Mild about Manchester

I went into Manchester city centre yesterday afternoon and completed my sticker card for Mild Magic, an annual event organised by Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA to promote mild ale.

I usually get off to a decent start by going on the pub crawl held to launch it, but this year my attempt to join it was, er, derailed by a freight train which caught fire and shut the Manchester Airport line for several hours.

In the end, I managed to get to sixteen pubs, about half of them tied houses of local breweries Holt's and Hydes (who sponsor the event) and the others a mixture of micropubs and Wetherspoons. Seven were in the city centre, five in the SK8 postcode area, and four in south Manchester (along the Metrolink line of that name from East Didsbury to Withington).

The beer quality was generally good, with just one poor and another returned as undrinkable. I voted for the Bank Top Dark Mild I had at the Wobbly Stamp in Cheadle as the best mild, and the City Arms in Manchester as the best pub.

Supping in the seventies

I've just finished reading Keg, an overview of British brewing in the seventies by Ron Pattinson.

I was born at the start of the decade so only have fragmentary memories of the mid to late seventies, but certain things continued into and up to the end of the eighties, when I began drinking in pubs.

The consolidation of British brewing in the sixties into the Big Six national groups (Allied, Bass, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Watneys and Whitbread) with their large tied estates only began to break up after the introduction of the Beer Orders in 1989 - the first pub I drank in as a teenager was a Whitbread house, originally built by Manchester brewery Chester's and acquired by them when they bought Threlfalls in 1967, which finally shut last summer. The lack of choice and imposition of overpriced keg and bland national cask brands by them was a major factor in the formation of the Campaign for Real Ale in 1971 and the Big Six became their primary target throughout the seventies and eighties, although the fight against them ultimately backfired as they all subsequently sold up to global brewers with even less interest in cask beer or transformed themselves into non-brewing hotel, leisure and pub companies.

The seventies also saw lager's rise to dominance in the draught beer market, with the section on it here a snapshot of the longer, and fascinating, version in another of Ron's books, Lager.

Things which Ron mentions that I recall from the late eighties and early nineties, and which have either now disappeared or become far less common, include outside toilets, afternoon closing, drink driving, bottle-conditoned Guinness, milk stout, bottled beer mixed with draught, and not having a problem being served under the legal drinking age of 18 (the first place I drank draught beer as a 16 year old was a Labour club, after joining the Young Socialists in the 1987 General Election campaign, and which somewhat ironically is now a children's nursery. Around the same time, a couple of mates and myself sipped halves of Boddies bitter at dinnertime in a rather rough Salford estate pub, on a break from a Sixth Form thing across the road at the university, in our school uniforms). 

Smoking was of course ubiquitous and unremarked upon in pubs - the idea that it would become illegal within a couple of decades would have seemed incredible to most drinkers had it crossed our minds (I had an old coat that I only wore to my very smoky local and which stank of tobacco until I hung it out to air the next day). Other things in pubs that seemed immovable back then included men selling seafood on a Friday night and the football newspaper (pink in Manchester) on a Saturday evening, football pools coupon collectors and darts boards. You still occasionally saw older women having bottles and jugs filled with draught beer to take home. I'm not sure what the reaction to that request would be now, or to heavy drinking during working hours (Friday afternoons at Stockport social security office, where I worked in my late twenties and early thirties, were never the most productive after our extended dinnertime session at the Robbies pub round the corner).

I also recall as a kid in the seventies seeing lots of home brewing kits for sale in high street shops, the popularity of which was no doubt linked to the rising cost of draught beer in pubs, illustrated in the book by a handy table showing the average price of a pint of bitter increasing from 10p at the start of the decade to 34p at the end of it (Holt's cask bitter cost 79p a pint when I first drank it in 1989, and is now between £3 and £4.50 depending on the area the pub is in and how much the brewery has spent refurbishing it).

Winter Warmer Wanderings

I completed Winter Warmer Wander, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA's annual celebration of strong ales, stouts and festive beers, somewhat ahead of schedule this year, three weeks before the end of the event, which runs from mid November to late December, consists of collecting stickers from pubs to win prizes, and is sponsored by Stockport family brewery Robinson's, who are also celebrating the 125th anniversary of their strong ale Old Tom.

