In a League of their own

The Rugby League World Cup kicks off in Australia today, although you'd never know it from the lack of interest shown in the event by the mainstream media. The BBC has come under fire after it didn't even bother to bid for the rights to broadcast the matches live, which have now ended up with Irish subscription channel Premier Sports (political pressure from the minister responsible for media and sport, Lisa Nandy, who is also the MP for Wigan, led to a last minute deal whereby the BBC will put highlights on their iPlayer, where no one who isn't already a fan of the game will see them).

The BBC probably thinks that rugby league is a Northern sport that no one outside the M62 corridor is really interested in, but even if that's true it's no reason not to broadcast matches. With the possible exception of football, all sports are minority interests, including ones that the BBC spends a lot of time and money covering like rugby union and tennis. You can't help thinking that there is some class bias at work here, with BBC executives allocating resources to sports that they themselves follow.

Between 1999 and 2023, the BBC broadcast a weekly, hour long highlights show of Super League matches. That was then replaced by a three year deal to broadcast fifteen matches a season live, a contract which has now expired and is apparently not going to be renewed (as with the World Cup, a highlights package will be put on the iPlayer instead). That leaves them with live coverage of the Challenge Cup and England autumn international Test matches which are played outside World Cup years. If they are cut too, you might well see a sudden drop in TV licence renewals across a swathe of Northern England.

Gone for a Burton

Carlsberg announced yesterday that it will shut Marston's Brewery in Burton on Trent, where it produces cask beers including the flagship bitter Pedigree and Draught Bass, which it contract brews for AB InBev, next summer. Where those beers will now end up being brewed is anyone's guess.

I drank quite a bit of Pedigree, and the occasional pint of Draught Bass, when I was a student in Stoke on Trent in the early nineties, the former mostly in the Victoria pub, opposite Stoke City's ground of the same name, after meetings in the Labour Party offices round the corner. In the 2010s, I regularly drank Draught Bass at the Unicorn in Manchester city centre, the pub where the Honourable Order of Bass Drinkers was founded in the late sixties, when Manchester Jazz Society met there, and in 2013 went to Burton on Trent where the Coopers Tavern serves it straight from the cask. 

AB InBev belatedly started an advertising drive last year to promote Draught Bass, which has since seen a modest uptick in sales, including amongst young people, paralleling the much wider popularity of Draught Guinness with that age group. Let's hope that they can find another brewery with the capacity to produce enough of it to meet the continuing and deserved demand for this iconic beer.

Spinning mildly in Manchester

I went to the Spinners Rest in Ancoats for the first time last night as Joseph Holt's Brewery chose it as the pub where their award for the best mild of this year's Mild Magic trail organised by my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, would be presented.

An early nineteenth century inn which later became a keg only Irish pub called the Shamrock, and was once allegedly frequented by members of the Quality Street Gang, Holt's bought it in 2019 and reopened it this summer after an extensive refurbishment, with a new name connected to the streets of former textile mills in the Ancoats area just north of Manchester city centre. 

It's pretty much what you'd expect from a Holt's refurbishment, with lots of dark wooden panelling, Victorian style lamps and leaded glass, and they've clearly spent a lot of money on the place, something reflected in the slightly higher than normal prices which you often find in their improved pubs compared to the more basic community locals they're known for throughout Manchester and Salford.

There were four cask beers on the bar, bitter, mild, Two Hoots golden ale and a seasonal IPA. I tried the first two and found both of them to be in good form.

There's also a small beer garden at the side of the pub, where last night lots of young people were sitting outside in, as they were at trestle tables in the now pedestrianised apart from a bike lane Stevenson Square which I walked through en route to Ancoats from Piccadilly station, giving the city centre something of a continental air.

RIP Humphrey Smith

I raised a glass of Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale last night to the memory of Humphrey Smith, the owner of the brewery in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, who has died at the age of 81.

He was a complex and controversial figure, as alluded to in this obituary of him.

