Beers of the Year

I've visited seventy-two pubs this year, compared to thirty-eight in 2019, the last "normal" year before Covid, ten in the first three months of 2020, and just four and six in 2021 and 2022. I've been to three new pubs, the relocated Runaway Brewery in Stockport and the Victoria Tap and North Westward Ho in Manchester city centre, and made it to a few others I've never got round to before, including the Sun in September and Reasons To Be Cheerful in Burnage, Ladybarn Social Club, the Grove in Clayton and Davenport Arms in Woodford. It's no coincidence that my top two months for pub going, April (fourteen) and November (eleven), were when Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA was running its Mild Magic and Winter Warmer Wander sticker trails.

I've scored nearly all the beer I've drunk this year as Good, with just a handful of pints found to be Average or Poor, and have not hesitated to return almost all of the latter to the bar as undrinkable, apart from half a Doom Bar unwisely ordered on a weekday afternoon in a suburban chain dining pub, where no one else was drinking cask beer, that I couldn't be bothered to take back. Lesson learnt.

I've given just one pint a Very Good score in 2023, Vocation Bread and Butter Dry Hopped Pale Ale at the Archive Bar in Cheadle Hulme, so by default that's my beer of the year.

Books of the Year

What I've read in 2023. As ever, it's an eclectic collection, largely based on films I've seen and then sought out the book or short story that they're based on.

A Laodicean/The Hand of Ethelberta/Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy 

I  completed my reading of Hardy's prose works with three of his minor, and least regarded, novels.

A Laodicean, a novel about the clash between modernity and tradition, has a remarkably similar opening to Franz Kafka's The Castle (a young surveyor walking down a country road at night, lost and looking for the village inn he is to stop at, before unexpectedly coming upon the castle where he has been hired to work).

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Maybe not quite up there with her major novels, but a thought provoking story nonetheless, set in her familiar Midlands countryside.

Tom Jones/Joseph Andrews/Shamela by Henry Fielding 

The first two are picaresque novels about young men making their way in the world, and getting into scapes as they travel round the country, and the last is Fielding's spoof of Samuel Richardson's best-selling epistolary novel Pamela.

Pamela by Samuel Richardson/Anti-Pamela by Eliza Haywood 

Having read the spoof, I moved on to the original, and then another parody of it.

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

A novel about the cultural limitations of a small Midwestern town before and during World War I, based on the one where Lewis grew up, with echoes of the small town Minnesota-set Lake Wobegon Days stories that I read as a teenager (there's also another very Kafkaesque scene in it, when a country doctor sets out on a winter night in a horse drawn carriage to visit a dying patient on an outlying farm).

Crabwalk by Günter Grass 

The quality of Grass's literary output definitely declined in his final decades, but I enjoyed this 2002 work about the sinking of a Nazi recreation ship packed with refugees by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic towards the end of World War II, mostly because it features characters from his earlier Danzig Trilogy, The Tin Drum , Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, which propelled him to fame.

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean 

The novella on which the Hollywood film was based, it centres on the relationship between two brothers and their flyfishing father in early twentieth century Montana.

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

I continued my out of sequence reading of Trollope's Barchester Chronicles with this entertaining tale about the political and clerical machinations around the appointment of a new bishop in a West Country cathedral city.

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

A 1909 sci-fi short story about a future world whose inhabitants live in isolated pods which is an eerily prescient description of the Zoom age ("the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.").

Tomorrow by William Faulkner

A short story set in Faulkner's fictional Yokanapatawpha County, like Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now this is a good example of how you can turn ten pages of text into a two hour film (in this case, a stark black and white 1972 one starring Robert Duvall).

In the Heat of the Night by John Ball

Like the film, this features a black detective passing through a small Southern town, but there are some major plot differences between the novel and the the screenplay.

Big Fish by Daniel Wallace

A fantastical tale about a larger than life Alabama salesman, later played on film by Albert Finney.

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl

Another sci-fi short story, from the fifties, about a future society where the Christmas shopping rush starts in September!

