Posts Tagged ‘pubs’

Why Do They Do It?

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

It’s like the traditional spot the first cuckoo in spring competition but a lot more irritating — coming across the first ‘Book Early for Christmas’ outside a pub or restaurant.

Driving up to the Bucks County Show on Friday I spotted the first offending banner of the season hung outside the Horse and Jockey in Aylesbury. This was 26th August — fully four months before Boxing Day — that’s what I calculate to be a mere 131 days before the event itself.

I thought it was bad enough that I saw Trick or Treat pieces of junk on sale at John Lewis in Oxford Street on Monday — though that may be worse in some ways as those imported American Hallowe’en ‘customs’ are just a consumerist abomination — what’s wrong with Guy Fawkes night.

If I were a pub or restuarant owner I’d calculate that hanging prominent ‘reminders’ (does anyone need reminding about Christmas) outside the establishment before the August Bank Holiday is out would lose more customer by annoying people rather than generating bookings — surely only those organising large work celebrations book so early and they’d either have done it months beforehand, not in the middle of the school holidays.

Even though the likes of B&Q and Homebase seem to start hawking their Christmas decorations in September (to the extent they’ve usually sold out by December) I prefer to try and banish all thoughts of Christmas until after 5th November — despite being an unashamed enthusiast for all things seasonal.

Mind you, the weather last week, particularly the deluges on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, were more fitting for November (the thermometer outside my house read 12C yesterday afternoon). Perhaps someone at the Horse and Jockey woke up, took a look out of the window and hung the banner out in panic that they’d overslept by three months?

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Posted in Life's Frustrations | 1 Comment »

A Summer ‘Tradition’ We Can Do Without

Monday, July 12th, 2010

I’m sure John Major in his rather risible but memorable speech about warm beer, long shadows on cricket grounds and so on from the early 90s would have included Morris dancing in his wistful list of unchanging Englishness (see the photo below of the Towersey Morris and Aldbury Morris Men performing outside the Swan, Great Kimble on 7th July).

Towersey and Aldbury Morris Outside the Swan, Great Kimble

Towersey and Aldbury Morris Outside the Swan, Great Kimble

That speech is a particular bug bear as beer should NEVER be warm — the belief that real ale is best drunk tepid has allowed bad landlords to get away with serving undrinkable crap. It should be cellar temperature (about 10-12 C) and it’s sometimes so difficult to keep it that way in unrefrigerated cellars that even usually reliable pubs might be wisely avoided in temperatures of the upper 20s and even 30s C of the sort we experienced at the end of last week and this weekend.

In fact, on our trip on Saturday to the Black Country, I had more than one pint in usually exemplary pubs that, while by no means bad, that certainly weren’t on top form. It’s not a problem we’ve really had to worry about over the last couple of summers but, in hot weather, if the beer comes out as anything like ambient temperature you know you’re likely to be in trouble — whatever rubbish John Major came out with years ago.

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Posted in Beer | 1 Comment »

Haggis and Kangaroo Crisps for Tickers?

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Seems like Walker’s Crisps have learned something from many microbreweries — give the same old product a new, gimmicky name and people will queue up to buy it for the novelty value.

For the World Cup Walker’s has introduced a national range of crisps based on World Cup qualifying nations (mostly!). They are listen on Wikipedia but also listed below:

  • England-Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding
  • America-Cheeseburger
  • Argentinean-Flame Grilled Streak
  • Australia-BBQ Kangaroo
  • Brazil-Salsa
  • Dutch-Edam Cheese
  • France-Garlic Bread
  • Germany-Bratwurst Sausage
  • Ireland-Stew
  • Italy-Spaghetti Bolognese
  • Japan-Teriyaki Chicken
  • Scotland-Haggis
  • South Africa-Sweet Chutney
  • Spain-Chicken Paella
  • Wales-Rarebit

    • While these flavours may be completely honed to resemble their inspiration dishes, there’s a certain similarity between various ingredients — a few cheese (Rarebit, Edam, the cheeseburger, etc,). Also the meaty flavours: English Roast beef, Flame-Grilled Steak, Spaghetti Bolognese, Haggis, Kangaroo and so on aren’t probably very different from each other.

    It reminds me of the microbreweries that produce a differently named brew every month which are so beloved of the CAMRA ticker tendency. Surely their beers are not that radically different from each other once around half a dozen styles have been covered. I’ve never understood why the novelty seekers are so easily taken in by a gimmicky name or pump clip design. If I drink a decent beer I’d like to be able to go out and find it again — not for it to disappear into the oblivion of a few tickers’ notebooks.

