Beers of the Year

Happy New Year everyone, hope it's a good one for you all.

Just been doing some number crunching of my 2025 beer scores on the CAMRA website. I went to 54 pubs last year, 26 in Stockport and 28 in Manchester, and submitted 99 beer scores.

Ninety of them were 3s (Good), with only a single 1 (Poor) and six 2s (Average). I gave two beers a 4 (Very Good/Excellent), Vocation Bread and Butter Pale Ale at Ladybarn Social Club and Thornbridge Jaipur IPA at the Angel on Stockport Marketplace, so hats off to them.

Cheers, and hope to see some of you at the bar this year.

Draught Bass at the reopened Crown Inn, Stockport, in August

Books of the Year

Or what I read in 2025.

Headbirths, Or The Germans Are Dying Out/Too Far Afield by Günter Grass

Two later, and critically less regarded, novels by my favourite German writer, with which I completed my reading of his works, a somewhat sad moment given I've been enjoying them since my late teens.

West by Carys Davies

A slightly surreal noir Western, with some echoes of True Grit, which I read straight through in an afternoon.

The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant

I was led to this after reading his earlier novel The Pawnbroker, which was filmed with Rod Steiger as the title character. Another story about Jewish-African American relations in New York, and human redemption, it has a quietly elegaic ending.

A Life's Music by Andrei Makine

This novella about a concert pianist fleeing Stalin's purges in the late thirties is both lyrical and of unusual literary origin, being by an exiled Russian writer who wrote it in French before it was translated into English.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. I know the subject matter, a crew from different countries orbiting Earth on the International Space Station, is unavoidably repetitive, but I still found this unnecessarily so, and was bored long before I finished it.

The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges

I read this surreal short story after I learnt that it begins in the Stoke town of Fenton, where I lived as a student in the early nineties.

Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift

The first of these short stories, about a British National Servicemen attempting to discover the fate of his Jewish relatives in fifties West Germany, is by far the best. The others are all a bit contrived, and some derivative of his other works.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes 

One of the great unread novels, which despite its length is actually very readable (I finished it in about a week).

James by Percival Everett

A retelling of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the fleeing slave Jim which won this year's Pullitzer Prize.

The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee

Some unpublished short stories and pieces of non fiction from the early sixties by the writer of To Kill A Mockingbird. Most are very insubstantial, but the first, set in her native Alabama rather than New York where she then lived, offers an early glimpse of her later masterpiece.

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

Another collection of short stories by the writer once described as India's Günter Grass. There's a sense of time running out and things coming full circle here, especially in the first two stories set in his home city of Bombay.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky 

An ethereal short story about unrequited love set in the nighttime streets of St. Petersburg which I read after seeing in a newspaper that it had somehow become one of the year's bestselling books.

RIP Salford

In September 2007, the last time Salford rugby league club was relegated, I stood in the Shed at the Willows for the final home game of the season, a loss against Warrington. They were already down before kickoff but there was still a decent crowd in the ground and hope for the future, justifiably as they came straight back up after a season in the second division.

In September 2011, I stood on the same terrace for Salford's last ever game at the ground, a loss against French side Catalans, before they moved to a new 12,000 capacity stadium in Barton-on-Irwell, on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal between the high level bridge and Barton aerodrome. At the time, Salford were getting attendances of around 5,000 and it was hoped that this could be doubled to nearer 10,000. In fact, they dropped to about 3,000, many of those away fans arriving on coaches off the nearby junction of the M60 motorway. 

For home fans. the ground was in the wrong place, far from Salford's traditional areas of support and difficult to get to, and especially away from, by car, let alone on foot or public transport. Only a hardcore remained and new and casual fans were put off going, if they even knew where the stadium was. Despite that, Salford made it to a Grand Final at Old Trafford in 2019, Wembley for a first Challenge Cup Final since the late sixties in 2020, and last season finished fourth.

This season has been a disaster on and off the pitch. The new owner, a Swiss based businessman, seemingly only bought the club so he could acquire the stadium and land around it for development, and then lost interest when the council withdrew from negotiations over those plans. Wages have gone unpaid and there has been an exodus of players, coaches and other staff, fixtures were unfulfilled and points deducted before the inevitable relegation.

