A good pub?

The 2014 Good Pub Guide – a commercial publication not to be confused with CAMRA's Good Beer Guide – has stirred up a bit of (surely intentional) controversy by suggesting that up to four thousand pubs will close in the next year.

The GPG claims that pubs will only survive if they improve the quality of the food they serve. I must be missing something here as the main reason I go to pubs is to drink beer. I might have a pork pie or a packet of crisps or nuts with a pint but I wouldn't go to a pub specially for the food. I think that they're confusing pubs with restaurants here. Most of the pubs I drink in don't do food anyway. Let's see if they stagger on for another year despite the GPG's message of doom.

Let there be PR

The TV presenter Tim Lovejoy is fronting a new website called Let There Be Beer.

On Sunday Brunch, the magazine programme he co-presents with chef Simon Rimmer, Lovejoy has promoted interesting beers from Britain and the rest of Europe so you might expect the website to do likewise. You'd be wrong.

Its main theme is matching beer and food. I'm not really into all that but some of its suggestions are just bizarre. San Miguel or Kronenbourg is the perfect accompaniment to asparagus apparently. Cooking fish? Budweiser, Fosters or Tuborg are what you want. World beers it recommends include Heineken and Sol.

I detect a heavy corporate hand here, especially in the taste descriptions. Has anyone really drunk Coors Light and thought "Hmm, soft fruit notes (pear drops, banana)"?

Champion Beer of Britain

Elland 1872 Porter has just been announced as this year's CAMRA Champion Beer of Britain at the Great British Beer Festival in London.

I wrote about 1872 Porter when it won the Winter Beer of Britain award at the National Winter Ales Festival in Manchester in January so I won't reiterate what I said then except to say that it's a worthy winner of the top prize.

One of the things you notice if you look at the Champion Beers of Britain over the last twenty years is how regional breweries, let alone national or global brewers, have been edged out by microbreweries. 1872 is the only beer on the list that I've drunk, apart from White Shield in the Bottled Beer category. Many people will say that it's because microbreweries are now producing better beers than Fuller's, Robinson's or Timothy Taylor – I wouldn't – but there's also been a shift in CAMRA towards supporting locally-brewed beers, for example through the  LocAle scheme, rather than nationally-distributed ones.

I also note that, apart from Marble, the North West is unrepresented on the list. At least Holt's are still brewing the world's best lagers in Manchester.

Beer and sausages

BBC2 is showing a season of programmes about Germany at the moment.

Last night, the TV chef Rick Stein travelled around Northern and Western Germany with his son and popped in to see their relatives in Düsseldorf, Hochheim and Frankfurt (I know I play with words but the programme title Rick Stein's German Bite is a pun too far even for me).

Stein announced at the start of the programme that his mission is to get us thinking about German cuisine beyond beer and sausages. The only problem with that is that beer and sausages are the best thing about a trip to Germany, whether Alt and Rotwurst in Düsseldorf, Kölsch and Blutwurst in Cologne or Helles and Bratwurst in Munich. I must say though that Stein showed remarkably good taste in going to Zum Uerige in Düsseldorf which, along with Im Füchschen, is my favourite Altstadt pub. He also had Schweinhaxe, a massive pork knuckle encased in crackling that has defeated me both times I've attempted to eat one.

Spaten and The Sorrow and the Pity

I've just been watching The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls' 1969 documentary about the occupation of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand in World War II.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who first heard about The Sorrow and the Pity through Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I watched the two-part film about Allen the BBC showed last week which prompted me to watch Annie Hall and then The Sorrow and the Pity again. It's a wonderful documentary with Ophuls making French collaborators squirm and talking to two left-wing brothers, ex-Resistance fighters who spent the last months of the war in Buchenwald concentration camp, on their farm in the Auvergne. One of my favourite bits is where they go in the cellar to draw a glass of wine from a barrel and Ophuls asks them "Is it red?" and one of them shoots back "Yes, like me".

The bit that jumped out at me this time though is where he's interviewing a German soldier who was stationed in Clermont-Ferrand during the war. He's in the pub having a beer and draws a map on a beermat with the Spaten logo on it (he also talks about "here in Bavaria"). I could be wrong but I think it might be Braüstüberl Zum Spaten, the brewery tap in Munich where I had half a litre of their fairly bland Helles the first night I was there a couple of years ago.

Why Burton was built on Trent

No town in England is as synonymous with beer as Burton.

The sights and smells of brewing hit you as you walk out of the station. The number of railway lines in what is quite a small town also point to its history as the centre of English brewing. I made it to three pubs and had beers from two breweries.

The Burton Bridge Inn is the brewery tap of the Burton Bridge Brewery whose Bridge Bitter and Porter are both quite malt-accented. I also had a pint of Golden Delicious in one of their tied pubs the Devonshire Arms on the way back to the station.

Just round the corner from the Devonshire Arms is Coopers Tavern, a classic three-room Victorian pub that was once the Bass brewery tap. Now owned by Joules, the beers are served by gravity from casks behind the bar. Being in Burton in sight of the brewery, I had to have a pint of Bass. I know people say it's not as good as it used to be and they're probably right but I still enjoy the slightly sweet aftertaste you get after the bitterness.

Pottering about Stoke

On the way to Burton on Trent the other day, I had an hour or so between trains in Stoke.

I lived in Stoke for three years in the early 90's when I was a student at the poly there and drank in two pubs regularly, The Glebe and The Victoria. They've experienced contrasting fates in the last twenty years.

The Glebe when I drank there was owned by Banks's, but has since been taken over by Joules Brewery who have done a good job sympathetically refitting this nineteenth century pub. Joules first brewed in the late eighteenth century, but was bought and shut down by Bass Charrington in the mid-70's before being revived in 2010. The Pale Ale, based on a recipe from the original brewery, reminded me a bit of Batham's Bitter with a clean malt taste and low hopping rate.

The Victoria was apparently the biggest pub in Britain when Marston's opened it in 1900. When I drank in it, the pub stood opposite the football ground of the same name which was demolished when Stoke City moved into a new all-seater stadium in 1997, probably one of the reasons that The Victoria is now boarded up. Having spent many a happy hour drinking Pedigree there as a student, it is now a very sad sight to see.