    It might be a good business opportunity for Walker’s to get the kind of multiple hand pump pubs beloved of tickers to stock the full range of these crisps — perhaps rotating them through the run up to the World Cup — and see if the beer lovers start ticking them off too.

    Talking of beer that’s worth seeking out again, ‘Trashy Blonde’ from Brewdog was on at ‘The Angel’ — a Wetherspoons opposite the eponymous tube station in Islington. I would have had a pint but I’d already ordered a ‘Dark Rider’ from Kelham Island — which was strong and rather nice so I had another pint.

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    Posted in Beer, Football | 1 Comment »

    Vote Dalek

    Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

    The new Radio Times has a cover saying ‘Vote Dalek’. In my constituency I would quite welcome the choice. As boundary changes have illogically lumped us into John Bercow’s Buckingham seat then we really have a choice of lunatic candidates as it is (none of the three main parties stands by convention). Even though Farage has decided to visit all the pubs in the constituency, his crazy party has no chance of my vote.

    Vote Dalek

    Radio Times -- Vote Dalek

    I was hoping I’d get the opportunity to vote Green — which would be a definite choice given the absence of other candidates and I could well want to vote for them anyway.

    The Tories are confusing me somewhat with their society of volunteers. I think I know what they’re trying to aim at — the suspicion that the incompetent agencies of the state are uselessly interfering with aspects of community life, such as the ridiculous vetting of anyone who has cause to even look at a child in a voluntary work capacity. There are so many illogicalities to this sort of checking it’s amazing that anyone has the nerve to justify it (such as it only applies to criminals who’ve already been caught, that most abuse happens in families anyway, that such people are usually devious enough to disguise identities and so on). Yet the totalitarian tendency, epitomised by the likes of Harriet Harman, jump up to defend expensive and incompetently thought out schemes that destroy huge amounts of benefit for very little benefit. I also think the incompetence is inherent in his administration because he’s now surrounded by the cronies he used to undermine Blair for ten years and, to do that, they are not constructive people.

    This sums up Brown’s big weakness — that he has the arrogance to think that he knows better than anyone else about how they and others should live their lives but he also fatally compounds that arrogance by not having the self-knowledge or humility to realise that he’s often (usually?) wrong and that his administration is far too incompetent to deliver what Brown thinks is good for us.

    I Increased The gap Between Rich and Poor

    Tory Poster -- Rich and Poor

    The Tories seem to hit the nail on the head with their election posters that mock Brown’s record on this (and also hit another weak spot — his total lack of humour). I’m not so keen on the picture that they’ve used, which seems to exaggerate his physical appearance, but the messages are absolutely right.

    Vote for Me -- I Took Billions from Pensions

    Tory Pensions Poster

    His record is poor and he’s trying to campaign on it. Also ‘Vote For Me’ is ironic because no-one apart from his constituents has voted for him for anything. He’s an anointed Prime Minister whose bullying supporters prevented even a leadership contest in the Labour party.

    One point the Tories have made that’s worth noting on this blog is that they have hit a lot of CAMRA’s hot buttons in their manifesto – bans on loss-leading supermarket alcohol sales and the intriguing right for communities to buy pubs.

    I don’t see any promotion of this by CAMRA, though, which is odd seeing as the government’s proposals that came after 13 years of inaction and about two weeks before an election were given a lot of publicity.

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    Posted in Beer, Life's Frustrations | 3 Comments »

    The Fleet

    Thursday, December 10th, 2009

    Walking between two interesting pubs in Clerkenwell/Farringdon in London, the Jerusalem Tavern and the Gunmakers (they have up to date information on their beers on their website which is sadly incredibly unusual for most pub websites), I was quite struck by the topography around Farringdon Road. It was quite unusual for London and more like a city like Paris or Amsterdam as there were two roads that were only built up on one side with a large void between them of about 50 yards or so. Moreover, the ground gently rose on each side of the gap. The void was spanned by bridges that spans the Metropolitan line and the Thameslink railway line beneath but the geography looked very like a river valley. 

    Interestingly, a bit of research on the web shows that the tube and railway lines were actually built through the valley of the biggest of London’s hidden rivers — the Fleet. The river is contained in a storm drainage sewer that runs alongside the railway tracks. The Fleet itself is a fascinating subject — it rises in Hampstead and Highgate and passes into the Thames at Blackfriars via Kentish Town, Camden, St.Pancras, Farringdon, Clerkenwell, Smithfield, Holborn and (of course) Fleet Street. It is almost entirely covered over but water can be heard rushing down manhole covers at the time.

