Two in a row

 Bank Holiday Monday - but still a Monday, right?

In this house (flat) that means Barley Mow.

We wondered whether it would be open because of a hectic weekend.  We needn't have worried.

We popped round around 4.15pm

The chap behind the bar looked...broken...

 "busy weekend?..."

He nodded wearily, but with a warm smile.

"We broke all our records"

We chatted a bit about it and he chuckled when I said we'd been avoiding the whole thing and had been worried about the rain for the success of the event.  It seems a lot of people took refuge in the BM.  

Still the pictures I've seen from a few of the venues look like it was probably chalked up as a success across the board.  I'm genuinely delighted.  

We settled down with our beers - I had Notorious, he had a 3.8% pale by Ashley Down - both were great.

The pub was perfectly peopled - folk were at "our" table but that didn't dent our spirits one bit.

Second beer was a 5% Red Willow pale, slightly hazy cask.  Cracking! He had a second one of those whilst I jumped ship to a 5% keg beer (brewery not remembered) - however, he liked mine more than I did so we swapped after a couple of mouthfuls (greater love hath no man, an' that).

We'd necked our beers quite fast, despite playing Regicide to slow us down,  so there was scope for a 4th - so we had halves of a Weekend Project 6% keg beer (again, name forgotten but) it, too, was great!

Great selection of beer and the busy weekend clearly meant a thorough turnaround of beers from the day we arrived so it was really nice to have a completely different selection to choose from.

Another reason we both like BBF venues is their glass selection.  They have standard 1pt conic glasses, but their 2/3rds, halves and thirds are the same style and there's something incredibly satisfying about that when one of you is drinking a pint and the other 2/3rds (or other variations).  Their enthusiasm to serve cask in all the different volumes make me order the amount I actually want according to strength and appetite - I think that may be an underrated thing (or, we may just be odd...).

So, that's two consecutive days in a pub with everything (even the things they can't control) perfect.  That's a hard act to follow...