The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern

Rounding off the reading year, a festive short story which formed the basis of the classic Christmas film It's A Wonderful Life.

RIP El Tel

The former England football manager Terry Venables, who died this weekend aged 80, belonged to the same generation as the players who won the World Cup at Wembley in 1966, although unlike them he only picked up two caps for the national side he would go on to lead, from the also Dagenham-born Alf Ramsey, whose achievement against Germany he came close to emulating on the same ground thirty years later at Euro '96.

Despite something of a Flash Harry image, including owning a West End nightclub where he entertained fellow footballers and showbiz friends, and occasionally sang himself, but was ultimately forced to sell because of financial problems, players he managed for club and country have spoken highly of his tactical nous and how much they learnt from him, both through his insights into the game and man management skills, and the business issues that led him into trouble with the FA, Spurs chairman Alan Sugar and Companies House seem like small beer compared to the nefarious state actors and other dodgy characters who have since become involved with top flight football.

It's hard to imagine an English manager now being appointed by a top European club as Venables was by Barcelona in the mid eighties (Bobby Robson and Howard Kendall also managed Spanish sides in that and the following decade), or indeed one of the big six Premier League clubs doing so, rather than looking to one of the younger continental or South American coaches directly or indirectly influenced by that trio. His tenure as England manager in the mid nineties also came towards the end of the long spell when that job automatically went to an Englishman, and was followed by his coaching Australia, an indication of how international the sport he had earned a living from since signing with Chelsea as a fifteen year old apprentice straight from school had become.

Resurrection of the Boddies

I went into town last night for the launch of a new CAMRA book, Manchester's Best Beer Pubs and Bars, at Café Beermoth. I bought a copy while I was there and am looking forward to perusing it.

The other draw was a beer brewed specially for the event by Runaway, Manchester Best, based on a seventies recipe for Boddingtons Bitter.

I drank Boddingtons, and the similar Chester's Bitter, as a teenager in the late eighties. Book and Bailey wrote here about a distinctive Manchester sub-style of very pale and dry, well-hopped beers, which Marble's Manchester Bitter is another attempt at recreating. There was also a beer from Blackjack on the bar last night which fitted the description as well.

Manchester Best has been distributed to the free trade in the area, so should be available on the bar of some of the city's many good pubs that are featured in the book soon.

I also popped into a couple of pubs that have opened in the last few weeks, the Victoria Tap at the railway station of that name and Pomona Island's new place in the city centre North Westward Ho, and was impressed both by their retro feel and reasonable prices for their locations.

RIP HS2

In a widely trailed announcement, the Prime Minister yesterday confirmed in his speech at the Conservative conference in Manchester (in a former railway station no less) the scrapping of the Northern leg of the HS2 high speed rail line between Birmingham and Manchester.

I wrote here about the pros and cons, and likely future, of HS2, but still feel a sense of embarrassment, both at Britain lagging behind Western Europe on high speed rail and what the project will now end up as, an expensive, relatively short, and no doubt underused, section of track between Birmingham and London. So why are the Tories ripping up the scheme now?

Sunak clearly wasn't a fan of the Johnsonite rhetoric about levelling up the North when he was Chancellor, and probably doesn't see any need to develop the economy outside the South East, especially if it means increasing public spending. He may even think that he can get away with it politically amongst Northern "red wall" Tory voters (the eastern arm of the initially planned "Y" to Leeds had already been abandoned), or maybe he's just written them, and his hopes of winning next year's election, off and is now spending what time he has left in office killing off things he doesn't like, and which Labour seems ambiguous about reversing (as on so much else).

Cashing in on a crisis

Self-styled man of the people Nigel Farage was in Downing Street last week, along with colleagues from the right-wing TV channel GB News, to hand in a petition demanding that businesses continue to accept payment in cash, a bit of a contrast to his last battle over money, his clash with private bank Coutts after it closed his account for having insufficient funds in it.