I went to twelve pubs (four in Manchester, four in Cheadle Hulme, two in Cheadle and two in Stockport), about half of them tied houses of local family breweries (Holt's, Lees, Robinson's) and the rest a mixture of micropubs and free houses selling beers from further afield, mostly those of North Midlands breweries Thornbridge and Titanic. 

I drank more stouts than strong ales, almost all in halves due to their strength and price, although the latter were amongst my favourite beers on this year's event. I managed to call at some regular haunts, the Chiverton Tap next to Cheadle Hulme station and the City Arms in Manchester city centre, but also revisited a few pubs I probably wouldn't have gone to otherwise, including the surprisingly pubby Red Lion in Cheadle and the Pointing Dog in Cheadle Hulme, a far flung spot on the southern border of Stockport for most participants on the event, but fortunately only a couple of miles walk for me.

Castle Kings of the Mild Frontier

I went to the Castle in Macclesfield yesterday afternoon, which had been voted best pub of Mild Magic, the annual sticker trail organised by my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, and extended to the former Cheshire silk town for the first time this year. The owner of the Black Country brewery Sarah Hughes was also there to pick up the best mild award for their 6% beer Dark Ruby.

I haven't been to the Castle for a decade, since when it's shut, changed hands and been refurbished. Having the same name, it always brings to my mind the final, unfinished, novel by Franz Kafka, especially as its historic multi room interior mirrors that of the village inn where the young surveyor arrives late on a winter night at the beginning of the book. The dark strong beer we were drinking wouldn't look out of place in Kafka's native Czech land of Bohemia either.

I've only been to the Beacon, the pub in Sedgley where it's brewed, once, back in 2012, but that too is something of a time capsule, especially the front room on the right where I sat, which is essentially unchanged since the twenties.

Another Walk on the Mild Side

I've just completed another Mild Magic challenge, the annual trail round pubs drinking mild and collecting stickers organised by my CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester (it's a tough job, but someone's got to do it).

I ended up going to fourteen participating pubs this year, almost all of them in south Manchester (Chorlton, Didsbury, Rusholme, Withington) and the city centre, and drank milds from six breweries including local independents Holt's and Hydes, who sponsor the event, nearly all of them dark with just a couple of lighter ones. I voted for Hydes Light Ale as the best mild and the City Arms, Manchester, as the best pub.

The promotion runs until 19th May so there's still plenty of time to take part (you can download a sticker sheet for it here).

Winter Beers

The Christmas season coincided with the finish of Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA's Winter Warmer Wander at the end of December. I went to twenty participating pubs over the course of the six week sticker trail, split pretty evenly between Stockport and Manchester, and drank an almost equal amount of stouts and strong ales, the styles that it aims to promote. Local breweries Joseph Holt's and Robinson's, which sponsors the event, also produced seasonal Christmas beers alongside their strong ales Sixex and Old Tom, although I didn't see any of them myself in the pubs I went to (the only beer I had which specifically referenced the time of the year was RedWillow's Festive Treat).

I drink stouts and strong ales throughout the year, but they are particularly enjoyable in the cold and short days of winter. Thinking about the bottled beers I drank over the festive period, they were all at the stronger/darker/maltier end of the brewing spectrum too: Fuller's 1845, Schlenkerla Rauchmärzen, Guinness Foreign Extra Stout, Sam Smith's Imperial Stout, Robinson's Old Tom, Ayinger Winterbock and Augustiner Maximator.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ye Olde Vic: 21 not out

I went to Ye Olde Vic in Edgeley last night, for an evening on which Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA celebrated it having been in the Good Beer Guide for 21 years in a row.

As I wrote here, after my first visit to it in 2015, for years I thought that when people talked about the derelict looking pub at the top of the approach behind Stockport station, they were referring to the imposing, but long closed, and now converted for other use, Blue Bell Hotel rather than Ye Olde Vic just down the hill.

It's actually only a few weeks since my last visit, having popped in for a pint en route to the station after Stockport Beer and Cider Festival at Edgeley Park, and its unique atmosphere of a street corner local largely frequented by regulars rather than destination pub visitors cum eclectic bric-à-brac emporium and the well-kept cask beer which has led to it long appearing in the Good Beer Guide were the same on both occasions.