    There’s a really excellent and comprehensive guide to the course of the hidden river on someone called London Geezer’s blog. It might make a good theme for a pub crawl?

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    Happy New Year – 5p on a Pint?

    Monday, November 23rd, 2009

    Drinkers face an unhappy New Year in 2010 thanks to the government who have at least two tax rises on alcohol in the pipeline.

    The temporary reduction in VAT to 15% will be reversed on New Year’s Day. This will affect all VAT-able goods so expect your Christmas television viewing to be spoiled by even irritating ‘Sale starts at 9am on Boxing Day!’ advertisements than usual as the January sales are telescoped into the fag end of December.

    Keen followers of this government’s extortionate approach to pubs and the brewing industry may remember that alcohol never benefited in the first place from the VAT cut as the Treasury immediately raised beer duty to compensate for the reduction in VAT. This hasn’t, of course, stopped the government including alcohol in the 2.5% increase planned for January 1st.

    This administration’s schizophrenic attitude to the licensed trade has again been shown by the rather pathetic decision to delay in the increase in duty by a full six hours. The government’s seemingly favourite group of drinkers – those who binge 24 hours a day – will be able to drink themselves stupid right up to six in the morning on New Year’s Day at the lower rate of VAT.

    Any delay in the onset of the tax is likely to be welcomed by pubs but if there’s any evening in the year when pubs don’t need help in generating custom it’s probably New Year’s Eve. This delay is likely to be welcomed most by Hogmanay revellers north of the border – a remarkable co-incidence that the Prime Minister and Chancellor are both Scotsmen isn’t it?

    With the price of ale at or approaching £3 a pint in most pubs in the area a 2.5% rise in VAT is likely to translate to about 5p on a pint. Alcohol duty is also due to rise in April by another 2% and it’s possible that the pre-Budget report will increase that further.

    Stuart MacFarlane, the head of mega-brewer AB InBev UK (makers of Budweiser, Stella Artois and Beck’s) predicted that alcohol prices would rise by 10% next year mainly due to ‘government meddling’.

    In comments that many CAMRA members will endorse he said ‘The government’s thinking is not joined up? Are we policing underage drinking on the streets enough? No. It should better enforce laws already in place.’

    CAMRA recently called on members to sign an on-line petition on the 10 Downing Street website to call on the Prime Minister to support responsible drinkers in the face of the neo-prohibitionist hysteria whipped up in the press.

    In fact total alcohol consumption in the UK is actually falling. According to a report by wine magazine Decanter, the British Beer and Pub Association used the Treasury’s own figures to show that the rate of decrease is the fastest in over 60 years – with overall consumption down 8% in the first half of 2009. Such figures support CAMRA’s argument that problem drinkers are a small minority and targeted measures would be more effective than penalising the sensible majority.

    However, the government’s eagerness to raise beer duty suggests that the arguments about restricting consumption by increasing prices across the board makes a very convenient cover for the Treasury. You might think it a very cynical ruse to soak beer drinkers yet again but I couldn’t possibly comment.

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    Posted in Beer | 1 Comment »

    Charlie’s Artwork

    Sunday, November 15th, 2009

    Here’s a sneak preview of a fictional pub sign that might accompany something in the next Swan Supping — nifty use of my limited Photoshopping skills.

    Beware All Who Set Foot Inside

    Beware All Who Set Foot Inside

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    Good Old Fashioned Customer Service

    Monday, October 26th, 2009

    A tube worker has resigned because he was being exceptionally rude and offensive to a passenger. I wonder if the fact he was caught doing this on video has anything to do with it. Now the chap needs a new job he should consider that there is a still a career option open to people with the talent to insult the public and who hold the public in general contempt — pub landlord of course. Liberalisation of the licensing laws and a tougher economic climate have made the obnoxious, bigoted landlord a less common inhabitant of the country’s pubs (many will go out of business rather than make an effort to cater for any customer who’s not ‘a local’). However, many still hang on. The local CAMRA branch recently had a meeting in a fairly rural pub and presented the landlord with a pack celebrating his pub’s inclusion (for the first time) in the Good Beer Guide (2010). His response was to refuse to serve one member a coffee and generally complain that we didn’t drink enough beer (several people had to drive). He also kept on insulting one person about the length of his hair.

