) It’s an oddity, the Sportsman, as it doubles as the Rossendale brewery tap and a Latin American restaurant.

It’s still a Rossendale brewery tap and a Latin American restaurant – with little or no signage outside indicating either of these things – and it’s still a bit challenging to get served; if you’ve ordered food, in particular, it’s handy to memorise phrases like “relaxed, unhurried service” and repeat them to yourself occasionally. (It’s good food, to be fair.) A vast array of Rossendale beers were on the bar – seriously, there must have been seven or eight of them – but none of them was a mild as far as I could tell.

As for the Cheshire Ring, I always vaguely think of it as a bikers’ pub; I’m sure it isn’t, but it’s got that combination of cheap – but good – beer and macho bonhomie that I remember from my few forays into bikers’ pubs, Back in the Day. (People didn’t even say ‘back in the day’ in those days, I’m talking properly way back…) Further investigation establishes that there is in fact a biker’s pub in Hyde, the uncompromisingly named Bike’n’Hound; perhaps I’ll investigate another time. Or perhaps not; either way, something tells me that my mental image of the b.’s p. (involving draught cider, pork scratchings and singles by Hawkwind on the jukebox) may not be entirely up to date.

Back at the Cheshire Ring, there was nothing dark on the bar except Beartown Crème Bearlee (which is a stout); not being the world’s biggest Beartown fan, I swerved this in favour of something light (Shardlow Narrow Boat, my notes say, but I couldn’t tell you more than that). When I asked for a sticker the barman gestured at the Beartown stout – You should have had that one! I demurred politely, pointing out that it wasn’t a mild. You’re all right, he replied. Trouble is, when we do have Quantock on, it goes in a flash! As an argument against stocking Beartown’s dark mild, I thought this lacked something.

Exactly what happened after the Cheshire Ring I’m not able to tell you (although my notes tell me that I was back in Stockport an hour later). Similar issues relating to alcohol and memory make me unable to say very much about another trip, which finished at the Stalybridge Station Buffet Bar; there are pubs where I find it all but physically impossible to stop for just the one, and the Buffet Bar is definitely one of them.

Earlier that day, though, I definitely made a stop at Silly Country in Droylsden. There’s a distinct set of bars where I never do stop for more than one but invariably think I’d like to – Jake’s is one, and the Four Kings bar is heading that way; and Silly Country is on that list. On this occasion, though, one beer was plenty: they had an act on. There had been an act on at Platform 5 – or “the Holt’s pub with the flirty barman” as it is to me now – but that place is so big, they could set up a bowling alley if they moved a few tables; even with amplification, a full band off in the middle distance was no impediment to a quiet half. Not so Silly Country, which looks big-ish when it’s empty but looks – and sounds – decidedly bijou when it’s occupied by a dozen punters and a young man with an electric guitar. I say ‘young man’ – he can’t have been older than twelve. He was doing a decent job, accompanying himself through a series of hits – now the Beatles, now George Ezra – and he seemed to be collecting for a good cause. I didn’t feel like lingering, though. There no mild on offer, that day at least – I had a half of Stubborn Mule The Mandarin Candidate, an experimental-sounding IPA (Mandarina Bavaria hops plus actual mandarins). It worked, just about; awful name, though.

Next: final thoughts

Mild by Northwest 2 – Times Change

More on Mild Magic 2019

Times change
Ways change
Times change, people change
– Julian Cope

Didsbury and beyond
I haven’t been in many Hyde’s or Holt’s pubs for this year’s Mild Magic. But Hyde’s, in particular, is hard to avoid if you’re doing the Withington corridor, and one or other of 1863 and Old Indie was on offer at the Friendship, the Victoria, the Horse and Farrier (Gatley) and the Crown (Cheadle). The Vic was a bit dead when I called in, but the other three were all pleasantly busy – not something that’s always been true of the Friendship, in particular. (There have been fewer empty pubs across the board as compared to last year; it may not mean anything, but it does seem like a good sign.) I think 1863 is the only light mild I had this time round, if indeed it still is a light mild.