I agree in principle that people should have the choice between using cards and cash, but very rarely use the latter myself now (although I always carry a small amount for emergencies which has come in handy a couple of times in the last few weeks, in a chip shop whose machine wasn't working and a pub where I ordered a pint before being told that there was a minimum amount for card transactions).

I also understand however why some, especially small, businesses now prefer not to handle cash. The argument is sometimes made that card companies charging commission means that they don't get the full amount tendered by the customer, but banks also levy fees for paying in large amounts of cash and there are also security issues both with keeping banknotes on the premises and taking them to a branch (if you can still find one open: that and the availability of free ATMs, particularly in rural areas, would seem to be the biggest threat to continued use of cash).

The move towards a cashless economy is often linked to the social distancing rules introduced at the start of the Covid pandemic, but I think it began at least a couple of years before that. The widespread acceptance of contactless payments in pubs, shops and on public transport made it much easier to complete transactions by card (albeit harder to keep track of what you were spending) and was therefore becoming the preferred method for many even before the virus struck.

I'm not convinced that cash will ever completely disappear or cease to be legal tender, but it may soon seem as anachronistic a means of payment as writing a cheque or buying a postal order is now.

A Bottle Full of Rye

I drank and enjoyed a bottle of rye IPA from the Kinnegar Brewery in Letterkenny yesterday, one of a couple that my brother in law kindly brought back from Ireland for me the other week.

I hadn't drunk this style of beer before, but its colour and spicy taste reminded me a lot of the darker wheat beers (Dunkelweizen) that you get in Bavaria (some of which, Roggenbier, also contain a large proportion of rye in their grists) .

The now defunct King and Barnes in Horsham, Sussex, once brewed a brown ale with rye; in Russia, they drink kvass, a beer made by soaking and fermenting rye bread; and in Finland, sahti, a farmhouse ale brewed with rye and other grains before being flavoured with juniper berries. All ones to look out for in future, I thought wryly...

A saunter round the Northern Quarter

I did a bit of a mini crawl around the Northern Quarter of Manchester city centre the other afternoon, checking out a few pubs I hadn't been to for several years.

I popped first into the Unicorn on Church Street, where Manchester Jazz Society met in the upstairs function room on Thursday nights until the summer of 2019. I'd heard it'd gone a bit rough since, and sure enough there was a guy fitting a security door to the side entrance and the new landlady was manhandling a barred customer into the street from the main one. The serving hatch at the bottom of the stairs has been shut off, depriving it of its unusual island bar, and Draught Bass replaced with Doom Bar. Thankfully the Hare and Hounds round the corner on Shudehill was just the same: old boys watching the afternoon racing on TV with pints of cheap, well kept Holt's Bitter. 

I was aiming for the launch of a new beer, Blackjack Best Bitter served from oak casks, at their sole tied house, the Smithfield Market Tavern on Swan Street. As usual I was early so had a quick look inside the Mackie Mayor food hall next door and peered through the windows of the now keg-only Wheatsheaf round the corner. It was still a couple of minutes before the official start time of five o'clock when I arrived at the Smithfield, but the barman kindly turned round the pump-clip and served me the first pint of the new beer. The wood certainly gave it a different character, a sort of pithy leanness that I found quite appealing.

I called at the Crown and Kettle at the bottom of Oldham Road and Port Street Beer House on the way back to Piccadilly station, sitting on the benches outside the latter with a pint of very pale and bitter Five Points XPA as the sun sank over the Rochdale Canal, which rounded off an enjoyable afternoon nicely.

Having A Ball in London

BBC Sport broadcast both games of the Major League Baseball series between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals from London Stadium this weekend.

The MLB London Series is officially about promoting the sport in this country, but seems to be as much about giving players and fans the opportunity to experience the capital as tourists, with the chance of the league creating an expansion franchise here far more remote than that of a NFL team, with massively fewer regular season fixtures, relocating to Britain, in itself quite slim unless the other owners were willing to subsidise such a transatlantic switch, at least initially. Not that I'm complaining if it means live baseball on terrestrial TV, albeit not two games a week as in the halcyon days of Channel 5's coverage of the sport when I first got into it twenty or so years ago.