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    Posted in Life's Frustrations | 2 Comments »

    Wednesdays Will Never Be the Same Again At the Red Lion, Caerleon

    Saturday, October 17th, 2009

    I had dismal hopes for the Channel Four programme — the Red Lion – on Thursday. Another instalment of government promoted doom and gloom about the evils of drinking seemed on the cards.

    The programme visited 10 of the 600 Red Lion pubs in the country (the most popular pub name) and the first one featured unashamed, wanton binge drinking, the only objective of which was ‘to get hammered’ — but this was by a group of women. It was a student netball team from Newport University (no, I never realised there was a university there either) who religiously went out on a Wednesday to get completely plastered playing ‘pub golf’ (a close relative of drinking golf that I’ve played myself) at 9 local pubs. So the programme started with a dozen or so girls downing a pint of Guinness in one at the Red Lion. Rather than be apologetic, the students they interviewed were refreshingly honest about their motives — drinking to get pissed (although they have to be able to stand up or else that would be a bad night) and ‘feeling like shit’ the next morning was a big part of it. These women were not violent or sad or ill — they were all pretty athletic as they played netball for the university. I remained in awe as they went on to other pubs in Caerleon to down other drinks in one. I expect that, after this programme, Caerleon will never be the same again on a Wednesday night as hundreds of male binge drinkers will no doubt want to make a favourable impression on the netball players by consuming even larger amounts of alcohol. Where is it again?

    After that classic opening, the programme went to a reasonable cross section of other Red Lions. It seemed that even when they found the inevitable solitary drinkers whose whole lives revolved around the pub that even these characters came out of the programme with a lot of dignity. My favourite Red Lion was one in Whitworth, north of Rochdale, which was pretty typical of the pubs I learned to drink in (in Tim Martin approved fashion) myself just over the hills from there. There was one Rugby League player who cheerfully admitted to spending £100 on beer a week — as he didn’t have much else to do. He also gave one of the most eloquent descriptions of the pleasure of being mildly inebriated.  As with the netball players, even the BMA might have problems correlating the large volume of alcohol consumed with the physical fitness required of the players. (It brings to mind the conclusion that Jancis Robinson came to in The Demon Drink when she reviewed the scientific literature that the people who drink most do so because they can — i.e. fit young people in their 20s can outdrink almost anyone with no ill effects.)

    What the programme managed to convey quite effectively was the sense of camaraderie and community that can be found in all good pubs. It showed the pub is a leveller of society and class — with the regulars being incredibly brutal in their comments towards each other but all done so in the safe knowledge that they’ll be back there the next night. The pub pricks pretension and is an amazing social leveller. Many of these issues have been examined by social anthropologist, Kate Fox, who devotes a whole section of her book ‘Watching the English’ to the etiquette of round buying. The last Red Lion was closed — bought up by an owner who has no intention of re-opening it but, by the look of the boarded up windows, can’t get planning permission to do anything else with the building. Speculating and profiteering were ripping the heart out of a community — odd that after 12 years of New Labour.

    There was plenty of potential for ridiculing the pubgoers, who were remarkably candid, but what came across was an amazing feeling of common humanity bonding the pubgoers. After all, the pub is basically an institution where ’the public’ are invited into a ‘house’.  The programme generated a very favourable review in The Guardian. I can’t put the conclusion better myself:  ‘a lovely portrait of a peculiarly British institution’. The Times review says ‘Drinking in moderation, the contributors suggested, was a dreary waste of time.’ I couldn’t possibly comment.

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    Posted in Beer | 1 Comment »

    £2.50 For a Half-Decent Pint in Mayfair?

    Sunday, October 11th, 2009

    Credit to the Coach and Horses, Bruton Street, W1 for doing a cheap pint of real ale at peak time on a Friday evening (on BITE Bedfont points out that it is NOT the Shepherd Neame house — that’s the other side of Berkeley Square). Of course, cheap is a relative term in the area with the most expensive rental on the Monopoly board. However, one might save enough by buying Fuller’s London Pride at £2.50 to make a slight dent in the amount needed to buy one of the Rolls Royces or Bentleys in the showroom just around the corner. It wasn’t a bad pint of Pride either.  At the more typical price of about £3.20 they also did Timothy Taylor Landlord, one of my favourites normally but it had a good whiff of diacetyl, which I’ve never come across in its Yorkshire heartland. Warwickshire Darling Buds, which I tried a few weeks ago at the King’s Arms in Tring, was also on.