East Didsbury was more varied, in all senses of the word. I’ve never yet had a mild in Wine and Wallop (despite the name) and this year was no exception – although I gather that they did have a mild on for at least some of the Mild Magic period. My first visit to the Head of Steam also drew a blank, but when I returned a couple of weeks later they had Timothy Taylor’s Dark Mild on. The last time I’d seen that beer it was on the bar at the George in Stockport, side by side with Golden Best and both going for £2 a pint – happy days. It wasn’t £2 a pint at the HoS – in fact it was very nearly £2 a half – and I guess trade hadn’t been brisk, as it was rather tired. Still, better that than the reliably awful Coach House Gunpowder Mild which was on at the Olde Cock. Up the road in Burnage, Reasons to be Cheerful had Salopian Divine Comedy, an excellent contemporary take on the dark mild style, along with much else; it’s one of those bars that I try to fit in last when I’m doing a crawl, because I know I won’t want to stick to the one half. I have to confess, the places in this category used to be old-style real ale ‘exhibition’ pubs – the Crown in Stockport, the Railway in Portwood, the New Oxford – but these days they’re more likely to be places with interesting keg as well as cask ranges: Reasons, Petersgate Tap, Stalybridge Station Buffet Bar. Times change, people change.

Urmston
I like Urmston, but next to Chorlton – next to Stockport, for that matter – it’s… odd. It has the unevenly-developed, up-and-coming quality of bits of the Northern Quarter (ever-shrinking bits), or of Beech Road in Chorlton about five years ago, but with the difference that in both those two cases a bohemian/foodie/’craft’ scene took root in the midst of urban decline. Urmston’s not quite like that, in that the ‘old’ – pre-hipster – Urmston is still right there and doing absolutely fine. Put it this way, there can’t be many other places in Manchester where you can walk out of a craft beer bar and come face to face with a poster advertising a 70s dinner-dance hosted by TV’s Stan Boardman.

I was there for the beer, starting with Holt’s dark mild at the Lord Nelson; I even went for a pint, on the basis that

1. it had been off at Platform 5 in Cheadle Hulme, so I hadn’t had Holt’s mild yet
2. it’s only 3.2%, and
3. it seemed like the kind of pub where one orders pints

Nice pub, like a lot of Holt’s suburban pubs (the Griffin, the Park Inn) in being a massive, multi-roomed beer palace; hard to fill, but it was early in the evening when I was there and I got the sense it would get busier later. Perhaps it was just having a pint of mild in my hand, but it felt very much like proper old-school pubbing.

My other scheduled stop was the Tim Bobbin (JDW) for Lymestone Stonefish dark mild – and not Stella, as my order was initially misheard. (This seems to happen to me a lot in Urmston. I guess my accent still sounds a bit ‘southern’ – I’ve only been here since 1987, after all.) I also had a half of Evan Evans Cwrw; Evan Evans is the successor brewery to Buckley’s, whose bitter provided me with an unforgettable teenage beer epiphany. This time round… well, times change.

But I finished off at the Schooner, which wasn’t doing Mild Magic but would have been a sure-fire last-bar-on-the-route if it had been. The porter I started with was excellent; the arancini that were being prepared – one night only – on a stall outside made a great meal (and I’d been wanting to try arancini); and the second beer I had was the best of the night: it was dark, it was 7%, and it was an India Dark Ale. That’s right, it’s like an IPA only dark and stouty… It took me right back to when that piney/roasty combination was new – and “Cascadian Dark Ale” was being bandied about as an alternative title – and reminded me of what’s good about black IPAs, when they’re done well. It’s only a shame I can’t remember the brewer.

The Schooner also does off sales, and they had some beers reduced that night – including some that were up against the sell-by date and were reduced to £1. A recent Belgian beer tasting had introduced me to De Dochter van de Korenaar, so I was pleased to be able to pick up a bottle of their Beau Monde saison (brewed with bitter oranges and dry hopped). This is a daft recipe on paper, and it was an unprepossessing beer when I got round to opening it – it gushed enthusiastically and took about five minutes to transfer into a glass; how long it would have taken to settle I don’t know, as I wanted to drink it that evening. Still, sludge-brown and murky though it was, it was a terrific beer; the dry hopping and the oranges worked to blunt the rough edges of the saison style, and it all added up to a properly grown-up fruit beer.