The game has also been greatly improved by the new rules brought in before the season in order to speed things up and make it more of a spectacle for spectators rather than the stats-driven tactical grind that it was in danger of becoming, including a pitch clock and a ban on the infield shift (similar to the rule on the number of fielders inside the circle in limited overs cricket) which has led to more hitting into the gaps in the outfield and advancing runners on sacrifice flies rather than just relying on walks and homers for run production. 

If only they'd get rid of interleague games and let the pitchers bat again too...

A Chilled Call At the Guildhall

I popped to the trade session of Stockport Beer and Cider Festival yesterday afternoon.

With Stockport County now a Football League club again, and looking to redevelop their ground as they seek further promotions, it hadn't been possible to reach an agreement to hire Edgeley Park, the festival's home for the past couple of decades, so a move away from it was forced upon the organisers, to the Guildhall on Wellington Road where it was last held thirty or so years ago.

I'd seen a bit of chat online about potential crowd issues at the smaller venue, and also felt slightly uneasy as both a Catholic and lefty at entering a Masonic building for the first time, but the rooms were surprisingly spacious, with a large outdoor area and marquee also to the rear, and little evidence of secret rites about the place.

I drank a pale ale, porters and mild from local breweries Beartown, Runaway and Stockport Brewing, and also picked up a few of my favourites from Fuller's and Schlenkerla at the bottled beer bar.

I expect that the festival will return to Edgeley Park next summer once financial terms have been agreed with Stockport County, but with its more intimate and laid back atmosphere this venue made for an enjoyable interlude this year.

An Eye to the Main Chance

I've followed and enjoyed a few series from the seventies on Talking Pictures TV, especially Public Eye, with Alfred Burke as luckless private detective Frank Marker. My current favourite is The Main Chance, with John Stride as an unorthodox, and now struck off, solicitor David Main.

Like Public Eye, each episode of The Main Chance looks at a social issue of the time (housing shortages, juvenile delinquency, child custody). Last night it was the bête noire of the right-wing press in the seventies, and now, trade union militancy, with Main intervening in an industrial dispute on a large building site.

As with the films The Angry Silence and I'm All Right Jack, it goes out of its way to avoid being seen as anti-union per se, reserving its ire for picket line violence, intimidation and unofficial strikes sparked by an outside agitator or individual  militant (played by Alfred Burke in the former and Peter Sellers in the latter), with trade union officials portrayed as equally keen to stop these things and root out those responsible for them. Here the thorn in the bosses' side is played by Ray Smith (a change of part from his role as the policeman DI Firbank in Public Eye) as a militant who combines a genuine concern to improve working conditions, delivering an impassioned speech about health and safety and victimisation in the building industry, with running various scams for his own private gain, while attempting to outwit Main's assistant, an ex policeman played by Glynn Edwards who goes undercover on the site to gather evidence against him.

No doubt for technical and cost reasons, a lot of these series from the seventies are quite stagey, with little in the way of outdoor location shooting, and the script quality can be a bit uneven, but the acting and themes often lift them, and it's always fun to spot some retro features, whether in the pubs the characters frequent or the vehicles they drive.

 

The Death of An English Pub

The two drinking establishments closest to me were both built as estate pubs in the sixties, one by Chesters Brewery at the start of the decade and the other by Holt's towards the end of it.

The latter has been transformed by successive rebuilds and refurbishments into a dining pub, but the former remained a community local until it shut a couple of years ago. The site wasn't secured properly and the building was vandalised, with the cellar becoming an unofficial youth club, and last week damaged by a fire.

It's on an overspill estate built by Manchester council in the fifties and has been keg-only since at least the late eighties when I first went, although I'd guess it served cask beer when it opened in the early sixties (Threlfalls bought Chesters in 1961, and was then taken over in 1967 by Whitbread, who in 1988 shut their brewery in Salford, which is now a conference centre).