    The pub itself was packed with suits. Apparently this is hedge fund HQ territory and the fridge in the pub had more champagne in it than anything else — which goes to show that not a great deal seems to have changed around here since the credit crunch unless it’s the hedge fund managers who are on the £2.50 Pride.

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    Pubs — The Preserve of the Middle-Class?

    Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
    King William IV Speen

    King William IV Speen

    Today I drove through Southcourt in Aylesbury: a large, 1930s-60s housing estate which was originally almost all council housing. Such estates used to be bastions of working-class ale drinking but the smoking ban and the credit crunch have finished off two of the three pubs and the closest pub in the direction of the two centre is also shut. A pub that tried valiantly to keep going in the face of cheap supermarket beer and home-based entertainment like videos and Sky TV was the Steeplechase, which did some decent real ale at times. It has been boarded up for a year now and is a sad sight.

    However, on the bright side, a report partly supported by CAMRA and publicised on the BBC website reported that cask ale was the only type of beer now with growing sales and partly because twice as many women enjoyed drinking it in the past couple of years. There was also a very interesting report on the Radio Four Food Programme about hops and their use in real ale — which gave an opportunity for Roger Protz to yet again claim that beer is far more interesting than wine. The brewer at Brewdog commented on his Punk IPA, which the female presenter found very tasty. (I love this beer and its weaker sister — Trashy Blonde – Brewdog are so non-pc they even make an 18% beer.)  The programme noted that the trend towards using more (and more assertive) hops started by US craft breweries and is now being adopted by ale brewers here. Such beers have to either have a high alcohol content to balance the bitterness or need to be drunk in much smaller quantities (such as thirds of pints) to be palatable.

    The two themes above suggest that there’s a trend for both beer and pubs to lose their long-time association with the working man and instead to become the preserve of the middle-classes. A valid criticism of CAMRA is that while it has spectacularly succeeded in preserving real ale and increased the variety available, it has done so mainly for the benefit of a minority of beer snobs and tickers. Real ale is not the drink of the working man any more — that accolade was lost to lager a long time ago — the fact that real ale quality is dire in a large number of workaday, non-CAMRA-Good-Beer-Guide pubs might have a lot to do with this. However, it seems that these sort of workaday, average, unremarkable pubs are the ones that are suffering most at the moment and, as the cask report says, it’s the affluent real ale drinkers who are able to afford £3 a pint in the pub and don’t go for the £10 24 can Stella pack at Tesco as an alternative.

    So perhaps the saviours of the English pub as we know it are the middle-classes, much as that might be an anathema to some of the more revolutionary founders of the real ale movement. The middle-class seem to have saved real ale and pubcos should perhaps target these high-spending, but demanding customers more. Another factor in the pub’s favour is brought to mind by having forty-something politicians paraded at the party conferences over the past couple of weeks: it seems the annoying, social-skills free nerds that inhabited student politics in the 80s are now making their bids to be the annoying, power-crazed nerds that run the country. But if that’s reflected in other walks of life there may be a silver lining in that the middle-class, especially Generation X who are entering middle-age, have very fond memories of the pub from their student days (mostly rose-tinted in terms of the amount they drank and time the spent there). Yet this almost sentimental attachment to the pub as a hub of student life might yet save the great British institution. The middle-classes might not be propping the bars up swilling ten pints of mild a night but they might be pretty solid campaigners to ensure that pubs are still there for people that do.

    Crown, Sydenham, Oxfordshire

    Crown, Sydenham, Oxfordshire

    To illustrate the point there are a number of examples of local pubs being saved from closure by being bought by (presumably relatively wealthy) members of the local community and re-opened and run on a community basis. The Unicorn at Cublington and Crown at Sydenham, Oxon are good examples. I went tonight to a pub, the King William IV at Speen, that’s not owned by the community but run in a way that is designed to be community minded — to the extent of having a small room of a perfect sized for committee meetings. It also has an ice-cream parlour selling locally sourced ice-cream. A group of local charity volunteers were also enjoying the evening in the pub. These pubs aren’t, of course, exclusively full of middle-class people but they’ve benefited from the sort of activism that the middle-classes (and, dare I say it, CAMRA) have shown to be very successful.

