Yes we can

Although it's been available for more than eighty years, having first been sold in the mid-thirties in the post-Prohibition United States, canned beer has always had a bit of a cheapo image compared to draught, or even bottled, beer, and long been associated with globally-brewed, mass-market lagers.

The last canned beer I drank was probably a widgeted can of nitroflow Guinness at a sports event or in a hotel bar. Although I knew that some microbreweries had begun producing so-called "craft cans", the only pubs I'd seen them on sale in were Wetherspoons, where the draught choice is usually good enough not to bother with anything else, and at home I normally drink bottled beer, but an email from online retailer EeBria tempted me to pick up some from Macclesfield brewery RedWillow.

I've drunk cask versions of a fair few RedWillow beers (all of which have a -less suffix: Feckless, Wreckless etc.) on draught in the pub, and a couple of their bottled equivalents here and there too, so I was interested to see how they'd survive the transition to can. The first one I cracked open, Smokeless, is a beer right up my street: a 5.7% abv smoked porter, albeit one infused with chipotle.

I was expecting lots of fizz and a thin head, but as you can see from the photo there was a decent amount of foam and the beer beneath was softly carbonated: if I'd been asked to, I think I'd have had a hard time distinguishing it from the cask version, although the chipotle flavour was a little bit more pronounced I thought. I'm looking forward to seeing how their hop-forward and fruity pale ales stand up in cans.

There are apparently some can-conditioned beers, including a few German wheat beers, which still have live yeast in the container and would therefore be acceptable to CAMRA in the same way that bottle-conditioned ones are.

Back to Macc

I went on a pub crawl around Macclesfield this weekend.

I don't think I've been to Macclesfield since I used to change trains there travelling between Stoke and Stockport as a student twenty or so years ago. In the early 90's, its pubs were mainly tied houses of Robinson's Brewery in nearby Stockport and a few owned by Manchester brewers Boddingtons and Holt's. That's changed in the last decade or so as microbreweries Bollington, RedWillow and Storm have all opened up in or near the town.

Following a map produced by the local CAMRA branch, we started in the Castle Inn, a pub whose architectural features have led to it being listed on the National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors. The good thing about this crawl is that – contrary to how it might appear on the map – the pubs are actually pretty close together, and to the station; there is also a good balance of "pubby" pubs, including street-corner locals like the Jolly Sailor and Waters Green Tavern, and more modern specialist beer bars such as the Treacle Tap and Snow Goose  which give Sunderland Street the feel of a mini-Mancunian Northern Quarter. Although it's not on the map, we also managed to find the new RedWillow brewery tap whose draught beers include their distinctive, Bamberg-style smoked porter.

As someone once said, I shall return.

Crossing the river

Coming off the motorway at Sale the other day, I spotted this sign showing the River Mersey as the historic boundary between the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire.

I know people who argue for the restoration of the historic English counties are often Tories but even so I think they have a point.  The objection to the post-1974 metropolitan county of Greater Manchester is not just that it is artificial and has arbitrary boundaries but also that it ignores the Lancashire identity of towns like Bury and Wigan which continue to have their own distinctive accents, cuisine and culture.

I still feel I'm crossing a natural boundary when going over the Mersey.  It's not an accident that many borders around the world are marked by rivers. 

I was born in Manchester when it was still part of Lancashire, support Lancashire County Cricket Club who still play at Old Trafford and look forward to the day when Whitehall comes round to what locals have known all along.