I like the brewery's beers, in cask, bottle and keg, and their pubs (the ones that are still open that is). I'm not sure I would have liked the man himself though had I ever met him, and  I certainly didn't like the way he treated his pub managers.

Let's hope that those who inherit his empire run it in a less feudal manner, and without some of his idiosyncratic rules, while retaining the traditional feel of the pubs and quality and reasonable prices of the beers.

These are a few of my favourite things

This weekend s Guardian had a list of the best hundred novels, compiled from top tens submitted by writers and critics (I've read thirty eight of them).

I thought I'd compile my own top ten. It was much harder than I expected, and I could easily have added another ten novels to the list. Those that failed to make this most difficult of cuts will have to be summarised by the name of their authors, in no particular order: Albert Camus, George Eliot, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, George Orwell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Graham Greene.

So anyway, here's my top ten.

1. Günter Grass, The Tin Drum 

2. Günter Grass, Dog Years 

3. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children 

4. Franz Kafka, The Castle 

5. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Pledge 

6. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 

7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

8. Patrick Hamilton, The Midnight Bell

9. Hermann Hesse, The Prodigy 

10. Saul Bellow, Herzog

I'm aware that the list is heavily slanted towards twentieth century European literature, and at the top end especially towards magical realism.

Snookered by the black

I watched the fourteenth frame of the World Snooker Championship semi final between Northern Irish player Mark Allen and Chinese youngster Wu Yize yesterday teatime.

The black ball ended up hanging over the bottom right corner pocket with eight reds clustered around it. Normally the players would agree to a rerack and start the frame again, but with a thirty point lead on the scoreboard Allen declined to do so, and the referee was apparently unable to force him to, so for almost an hour the players clipped the reds or played off touching balls, sending the cue ball back to the baulk end of the table without potting anything. Eventually Allen knocked in the black with a deliberate foul shot and Wu went on to win the frame which lasted an hour and forty minutes, a record since the World Championship moved to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield in 1977. 

It reminded me of the bit in the Patrick Hamilton novel The Plains of Cement where a young boy drives the barmaid in a London pub who's looking after him to distraction by showing her how to play endless cannons in billiards.

There have unsurprisingly been calls for the rules to be changed so that such a frame can never happen again, but the audience who witnessed it live seemed to enjoy the spectacle, as did I watching it on TV, and it's not the only sport where things can technically go on indefinitely: baseball and tennis don't have a clock, and penalty shootouts in football are unlimited too. If it happened all the time it might become a problem, but every few years just adds to the variety of the game.

An Alt Alternative

Two of the beer bloggers I read regularly, Ron Pattinson and Martin Taylor, have both been to the Rhineland recently and I've been enjoying their reports from some of my favourite Düsseldorf and Cologne pubs.

That led me to this piece which fellow beer bloggers Boak and Bailey wrote about Altbier, the beer served in Düsseldorf brewpubs, back in 2008, the year before I first went there, in which they concluded: "To recreate the Alt effect at home: Get a nice brown bitter that you like, chill it for a couple of hours, and pour it carelessly into a 250ml tumbler so that it eventually settles down to half beer, half head. We tried it — it works. A good alt is very like a cold, super bitter English ale. In our humble opinion, this better recreates the alt experience than buying a tired bottle of boring Diebels from your local specialist beer emporium."

I bought a few bottles of Sam Smith's Nut Brown Ale the other day so tried it with one of them, and it definitely worked: I almost felt like I was drinking a glass of beer in a Düsseldorf brewpub, albeit one at the maltier end of the Altbier spectrum (think Schumacher or Schlüssel rather than Uerige or Füchschen).

Altbier is usually, and rightly, compared to a British style pale ale, being hoppy, copper coloured and top fermented, but in Düsseldorf they often describe it to English speaking visitors as a dark beer (which is it compared to Pils, the standard beer in northern Germany). The maltier and darker examples also line up in taste and colour with a brown ale.