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    Posted in Beer | 1 Comment »

    Ferguson Doesn’t Grow Old Gracefully

    Sunday, October 4th, 2009

    Oxford might have wonderfully historic pubs with great ale and lots of atmosphere but what about the needs of drinkers whose teams are playing at 5.30pm on ESPN? No big plasma screens at the Turf Tavern or the King’s Arms or White Horse so I ended up missing the Man Utd v Sunderland match live and followed the less than comforting scoreline on my phone. After a self-stranding toilet incident involving the 280 bus I had to catch the train back from Haddenham and then valiantly tried to stay awake when I eventually got home through the end of Strictly Come Dancing so I could watch the highlights on MOTD.

    Of course, I fell asleep just a few minutes before it started and missed the highlights. Fortunately I was able to remember to record the repeat of the programme at 8am this morning and so enjoyed two remarkable spectacles. Berbatov’s goal was superbly taken — an amazing overhead kick. However, the terrible decision that Wiley made about the Anderson penalty interview brought on the most amazing rant by SAF against the fourth official. Whatever his other failings, Ferguson will certainly get stuck in and fight ‘the enemy’ for his team.

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    Does the Cerne Abbas Giant Prick New Labour’s morals?

    Friday, October 2nd, 2009

    Went drinking in Flackwell Heath for the first time ever tonight. Not many people probably go there but many pass close by as it’s very close to the M40 — just behind the woods on the big hill as the road climbs out of the Wye valley at Loudwater (junction 3). The Stag was a decent enough pub and the Crooked Billet down a side road towards Little Marlow was a lovely old-fashioned country pub with an astonishingly well-tended garden — enough bedding plants, even at the start of October, to put a municipal park to shame.

    In the pub it was mentioned that White Horse Brewery have a special beer called ‘Giant’. It might not be a surprise to discover that, as the brewery has the ancient Uffington White Horse as its logo, the giant in question is the famously endowed chap at Cerne Abbas. In these days where it is not allowed even to hint to under 25s that alcohol may equate to enhanced sexual success, we wondered whether the brewery would be allowed to use an image of the prehistoric figure on the brewery pump clips. Or would the nation’s twenty-something males be corrupted into thinking that drinking this real ale might have such a startling effect on a part of their anatomy. (It would be interesting to see if their partners might be tempted into buying them a pint to test the drink’s efficacy.) I’d guess that the existing guidelines might prompt the brewers into modifying their pump clip design. I suggested inverting the said organ in Photoshop but another suggestion was to put him in a pair of Y-fronts to be on the safe side. No doubt, if it’s not against the law and the brewery go ahead and display the giant and his colossal manhood then we’ll see Harriet Harman rushing the necessary legislation through the House of Commons as soon as parliament returns.

    Of course, if the BMA get their way then all alcohol marketing and advertising would be banned so there would be definitely no pump clip, no matter how graphic.

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    Posted in Beer | 4 Comments »

    Credit Crunch Carries On

    Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

    I ventured out into High Wycombe on Monday in search of using up my J.D. Wetherspoon 50p off a pint vouchers that were due to expire on 30th September. The pubs were so quiet that I got served straight away in the Falcon — which is unheard of even on a slow night. Like cut-price supermarkets, Wetherspoons seem to pass on the low prices on their products in the form of less staff than their competitors. The manager even had chance to chat away to the two of us for five minutes about real ale. Shame that he didn’t notice that the Titanic Triple Screw that we had in our glasses at the time was as cloudy as soup. It was drinkable but probably only because it had a lot of roasted or chocolate malt (I think) in and that gave it a very bitter edge.

    Up the road at the William Robert Loosely there was a Bateman’s special ale on that had a pump clip that seemed to be confusing itself with a packet of Weetabix — lots of picture of ‘good for you’ grains. I’ve forgotten what it was called. This was served almost frozen but that didn’t stop a whiff of diacetyl rising up from the glass. I know that some brewers actually think diacetyl (the ‘butterscotch’ aroma) is pleasurable but most of their customers don’t. I find that holding my breath when I’m drinking helps — but, of course, this disguises most other flavours. The superchilled temperature meant that I may as well have been drinking lager in that case but, I shouldn’t complain, using the vouchers two pints cost the princely sum of £2.78! Round the corner at The Bell, a mediocre pint of Pride was more than 30p dearer.

    Walking through Wycombe I was struck at how few people were out in any pub or restuarant — Pizza Express was deserted. A Monday I suppose but it’s anecdotal evidence that people still seem to be holding on to their cash and I was only there to buy beer at £1.39 a pint myself.

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