Another draw last night was the presence on the bar of Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild, the strong mild ale created by a widow of that name in 1921 that disappeared for thirty years until the recipe for it was rediscovered by her grandson in the late 80s, which, combined with a cheese and onion cob in its home at the Beacon Hotel, Sedgley, was one of the highlights of my holiday to the Black Country a decade ago.

Another look at the Moss Nook and Heald Green pub scene

The first local CAMRA event cancelled at the start of lockdown in March 2020 was a pub crawl around Moss Nook and Heald Green; on Friday night, more than two years behind schedule, it finally happened.

The record breaking temperatures at the start of the week had thankfully been replaced by the overcast skies and light drizzle more normal for Manchester, making for a pleasant mile and a half stroll around this mostly residential suburban area at the edge of the airport and Cheshire countryside, extending along the southern border of the city and into the neighbouring borough of Stockport.

With the original starting point, Robinson’s Tatton Arms, closed for refurbishment, four of us assembled at the nearby Flying Horse, a chain dining pub which opened at the end of 2013. A pump-clip for Greene King IPA greeted us on the bar, but it turned out not to be available, and with our next call at the Heald Green Hotel (an inter-war Whitbread pub, and keg-only haunt of mine when I was a teenager in the late eighties) equally brief – a plastic pint pot atop the single hand-pump for Doom Bar signalled its unavailability, gruffly confirmed by the barman – after fifteen minutes we’d been to two pubs without drinking a drop of beer – as someone said, the evening was becoming less of a pub crawl and more like a Temperance tour!

Luckily, Brew HG, a café/bar in a former florist’s shop on the other side of the railway station, gave us a friendly welcome, seats at a table outside and a craft beer menu that included a few Belgian bottle-conditioned strong ales – it could almost have been Brussels if it hadn’t been for the aircraft about to land at the airport descending overhead; they also had German lagers and wheat beers in bottles and Beavertown Neck Oil IPA on draught at the bar. One to return to I think.

Having phoned ahead to confirm its availability, we were assured of cask beer in the form of freshly pulled through Doom Bar at the Cheadle Royal, a modern, low-rise building on a business park at the opposite end of the village, with which it shares its name as well as with the adjacent Victorian psychiatric hospital.

Our final call was at the Griffin, my local in the nineties and early noughties, when it was a typically squat, and smoky, sixties-built estate pub, since transformed by Holt’s into an airy food-led place once described as looking like Southfork Ranch, where we found their bitter in good condition, an upbeat end to an evening which had begun with an inauspicious series of swift retreats before improving in both hospitability and beer quality.

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.

 

A Plaque for the Printers

I popped to the Printers Arms in Cheadle between rain showers this afternoon for the unveiling of a Blue Plaque marking the spot where my local CAMRA branch was formed in 1974. It was the first time I'd been to the pub, and my first CAMRA event for eighteen months.

The South Manchester branch formed there forty-seven years ago covered a huge area south of the city, extending from Warrington in the west to Macclesfield in the east, before being broken up into smaller ones over the next few years, including Stockport and South Manchester which I'm now a member of, although there are still some anomalies resulting from historical local government boundaries and the ad hoc way in which it was done (despite its name, the current branch doesn't include the whole of either Stockport or south Manchester).

The Printers Arms is described in the 1976 Good Beer Guide as "A thriving old pub" (that's the entire entry by the way: more expansive write-ups in the GBG of what to expect when visiting somewhere new were still some years off). It still is an old-looking pub, at least externally, but has been modernised inside to create a large, airy space around a central bar, and a conservatory added to the rear, leading to a triangular beer garden.

The Robinson's Unicorn bitter was in decent form and it was good to see some of my fellow local CAMRA members again after a year and a half. Founder member Neil Kellett unveiled the plaque alongside his brother Alan, who was the secretary of Cheadle Constituency Labour Party when I joined it in the late eighties.

RIP Railway

As expected, and widely predicted by the local media, the planning committee of Stockport council yesterday granted permission for the Railway pub in Portwood, on the eastern edge of the town centre, to be demolished to make way for a retail development.

