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...

Beer and blues in the new Berlin

I went to Stockport beer festival last night, held for the third year in a row at the town's Masonic Guildhall (vale Edgeley Park: Stockport County's successes on the pitch, rising from National League North to EFL League One, and the subsequent redevelopment of the ground and its hospitality and conference facilities, have put it beyond the pocket of the organisers).

Stockport might not quite be the new Berlin, as an international DJ once dubbed it, but with a new bus station, which will now eventually become a tram interchange, a bridge across the Mersey from it to the Runaway microbrewery, which relocated there from Manchester, and some long shut pubs in that area reopening, the town is definitely on the up.

I tend to gravitate towards darker, stronger beers at festivals now, and amongst those I enjoyed last night were a strong dark mild brewed by Thornbridge, on the Burton Union system they acquired from Marston's, in collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver, Krakow Prince, a porter from Poland's only cask beer brewery, and a smoked Redwillow Rauchbier.

On the way back to the station I popped into the Spinning Top, where a blues band was playing covers of some Chicago standards (Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor, Jimmy Reed's Bright Lights, Big City). The Spinning Top, a music pub housed in a former Indian restaurant, is named after a short story by Franz Kafka, a quote from which is painted on the wall (Kafka spent some time in Berlin, but I don't think he ever made it to Stockport).

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.

A couple of beers from yesteryear

I picked up a couple of beers from the supermarket the other day which were a common sight in pubs when I was younger, Newcastle Brown Ale and Mackeson's Stout, both of which have now become something of a "ghost brand": still produced, albeit in much lower volumes than before, but never advertised or promoted.

I occasionally drank Newcastle Brown Ale as a student in the early nineties, when it became something of a cult beer and was regularly stocked by student union bars (it also pops up in most episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, rereuns of which I've been watching on That's TV). Since then, Heineken has bought Scottish & Newcastle, demolished the former Federation Brewery in Gateshead where the beer had ended up, and moved production to John Smith's in North Yorkshire. I'm not sure if it's the move from Tyneside to Tadcaster, but it seems much smoother and blander now, although still with a decent head and a slightly sulphurous aftertaste that is quite appealing and reminded me of the famous "Burton snatch" you get in the pale ales brewed there, Draught Bass and Marston's Pedigree.

The first pub in drank in as a teenager, a Whitbread house that finally closed its doors this summer, stocked bottles of Mackeson's Stout., a beer they had acquired from a brewery in Kent which they bought, and eventually shut down, turning it into a national brand (the dairy churn on the label of the bottle indicated that it contained lactose, a sugar derived from milk). Milk stout is traditionally associated with either pregnant women and nursing mothers, due to its supposed health properties, or older ladies, no doubt because of its low strength and sweetness. The gossipy trio who supped it in the snug of the Rovers Return in early episodes of Coronation Street fit the latter archetype, although it was also the favourite drink of one of my fellow teenage pubgoers, rather the bitter, lager, Guinness and cider everyone else ordered, and who regularly took bottles of it home with her. I quite enjoyed my first taste of it, which comes now out of a can rather than a bottle: a dark brown, rubyish colour similar to Guinness, a thick, off white head, an aroma of brown sugar, bit of a thin mouthfeel, and slightly roasty, not at all sweet really (I'm still on the look out for some Whitbread Gold Label barley wine so, like Ron Pattinson at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins, I can make a Mackeson's and Gold Label black and tan).

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.

No smoke without ire

Opinion polls seem to show a narrow majority in favour of the government's proposed ban on smoking outside pubs. The correlation seems to be that if something is potentially unhealthy and costs the NHS money (irrespective of the revenue raised from it) the consumption of it should be restricted, or ideally banned, a dangerously authoritarian idea which could easily be applied to many other things, especially those already deemed harmful by public health professionals, notably alcohol and fast food.

The original ban on smoking in indoor spaces could be justified by the protection of others from the effects of passive smoking, in particular pub staff, but that doesn't apply here. It's hard to see any other motivation for it apart from middle class distaste for and disapproval of unhealthy working class habits.

If this ban goes ahead, one of three things will happen: smokers will stop going to pubs, the time and money spent on constructing outdoor areas for them there will have been wasted, and inevitably more will shut, especially wet led ones; smokers will stand just beyond the boundary of the pub premises, potentially causing a nuisance to pedestrians and other businesses; or they will find the darkest corner of the beer garden in which to flout the ban, leading to awkward confrontations between pub staff and their customers who will rightly wonder what harm they are doing by smoking a cigarette outdoors and why that act is now illegal.

Last Orders at my First Local

The first pub I drank in regularly in the late eighties was a large Whitbread house, built in mock Tudor style by Chester's Brewery of Ardwick in the mid thirties, where between the age of eighteen and twenty I supped gallons of their keg bitter, Trophy (I also occasionally drank Holt's cask bitter at what we then regarded as the old man's pub down the road, which later became my local for another decade or so).

Our visits to the first pub came to an abrupt end when it reopened after a refurbishment, the lounge having become a restaurant and the small carvery at the side of it a bar, with higher drinks prices and a strict dress code which effectively excluded the younger drinkers who had frequented it in large numbers before its transformation into a more upmarket dining place.

A few years later, Whitbread built a Premier Inn hotel next to the pub/restaurant - an obvious move given the proximity of Manchester Airport, the end of whose main runway lies just a few hundred yards beyond its car park - and it soon came to depend on trade from that rather than locals.

Now, as part of a national programme of such conversions, it's closing, with the space being turned into extra hotel rooms, so on its final night of opening I popped in for a last drink there.

I was worried that it might be dead, but it was actually rammed, mostly by people my age, with a few fellow nostalgics no doubt amongst the crush at the bar. It often had cask beer on after I stopped going in regularly, lately a single handpump for Doom Bar, although I never saw anyone order it and always swerved it myself, so it was the usual default choice of Draught Guinness, which was a decent enough pint. At half past eight, the landlord rang the bell for last orders for the final time and a few champagne corks flew through the air, at nine the doors shut, and that was that. 

It was nothing like the pub or the atmosphere I drank in as a teenager thirty-five years ago, but I'm glad I was there to see it go under the waves.

There is a history of the pub 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.