The Book of Pubmanship

I've just got the Book of Pubmanship by Ronnie Corbett.

I'm not really a fan of Corbett's cabaret club-style light entertainment sketches or the golf club anecdotes and I probably wouldn't have bought the book if I hadn't read a copy at a mate's house and then spotted it second hand on Amazon for a penny.

The Book of Pubmanship was published in 1972 and sponsored by Imperial Tobacco (you read that right, a book about pubs sponsored by a tobacco company). The book deals with all the important questions: how to pick a pub, whose round is it and what to do about a hangover. Although Corbett is a spirits drinker, there's lots of interesting stuff about beer too: beer styles,  beer consumption between 1960 and 1970 and beer glasses.

Manchester, so much to answer for

I've just finished reading Morrissey's Autobiography, published in Penguin Classics (a bit of fun that some journalists have oh so predictably misunderstood).

Autobiography is as elegantly written and witty as you'd expect from the lyricist of The Smiths. There are lots of moments when I laughed, just as I often do listening to supposedly downbeat Smiths and Morrissey songs like this.

Manchester's top ten pubs

This weekend's Guardian had a list of Manchester's top ten craft beer pubs.

If a "craft beer pub" is one that has cask beer, non-mainstream/"craft" keg, bottled European and North American beers and draught, unpasteurised cider, neither the City Arms nor the Grey Horse qualify, despite the latter now offering beers from the Hydes microbrewery's Beer Studio range (Font is the only pub on the list I've not been to but from the description it sounds as though it ticks all the boxes).

I tend to rate pubs on their atmosphere, architecture and clientele. As long as there's one well-kept cask beer, I'm happy. On that basis, my own Manchester top ten, in no particular order apart from alphabetical, is The Briton's Protection, City Arms, Crown and Kettle, Grey Horse, Hare and Hounds, Lass O'Gowrie, Marble Arch, Salisbury, Smithfield and Unicorn.

Engerland?

The Arsenal midfielder Jack Wilshere has spoken out against footballers not born in England playing for the national team.

The comments come after speculation that England might select Manchester United's eighteen year old winger Adnan Januzaj in the future. Januzaj, born in Brussels to Kosavar parents, is also eligible to play for Albania, Belgium and Serbia. There has been a similar debate in Test cricket where South Africans play for England, Pakistanis for South Africa and Australia etc.

I don't have a problem with sportsmen representing the country they live in rather than the one they were born in, especially when they or their parents have fled their homes because of war or violence. In football, South Americans played for Italy in the 30's, helping them to win their first World Cup, and in the 60's Real Madrid's Ferenc Puskas from Hungary and Alfredo Di Stefano from Argentina both played for Spain.

Lancashire Dark Mild

I've got Ron Pattinson at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins to thank for alerting me to the fact that Marks and Spencer is now selling a bottle-conditioned mild.

Lancashire Dark Mild, a 3.7 % abv beer brewed by Thwaites Brewery in Blackburn, is I'd assume a slightly tweaked and rebadged version of their draught mild Nutty Black.

Although dark milds are traditionally associated with the Black Country and the West Midlands, the first two milds I ever drank were dark ones from Manchester brewers, Holt's and the long-gone and much missed Wilson's, and Robinson's Brewery in Stockport still brew a pale and a dark version of their mild.

Bottle and cask

I went to a CAMRA Meet the Brewer event at a pub in South Manchester last night.

The brewery in question had three of its beers on draught in the pub and also kindly brought us some bottles to try. I was pretty impressed with all of them, including a Pils brewed with Czech hops that unusually was available on handpump as well.

What struck me most was the difference between the beers in cask and in bottle (the bottles are brewery rather than bottle-conditioned). The citrusy notes in the IPA for example were far zingier in the cask compared to the bottle.

There aren't that many beers that I drink in both cask and bottle. Most of the bottle-conditioned beers I regularly drink are from London brewers like Fuller's and Young's and either aren't available in cask or only in their pubs in the capital.  I also find that some brewery conditioned bottles – Robinson's Unicorn, Timothy Taylor's Landlord – are much closer to the cask versions than others.

Join the Red Revolution

Salford rugby league club is relaunching itself at the last game of the season on Friday.

In a so-called Red Revolution, Salford's new owner Marwan Koukash is rebranding the club as Salford Red Devils.

I've always liked the fact that Salford, unlike other rugby league clubs, has avoided silly names such as Bulls, Broncos and Rhinos and stuck to simple ones connected to its history, first Reds and now Red Devils (the nickname apparently comes from a 1934 tour of France where a journalist dubbed them "les diables rouges").

Although the Salford rebranding has obvious socialist connotations, it also reminds me a bit of the advertising for one of the worst beers ever brewed in Britain.