The Railway, whose name comes from the line that once ran behind it, which closed to passenger trains in the late sixties before being buried beneath a motorway, was the scene of many CAMRA events, the recipient of numerous awards and the start or end point of several pub crawls, and the local branch made a forceful, if sadly ultimately unsuccessful, submission to the planning committee objecting to the application in an attempt to save it. It has been known for selling stronger and darker beers and real cider, and was a regular participant in the Winter Warmer Wander, Mild Magic and Cider Circuit promotions to showcase those styles. It was also a favourite of the Good Beer Guide pub ticker and blogger Simon Everitt when some of us took him around the town a couple of years ago. 

The pub's owners seem to have taken advantage of certain aspects of planning law to obtain the council's permission for demolition to take place: relying on an application made and granted in 2005, on which minimal work was subsequently done, and citing the disrepair that the building has been allowed to slip into it, so that it is now allegedly unsafe and impossible, or rather uneconomic, to save it.

In the Railway with fellow CAMRA members and bloggers, October 2019 (photo by Simon Everitt from his BRAPA blog)

Fifty Years of Beer

I've just got my copy of 50 Years of CAMRA by Laura Hadland, an official history published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Campaign for Real Ale, which was founded on a drinking holiday to Ireland in March 1971.

As you'd expect, the book has material in it from every part of the country and decade of the campaign's history - much of it from its newspaper What's Brewing, which has just been axed to cut costs - but the section on the early days has a definite tilt towards the North West, which is unsurprising given that the four founder members all came from Lancashire, including two from Salford.

So how different does the campaign look now as it enters its sixth decade?

The organisation in the early seventies was obviously a lot smaller - although it grew from the original four to five thousand in the first couple of years - and had a much looser structure, with fewer branches covering larger areas, a single employee, to process membership applications, and initially didn't do either of the things it is now probably most associated with - organising the Great British Beer Festival and publishing the Good Beer Guide - but on the other hand undoubtedly had a much higher proportion of young and active members, ready to turn out for meetings, demos and social events  (more than a hundred and fifty thousand overwhelmingly paper members, who joined at a beer festival or through a gift membership, but are never seen by their local branches, and a national executive elected on a very low turnout, and known only by a handful of activists, are both relatively recent phenomena).

Like other parts of society, CAMRA has been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, with pubs shut for most of the last year and financial pressures forcing it to furlough many of its headquarters staff as two of its major income streams - new membership applications and beer festivals - respectively slowed down and disappeared entirely, and the decision to press ahead with a third, publication of the Good Beer Guide with its lucrative pre-Christmas sales, looking more like a commercial decision than a campaigning one.

So what now for CAMRA?

Two of the issues it faces - the ongoing closure of pubs and an ageing active membership not being adequately replaced by younger people at branch level - each predate the pandemic, even if it will likely worsen things on both fronts, and in the latter case is something seen across all voluntary organisations and societies.

In the future, I can see CAMRA becoming something like a beer drinkers' equivalent of the National Trust, an organisation that people have a direct debit to because they broadly support its aims and/or like the benefits that membership brings, but aren't willing to give up their spare time to work at festivals for or interested in becoming involved with the running of, with the labour of a decreasing band of volunteers increasingly replaced by that of paid staff (obviously I will be attempting to swim against that tide myself by resuming activity with my own local branch in Stockport and South Manchester, now like all the others in lockdown-induced hibernation, once I've had my Covid jabs and the pubs are back open as normal).

I Know What I Like

Talking Pictures TV last night showed I Know What I Like, a 1973 film about beer and brewing made for the trade body the Brewers' Society.

Starring Bernard Cribbins in various parts - farmer, brewer, maltster, landlord, hop picker and white-coated scientist - it's a fairly standard promotional film that reflects drinking trends in the early seventies, with the brewing industry keen to defend itself against the charge of pushing an inferior product on consumers by, rather unconvincingly, claiming that the traditional method of brewing draught beer in regional family breweries before racking it into wooden casks and loading them onto horse-drawn drays for distribution to tied pubs had essentially been retained, admittedly on a much larger scale, in the stainless steel coppers, mash tuns and closed conical fermenting vessels of a massive keg plant lately built by some national conglomeration next to a motorway junction whose output was then transported around the country by tanker lorries. In the pub scenes, very little distinction is drawn between cask and keg or draught and bottled beer, with it being taken for granted that you could buy bitter, mild, stout, brown ale and lager in at least one of those forms of dispense wherever you happened to call in for a drink.

