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.

Runaway to the Riverbank

Before a CAMRA pub crawl around central Stockport last night, I popped into the town's newest brewery, Runaway, which relocated there a few months back from Dantzic Street on the edge of Manchester's Northern Quarter and opened their bar to the public a week ago (I'm not sure where the name comes from: maybe it's a tribute to Del Shannon's 1961 hit whose line "I'm a-walkin' in the rain" is equally applicable to Manchester and Stockport).

Their new place is pretty much what you'd expect from a modern brewery taproom in a converted industrial building: stainless steel vessels, wooden tables in a bright, airy space with lots of natural light from the large windows and a mostly keg lineup on the bar along with a couple of cask lines. There's a bottle shop you can stock up at and plenty of outside seating in the courtyard beer garden, where the young, hipsterish crowd was enjoying pizzas from a wood fired oven. On the banks of the Mersey, it's just upstream from the town's famous railway viaduct, next to the the new bridge over the river which I hadn't been across before, and from where you get a panoramic view of the town centre.

Stockport might not be the new Berlin, but with more residential and retail development on the way, and transport improvements that will hopefully include the Metrolink tram system reaching it at some point, that side of the town is certainly being transformed rapidly, and will soon be unrecognisable from the scene once viewed and described disparagingly by a German communist travelling above it across the railway viaduct.

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.

 

Golden Pints 2022

Having read Boak and Bailey's, I was inspired to put together my own list of favourite beery things from 2022. I like the subtitle of their post, "notes on an almost normal year": despite the final Covid restrictions being lifted at the end of January, it's been another tough year for the beer industry as soaring energy prices and other rising costs have seen pubs and breweries shut and drinkers' pockets hit.

Looking back at the first time I did this in 2013, and the last in 2017, I saw how little some of my answers have changed in the last decade. I'm not sure if that indicates a reassuring adherence to tradition, or a worrying failure to explore new things...

Pub 

I've only been to half a dozen pubs this year, mostly my local – either side of yet another refurbishment by Holt's in November – and a few other food-led places within walking distance, including on a CAMRA crawl in July which also saw my first visit to a newish micropub, as well as a couple of multi-cask specialist free houses in Stockport, the Magnet, where I spent a memorable afternoon in September, and the one I'm going to give the prize to, Ye Olde Vic in Edgeley, whose twenty-one years in the Good Beer Guide we celebrated in August.

Draught beer 

Holt's Bitter: despite progressively wrecking my local in the last twenty years, the north Manchester brewery still produces a top cask pint.

Bottled beer 

Fuller's 1845 is still my favourite British bottled beer. I've also enjoyed a few bottles of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and Schlenkerla Rauchmärzen.

Festival

I only went to one, Stockport in June, the last at Edgeley Park, at least for now, before the move to the Masonic Hall in 2023.

Blog 

I've read two pretty much every day, Ron Pattinson's Shut Up About Barclay Perkins and Retired Martin, whose posts from the Rhineland I particularly enjoyed, as well as BRAPA, Boak and Bailey, Paul Bailey, Pub Curmudgeon, Tandleman and Zythophile as they published on theirs. Cooking Lager deserves a special mention for this post about the pubs of Reddish.

London Calling?

Yet another review into the future of rugby league, this time by consultants IMG, has concluded that what the sport really needs is a top flight London team, pointing to the healthy attendance at Arsenal's stadium for England's World Cup semi-final against Samoa last month, in contrast to a lower turnout for their opening match of the competition in Newcastle.

The idea of a London club in the top flight of rugby league is not a new one: Wigan Highfield relocated to the White City stadium in the early thirties and Fulham FC established a side to play at their Craven Cottage ground in the early eighties, while semi-professional teams London Broncos and Skolars still exist lower down the league structure, the former having played in the Super League before.

There has always been a tension in rugby league between concentrating resources on the game's Northern heartlands and attempting to extend its appeal beyond them, which in the twentieth century was reflected in a long debate amongst its governing bodies as to whether the Challenge Cup Final should be played at Wembley, and while some expansion projects have flourished, notably Australasia and France, others have spectacularly foundered, including Paris, Newcastle, Wales and Toronto, although the last was really scuppered by the travel restrictions brought in at the start of the Covid pandemic rather than a lack of public interest.

The game's authorities have two groups of supporters in mind for a London team: rugby league fans from the North who now live there, and potential new converts from rugby union, who they think can be won over by the sport's innate strengths (tough tackling, speedy passing and running with the ball, and an emphasis on try scoring rather than penalties, scrums and kicking into touch), as well as the kind of casual spectator who turned up at Arsenal's stadium a few weeks ago, and has largely filled the seats for the NFL International Series since it was first played in the capital in 2007, and which has also led to calls for a team in North America's biggest sports competition to be (re)located here.

Ultimately what a London based club really needs to take off though is a production line running through schools, junior amateur sides and its own academy to provide a stream of talented young players, rather than having to rely on expensive imports from the North and Australasia.