The Sherwood Foresters

I've just finished watching Sherwood, the BBC drama set in a former Nottinghamshire pit village still split by the 1984-85 miners' strike, at the edge of the eponymous forest into which a young bow and arrow-wielding murderer flees (Robin Hood isn't the only literary reference - the Metropolitan Police spies sent into the coalfield at the start of the strike with the identities of dead children assume codenames of Romantic poets including Keats, Wordsworth and Byron, who lived nearby at Newstead Abbey, where the investigators meet the National Union of Mineworkers' lawyer to discuss their undercover operations).

The plot combines a crime drama based on two real, but unconnected, killings in the same area, revealing the identity of the murderers from the start and focussing more on their motivations, with a slower uncovering of secrets in the backgrounds and personal lives of the police and petty criminal characters.

The series sketches some of the background to the bitterness, with flashbacks to the 1984-85 strike when Nottinghamshire's pits and a big majority of its thirty thousand miners worked throughout the year long dispute as flying pickets from Yorkshire to the north clashed with police dispatched to confront them from the south. Although the Nottinghamshire Area of the NUM had always been on the right of the union, and split from it at the end of the strike (as it had after the 1926 General Strike), their ostensible reason for not joining the strike (the failure to call a national ballot) was always a pretty threadbare excuse, with thick seams of coal, modern mines and good wages meaning that they felt safe from the closure programme which would decimate the industry elsewhere in the country by the late 80s (they weren't: in 1992, the Tory government, which had lauded them as heroes in 1984-85 and promised them jobs for life, turned on them and shut their pits down too).

There are a couple of nice beer references: the NUM stalwart and murder victim who orders a pint of mix (mild and bitter) and the leader of the striking Yorkshire miners who bemoans the lack of Tetley's in the local club when they come down on a coach for his memorial.

Guinness is good for youth?

Channel Four's Inside the Superbrands last night looked at the world's most popular stout, and major Irish export, Guinness.

When I started drinking in pubs as a teenager in the late 80s, I occasionally drank bottle-conditioned Extra Stout as well as the cask bitter in my local Holt's house, or Draught Guinness in keg-only places, but since the former became a filtered and pasteurised, and to my palate rather thin, product and the latter is now usually sold in the Extra Cold form that tastes of nothing, the only version I really still like is bottled Foreign Extra Stout, which is much closer in both strength and mouthfeel to the original Extra Stout.

There was a bit about the alleged continuity of their brewing methods which I found a little hard to believe when they were standing next to a row of shiny new, sealed stainless steel vessels, but I didn't spot any of the many myths about Guinness which often pop up in things like this. There was also an interesting section about how the famous Guinness adverts began in the late 20s (although I thought they might have mentioned the Anglo-Irish Trade War just after that, which led to Guinness building a brewery at Park Royal in west London, too).

The programme spent a lot of time discussing Guinness's lack of appeal to young people in Britain and Ireland and the likely impact of this on future consumption of the beer, although as long as it still sells well in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean I can't see the company being too threatened by that, and despite the marketing spiel rolled out by PR agencies and pluggers I'm still unconvinced that the key to attracting them is the non-alcoholic Guinness Zero which they launched a couple of years ago.

Stockport(er) in the sunshine

After a three year break because of Covid, Stockport Beer and Cider Festival kicked off at Edgeley Park football ground with a trade session yesterday afternoon.

A couple of things had changed since my last visit to the home of the Hatters back in the summer of 2019: Stockport County are now a Football League club again, and the Cheadle End where the festival is held has been redeveloped, although the concourse under the stand where the bars are wasn't as different as I'd expected.

I drank mostly darker, stronger beers - Kirkstall X Mild, based on a recipe from 1885, Redwillow Heritage Porter and Stockport Stock Porter - as well as Kerala IPA from the former Howard Town, now Distant Hills Brewery, in Glossop. I also popped to the bottled beer bar in one of the function rooms at the top of the stand, whose temporary licence now allows off sales, and picked up a couple of my favourite smoked German lager Schlenkerla.

On the way back to the station we popped into the Olde Vic, somewhere else I hadn't been to for a few years, and had a pint in the beer garden there. One of Stockport's first freehouses and a longtime Good Beer Guide pub, it seemed to be doing a decent post-festival trade.

 

Going green with Stella

I finally succumbed to the advertising this week and picked up a few green labelled bottles of the new unfiltered Stella Artois from the supermarket.

First of all a confession: at the risk of shredding my beer credentials, I quite enjoy normal Stella and have drunk it in cans and bottles at parties and while watching sports events on TV and on draught in keg only pubs. Like a few other - mostly German - mass market pils (Becks, Radeberger, Warsteiner) it still has some hoppiness and isn't as sweet or gassy as certain Australian, French and Canadian brands.

Unfiltered Stella isn't actually that different, maybe slightly cloudier, but with no yeast deposit at the bottom of the bottle. Like the normal, filtered Stella, it's brewed under licence here, but at 5% rather than 4.6% abv (still slightly weaker than the 5.2% Belgian brewed beer which I've occasionally seen bottles of in local off licences).