The site is still for sale, but at £1.2 million, and more needed to be spent on repairs if it were to reopen as a pub, the likelihood now must be that a developer will buy it and demolish the semi-derelict structure before building houses there.

Has the wet-led community local a future then? Although a few still seem to thrive, the statistics suggest that many do not, with several others already having been shut and knocked down locally (tellingly, the former landlord of the one awaiting its fate near me now runs a micropub serving wine and gin as well as beer in a small unit on the adjacent parade of shops).

Mild thing

Being the first of three Bank Holiday Mondays in May, thanks to the coronation of King Charles next weekend, I set out yesterday afternoon to complete Mild Magic, the annual event organised by my local CAMRA branch to promote mild ale, with a bit of a crawl around some south Manchester pubs.

Across the month it took me, I visited thirteen participating pubs and drank mild in nine of them (in the other four, mild was unavailable in two and undrinkable and returned in two, and either substituted with or changed for bitter or stout).

Five of the pubs where I drank mild were tied houses (1 Holt's, 3 Hydes, the sponsors of the event, and 1 Wetherspoons, all serving dark milds), three micropubs (2 light and 1 dark mild), and one a social club in a former pub (another dark mild). Seven of the pubs were in Manchester and two in Stockport.

I voted for the Cross Keys in Adswood as the best pub I visited, and Thirst Class Sweet Mild O' Mine as the best beer I drank.

After completing my sticker card at Reasons To Be Cheerful in Burnage, I continued to Ladybarn Social Club, where I received a very friendly welcome from the staff there (it's the local CAMRA Club of the Year, and has some interesting architectural features). It was the first time I'd been to either, and, as on another occasion in south Manchester a few years ago, made for a contrast between a young hipsterish bar and a more traditional drinking establishment.

Runaway to the Riverbank

Before a CAMRA pub crawl around central Stockport last night, I popped into the town's newest brewery, Runaway, which relocated there a few months back from Dantzic Street on the edge of Manchester's Northern Quarter and opened their bar to the public a week ago (I'm not sure where the name comes from: maybe it's a tribute to Del Shannon's 1961 hit whose line "I'm a-walkin' in the rain" is equally applicable to Manchester and Stockport).

Their new place is pretty much what you'd expect from a modern brewery taproom in a converted industrial building: stainless steel vessels, wooden tables in a bright, airy space with lots of natural light from the large windows and a mostly keg lineup on the bar along with a couple of cask lines. There's a bottle shop you can stock up at and plenty of outside seating in the courtyard beer garden, where the young, hipsterish crowd was enjoying pizzas from a wood fired oven. On the banks of the Mersey, it's just upstream from the town's famous railway viaduct, next to the the new bridge over the river which I hadn't been across before, and from where you get a panoramic view of the town centre.

Stockport might not be the new Berlin, but with more residential and retail development on the way, and transport improvements that will hopefully include the Metrolink tram system reaching it at some point, that side of the town is certainly being transformed rapidly, and will soon be unrecognisable from the scene once viewed and described disparagingly by a German communist travelling above it across the railway viaduct.

Back in town

I met up with a mate who happened to be in town and went on a bit of a pub crawl round Manchester city centre yesterday afternoon, the first time I'd been there since the beginning of 2020.

Before the start of the pandemic, I went into town at least once a week, a ten minute train journey through the south Manchester suburbs on which, having done it hundreds of times over the years, I got to know the order of the intermediate stations by heart and almost every yard of junction, siding and signalling we passed through. It was quite surreal seeing it all again yesterday.

The pubs we went to - the Piccadilly Tap, City Arms and Britons Protection - were all pretty much the same as three years ago, although the last seems to be imperilled not just by the ongoing dispute with its owner, but also the still expanding cluster of apartment towers at the end of Deansgate. 

The most startling thing really was seeing the town hall encased in white plastic sheeting and Albert Square occupied by a mountain of builder's portacabins.