Urmston took me back: back to the glory days of the late noughties when black IPAs were new, back to drinking malty Welsh bitter in my teens, back to the kind of pub that my Dad would have known his way around… (Not to mention taking me back to when I was new in Manchester and I was still getting accent-checked.) But the Schooner, at least, has one foot firmly in 2019. No mild, but nobody’s perfect.

Next: way out East.

Mild by Northwest

More observations on Mild Magic 2019.

Manchester
Pubs in and near the city centre did pretty well by Mild Magic this year. I had Brightside Ch-Ch-Cherry Mild at the City and an excellent Moorhouse’s Black Cat at the New Oxford (have Moorhouse’s changed the recipe? I’m sure it never used to be that good). The Briton’s Protection even had a house mild on (brewed by Beartown). I would have liked to stay longer at all of those, the Briton’s most of all – partly because they had an excellent beer range, partly because I’m not a huge Beartown fan and wouldn’t have minded moving on to something else, but mainly because I was the only person in, that Wednesday evening. Most of the pubs I went into on a weeknight were pretty quiet, but that was a low point. Of the town-centre Spoons’ – which weren’t quiet – the Moon Under Water and Paramount both had a mild or something similar (Pheasantry Mikado and Orkney Dark Isle respectively); the Waterhouse didn’t, although the porter I had instead was very good. The Oxnoble was (I think) new to Mild Magic this year, and (definitely) wasn’t really trying – only one hand pump on when I visited, and that one had Robinson’s Trooper on.

Stockport
I mentioned the Hope and the Remedy Bar in the previous post. The Petersgate Tap also had a ‘coffee mild’ on – North Riding Coffee Bean Mild – while the Railway had Howard Town Milltown. Less encouragingly, on my visit there was no mild at the Angel or at the Cocked Hat. I’d been encouraged to revisit the Cocked Hat by reading that it had reopened under new management, but I won’t be hurrying back. The main beers on the bar were a pale bitter called 28 Days Later and a darker bitter called One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, both from a brewery called RT about which I can find out precisely nothing (except that I don’t think they’re anything to do with RT Ales of Cardiff). I had the second of these, and it was really poor – somehow bland and unbalanced at the same time. As I was forming this opinion the song playing on the PA finished and another started – a cover version of the Steely Dan classic Do It Again, which had apparently been augmented by the bass and drums from Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. Recoiling from this travesty, I necked my beer as quickly as I could manage and moved on. Up the road, Heaton Hops wasn’t serving a mild (although the Siren Undercurrent was excellent). Normal mild service was restored – not before time – at Fred’s in Levenshulme, where I had my second half of Brightside Ch-Ch-Cherry Mild, to the accompaniment of the bar staff talking among themselves about how horrible it was.

– Have you tried that one? It’s… ugh…
“I’d be all right, I like anything with cherries in.”
– Well, I’m the same, that’s what I thought, until I actually tried it…

(Memo to Brightside: I don’t care what they say, I like it.)

Spoons’
Mild in Spoons’ pubs was patchy this year, possibly because the chain’s latest ‘beer festival’ had only just finished when Mild Magic started; the Sedge Lynn in Chorlton was still starting ‘festival’ beers two weeks later. Yes, there were milds at the Moon Under Water and Paramount – not to mention Tim Bobbin in Urmston (Lymestone Stonefish), the Great Central in Fallowfield and the Society Rooms in Stalybridge (both Leeds Midnight Bell) – but there were no milds at the Waterhouse, the Bishop Blaize, the Ash Tree, Ford Madox Brown or the Gateway. Part of this will just be down to when beers start and finish; I was told at the Gateway that they’d have a mild on the next day. On the other hand, the Smithy Fold in Glossop did have Beartown Brown Bear on, but it was off (and was exchanged without a fuss). The Sedge Lynn didn’t have a mild in the first week of Mild Magic, or the second, or the third; that said, when I went in the week after that they’d put two milds on to make up for lost time. (But no, I didn’t note either of them down.)

Next: Urmston, Didsbury and beyond…

Mild Magic – slow starters

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!)