Yesterday in the High Court in London, a winding up petition was granted to HM Revenue and Customs over unpaid taxes, bringing to an end a club which traced its history back to 1873, when it formed in Hulme, Manchester, before moving across the Irwell to Salford.

No doubt a phoenix club will be formed, and Salford council will be keen for it to move into the stadium that they still own, but the real question is whether they can field thirteen players for the start of the Championship season just six weeks from now.

Best of the Fest

Oktoberfest starts in Munich today with the tapping of the first barrel of beer by the city's mayor. Breweries, specialist beer shops, online retailers and supermarkets here have all been promoting Bavarian-style lagers in the run-up to it so I picked up some from RedWillow in Macclesfield.

Festbier Märzen (5.6%)

Named after the month of March when it was originally brewed, malty, medium strong Märzen is the beer traditionally served at Oktoberfest, with Festbier being the pale version of it.

Sweetish, with an almost amber, fuller colour than I expected. Quite a bitter aftertaste.

Kellerbier (4.3%)

Kellerbier ("cellar beer") is an unfiltered lager, normally served on draught and particularly associated with Franconia in northern Bavaria. It is probably the nearest German equivalent to cask beer, especially when dispensed by gravity from wooden barrels.

Large, tight head. Very clean malt taste, balanced by a dry hoppiness. Golden colour, slightly cloudy with low carbonation.

I enjoyed both these beers and would drink them again. I'm also hoping to return one day to the beer gardens of Munich, which I lasted visited with a, sadly now late, mate back in 2010.

Crown Inn glory

The Crown in Stockport reopened yesterday after a lengthy, and much needed, refurbishment by its new owners, the father and son who also run the Petersgate Tap between the station and marketplace, so I popped down last night to have a look.

Fifteen or so years ago, the Crown was Stockport's premier pub for cask beer, a multi handpump Victorian boozer beneath the town's famous railway viaduct which, despite not being the closest to the ground, often attracted away fans when their teams played at Edgeley Park (I was in there once on a Saturday dinnertime when a coachload of Southampton fans, whose side were briefly in the third tier, turned up having heard about its reputation for well kept real ale). But then the longtime landlord retired and the place began to drift a bit, a slow side into general shabbiness and average beer that in the last few years has seen a dizzying succession of short term licensees and sudden, unexplained closures.

Thankfully the pub is now in good hands again, with a smartened up look and cask range that I'm sure will get it back into the Good Beer Guide. It also now has Draught Bass as a permanent beer on the bar, which was flying out last night (they were already on their third cask of it!).

Roll Out the Barrel

I watched the Mets-Brewers baseball game on the BBC Red Button last night.

In the seventh inning stretch, when the crowd normally sings Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the Brewers fans sang Roll Out the Barrel. The lyrics ("Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun") are of course perfect for the Milwaukee Brewers, and for drinking beer at the ballpark. 

They also went into the history of the song, which everyone seems to claim to have composed. I always assumed it was an English pub song (the British Film Institute once put out a DVD of short films about English pubs with that title), but it turns out to be based on a Czech polka instrumental from 1927. Czech lyrics were added in 1934, English ones by American songwriters for a hit in 1939, and then it was sung by soldiers in World War II.

Every day's a school day...

The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club

For the last few months on a Sunday night, Talking Pictures TV has been showing episodes of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a seventies variety show supposedly coming live from a Manchester working men's club, but actually filmed at the studios of Granada TV on a midweek afternoon (the audience seems to consist largely of pensioners, no doubt drawn by the trays with pints of keg bitter on them being constantly filled at the bar and carried round the room by the waitresses).

The first thing to say is that most of the turns aren't very good. Bernard Manning as compere confirms that not only wasn't he very funny but he couldn't sing either, crooning in a strange cod Las Vegas lounge style. The two things that make it watchable are the comedian Colin Crompton, as the stereotypical committee chairman who makes humorous announcements between the acts, and the stars from beyond the Northern club circuit whom the legendary Granada producer Johnnie Hamp somehow managed to attract, like Howard Keel and Karl Denver. There is also occasionally some jazz from the traditional end of the genre (Kenny Ball, George Melly).

Some ITV regions, especially those in the South, apparently refused to show the programme until the early hours, deeming it too broad for their allegedly more sophisticated audiences, and you can sort of see their point. If you want to know why variety died, here is your answer.