Thankfully the argument that the consumer must be happy with the choice of beer in their local because they kept going to them was resisted by at least a significant minority of drinkers, with 1973 also seeing the publication of Frank Baillie's seminal book The Beer Drinker's Companion, and the Campaign for Real Ale - which had been formed in 1971 on a casual basis by four journalists on holiday in the West of Ireland - starting to find its feet as a national organisation of members organised into branches and about to produce the first printed Good Beer Guide.

Beer in the Millennium Year

A post about Boddingtons Strong Ale on Ron Pattinson's blog Shut Up About Barclay Perkins the other day had me looking through my collection of Good Beer Guides, and noticing a gap - the first one I've got is from 1976, then the ones published in 1983 and 1990, but after that nothing until the 2011 edition, so I put that right by buying a cheap secondhand copy of the 2001 one online. So how do pubs in the Manchester area compare now to back then in the first year of this millennium nearly twenty years on?

Of the pubs in Manchester city centre, most are still there - the Britons Protection, Castle, Circus, City Arms, Grey Horse, Hare and Hounds, Jolly Angler and Old Monkey - but further out a few cask outlets in the 2001 GBG have gone, including the Sir Edwin Chadwick, a Wetherspoons in Longsight ("Comfy chairs near the door are appreciated by older customers") that I can't say I remember, and which was apparently quite short-lived, and the Albert in Rusholme, a genuine rather than plastic Irish pub, with an Irish landlord and regulars, which I drank in quite a bit at the time and which served a decent pint of Hydes bitter, from their then brewery not far away in Moss Side (round which it occasionally organised tours). It went downhill after Manchester City moved from nearby Maine Road to the City of Manchester Stadium in east Manchester in 2003 and the landlord retired to Australia, and became keg-only, but seems to have regained its popularity since.

In Stockport, the Armoury, Blossoms, Red Bull and Swan With Two Necks are thankfully still with us, but a couple of pubs that I never made it to, Robinson's brewery tap the Spread Eagle on Lower Hillgate and the Olde Woolpack near the Pyramid office building, have shut (the latter only fairly recently), as has the Tiviot which I drank in once or twice in its final days, when it had steel poles supporting the roof ahead of the long-serving licensees retiring from the trade.

That Was The Winter Warmer Wander That Was

I've just completed another Winter Warmer Wander, the annual celebration of strong ales and stouts organised by my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, so here are my scores on the doors:

Beer style

7 stouts, 2 strong ales (both Robinson's Old Tom), 3 premium beers (strong bitters, milds and brown ales over 4.5% abv where the pub didn't have another qualifying beer).

Pubs

Stockport 6, Cheadle 3, Manchester 2, Cheadle Hulme 1.

Breweries

5 beers from regional brewers (Hydes 1, Robinson's 4), 7 from micros (4 from the North West - Cheadle, Dunham, 2 from Thirst Class - and 3 from the rest of the North/north Midlands: Elland, Little Critters, Titanic).

Price

Cheapest pint £1.95 (in Cheadle!), dearest a fiver, in Manchester city centre.

Favourite beers/pubs

Stout: Elland 1872 Porter in the Petersgate Tap, Stockport.

Strong ale: Robinson's Old Tom in the Bakers Vaults, Stockport (our local CAMRA Pub of the Year for 2019).

Pub: Britons Protection, the new home of Manchester Jazz Society, for its historic, multi-roomed interior and range of well-kept cask beers; runner-up, its sister pub, the City Arms, which had two cask stouts on the bar.

Sponsors of this year's Winter Warmer Wander

Warming up for another Winter Wander

With chill winds beginning to blow as we approach the back end of 2019, it's now only a fortnight until the start of the Winter Warmer Wander, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA's annual celebration of strong ales and stouts. And with even more pubs and bars signed up for this year's event, including a few new places which have opened in the last twelve months, it's easier than ever to take part.

On a pub crawl around Stockport town centre last Saturday with fellow blogger BRAPA, it was noticeable that nearly all the ones we went to had a dark and/or strong cask beer on the bar, as befits the season, although to be honest I'm happy to drink these kinds of ales and stouts at any time of the year. 

I'm yet to drink a half or two of this year's Old Tom, the strong ale from Stockport brewery Robinson's which only appears on draught in their pubs in the winter, but I'm sure that I'll put that right in the next few weeks.