We had to do some maintenance at the Wish Tower on Sunday afternoon. It was bitterly cold and there are no facilities of any sort at the Tower.
By the time we finished, even though we planned to go to Wolf, I desperately needed to warm up and get to a loo. So we popped into The Bohemian.
There was Longman Long Blonde and Best on but also what looked like something decent from "Only With Love". I ordered two pints, took them to the table and then dashed for a comfort break.
One pint was a little warm - as if it had sat in the lines a while. The BBB sniffed and tasted and made a bit of a face and said it was probably "on the way out". He tried the second which was, at least colder, but the face remained.
I tried the better of the two but I reckoned it was off. Only With Love generally don't do weird funky flavours in their cask beers. So I took them back.
The chap at the bar came straight over when I said "These are off" but then said "Oh, is that the Best?" (they looked nothing like Best from any brewery).
He also immediately offered "do you want something else" - we took the Longman Blonde which, actually, was fresh as a daisy and much nicer than I'd remembered.
It has put a bit of a cloud over my feelings for the pub which had been looking up over the last year or so. It might just be a bad day, and I'm not saying we'll never go again, but it's hard to shake the feeling that a pub that charges this much for beer (upwards of £6/pint) needs to do better to know what condition its product is in.
So we used the facilities, finished our pints and strolled up to Wolf - god, it was great!