We're All Doomed (Bar None)

There are four pubs within a mile of where I live. They are all dining places to a greater or lesser degree and only one, a Holt's house, regularly serves cask beer; in the others, which have it on occasionally, it's normally represented by a single handpump for Sharp's Doom Bar.

As a national brand of bitter, Doom Bar is often dismissed as a boring brown beer, despite being the UK's best selling cask ale and favourably reviewed by at least one blogger. I drank, and enjoyed, it on a CAMRA stagger around the area last summer, and saw it on the bar of a couple of pubs while on another of Cheadle Hulme on Friday night, although it was either unavailable or overlooked in favour of better cask options 

I popped into the largest local pub, which also has a hotel attached to it, the other afternoon (most of its trade comes from Manchester Airport, whose runways lie a couple of hundred yards to the west). Unlike on my last visit, Doom Bar was available, but the bar was completely deserted and, wanting to avoid the first pint out of the pump, I swerved it and had half a Guinness instead, which being the normal rather than Extra Cold version wasn't actually a bad drink. I'll call in at the weekend when it's a bit busier, I thought, and duly did yesterday afternoon, only to find a pint pot atop the handpump again, so had another half a Guinness.

Guinness is a bit of a thing itself at the moment, overtaking Carling Black Label as the best selling UK beer brand, a position the latter had held since the early eighties (although it's still top in volumes rather than revenue, and the market for stout is still much smaller than the overall lager one). Anecdotally, I seem to have seen more people drinking it in pubs recently, including younger ones. Could keg lager become a declining beer style favoured by older drinkers like cask bitter and mild before it?

I've been in ten different pubs so far this year, the same as the first two months of 2020, compared to only half a dozen last year, and thirty-eight in 2019.

Boak and Bailey have written a very useful summary of Doom Bar's rise from regional beer to national brand.

Carling Black Label is an older beer than you might think, having been brewed in Canada since the late twenties and available here in bottles since the early fifties and on draught since the mid sixties, as explained in Ron Pattinson's excellent, and typically comprehensive, history of British lager.

Kafka and beer

I've been re-reading in the last few days some of the works of Franz Kafka, which I first discovered as a teenager in the eighties.

As with Dickens, Orwell, Patrick Hamilton, and his compatriot Jaroslav Hasek, there are very few novels or longer short stories by Kafka which don't feature pubs, beer, or the effects of drinking, often in the opening chapter or even paragraph: the young land surveyor K. in The Castle who arrives late on a winter night at the village inn where a "few peasants were still sitting over beer"; the victim of The Trial, Josef K., who on leaving the office at nine would "go to a beer hall, where until eleven he sat at a table"; and Metamorphosis, which can be seen as a description of a hangover.

Coming from a well-off, German speaking Jewish family, Kafka felt alienated by his class, language and religion from much of the society around him in early twentieth century Prague, but there was one thing he shared with his fellow Czechs: an appreciation of good beer, still ubiquitous in his native Bohemia.

Kafka's relationship with his father was a difficult one, but dying of tuberculosis at the age of forty in a sanatorium outside Vienna in 1924, and unable to swallow much, he wrote to his parents about how "during heat spells, we used to have beer together quite often, many years ago, when Father would take me to the Civilian Swimming Pool" and recalled the same childhood memory to his girlfriend Dora who nursed him there:

"When I was a little boy, before I learnt to swim, I sometimes went with my father, who also can't swim, to the non-swimmer's section. Then we sat together naked at the buffet, each with a sausage and a half litre of beer...You have to imagine, that enormous man holding by the hand a nervous little bundle of bones, or the way we undressed in the dark in the little changing room, the way he would then drag me out, because I was embarrassed, the way he tried to teach me his so-called swimming, etcetera. But then the beer!"

I'm still hoping to go to Prague myself one day, possibly when the sleeper train from Berlin starts running there next year; I'll be sure to raise a glass of pivo to him when I finally get there.