Regionalisation

We've just come back from Cornwall.

Land of Betty Stoggs, of Doom Bar and Tribute.

I used to love all three of these beers, I probably wouldn't choose any of them now if there was almost anything else to try.

Thankfully, we managed to avoid all of these during our week in the far South West and yet, the beer experience was decent, rather than good.

I really wanted to love the Crown Brewery beers and I did like them a lot, ...but love didn't come.  We revisted one of the Penzance Brewery beers - Potion No9 and it was still impossible to not enjoy it, and yet  I wouldn't have wanted to drink more than a couple of pints of it.

There were highlights, though...

The Bath Inn on the Newlyn/Penzance borders was a delightful find, along with Exeter Brewery Avocet beer.

I loved Mousehole and it's brilliant harbour - the Old Coastguard Hotel did some nice Padstow Beers and becoming reacquainted with St Austell HSD and Proper Job in the Ship Inn was grand.

So with all this goodness...why wasn't it quite right?

None of the pubs felt like the place we wanted to just huddle in a corner, watch the world and and have the choice of a few beers we wanted to try next.  But all the places that had good beer, really only had one or maybe two we wanted to try and most of them didn't really bear a third pint.

All of the local beers we drank (and it was lovely having a choice of local brews) had common features - in much the way many Sussex beers have.  That's both and good bad, since if you want something a little different...there's nothng to choose from.

Still, we had a good, relaxing time and we walked a good few miles every day. That's a good thing, right?

And we went back via Bristol and made the most of the Barleymow...naturally...

On the Booking of Tables in Pubs

ach!  Bain of my life (well, OK, that's a little over-dramatic and it's very much a first-world problem)...is good pubs allowing all their tables to be booked of an evening.

We arrived in Bristol after a flawless train journey and, coincidentally, find out that a local bunch of internet-introduced friends were planning a pub meet.  We suggested the Barleymow (obviously) and everyone was excited to fall in line.

We arrived there about 4.45 to find that all but one small table in the pub had been booked.  One booking of about 20 people and another for 15.  On a Thursday night.

I have to say we were really grumpy at the barman on duty (I'm sorry about that, I really am...it's really not your fault that your pub allows booking out of the place).  He did what he could to suggest an alternative (ie sitting outside) but we decided to pass after an inital pint (which was lovely).

So we somewhere else instead (the Old Market Assembly) which has more space but they only really had one beer on cask and had only 3 pizza bases available to people who hadn't booked.

The pizza was OK (but not as good as previous visits) and the lack of beer variety was very sad but we had a fun evening with pals we haven't seen for ages.

Now - I can't tell pub how to maximise their business model but I think I'd like to suggest that you're careful about how you run your space but if you're a pub, perhaps consider limiting the number of tables you allow to be booked so that "ordinary" drop-by punters can fill the rest of your evening eating and drinking.

The best example I saw of this was a pub/cafe/bistro in Kingsand.  There were about 5 tables just inside the door that they never allowed to be booked and as a result you could swing by and have a pint and a meal and slot into their less busy times without feeling the impending deadline of a table hand-over.

Rant over.  this afternoon we'll be off to the Moor Brewery tap.  It'll probably get quite busy but there won't be any pre-booked tables...

Research suggests...

...how often do we see/hear headlines relating the latest research on alcohol consumption and it give us a clear picture of anything?

I would contend, almost never.

The latest government campaign is suggesting that middle-aged drinkers (ie: me) have more alcohol-free days each week. 

First off, I'd like to say right here, right now that I don't think this is a lie, or is bad advice.  But I do question where it comes from and what it really means.

Is it that

a)  Really, people just need to drink less and since we can't stop them once they start of an evening, it's just better they spend some evenings not drinking at all

or

b)  Days when you don't drink certain physiological things happen in your organs that are genuinely beneficial/protective for the days you do drink.

the headline doesn't say, of course, because if it did we'd just find ways to drink as much in different ways.

Also, we see a lot of headlines about how many hospital admissions are caused or contributed to by alcohol consumption. What they don't break this down into is those caused by:

1  Saturday night punch-ups amongst annoying pissed-up young men
2  Friday night acute intoxication in non-regular drinkers
3  Domestic violence meted out by a drunk spouse
4  Road traffic accidents involving intoxicated young or older drinkers
5  Chronic conditions worsened by regular drinking
6  Primary disease caused by alcohol
7  Admissions caused by alcohol addiction
8  Other hospital admissions not really related in any way to alcohol but the person had obviously been drinking.

Then there's the "drinking more than...increases your risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and liver diease by x%..."
...and this is the one that probably pisses me off the most.

Why?  Because these are from population-level studies (or meta studies...that is: secondary studies on several different sets of data from different studies) and they tell you absolutely nothing about your risk because those increases in risk are in relative risks.  If I have a 1 in 1000 chance of getting primary liver disease and my risk has increased by 5% by drinking then it's still a relatively small chance compared to other things that will kill me.

As a government I guess it's reasonable enough to act on population level information because you are concerned with the population as a whole.  But - and this is a big but...

We know that one of the biggest contributors to chronic ill health is poverty.  If we put serious money behind that then perhaps hospital admissions not only related to alcohol but other things would reduce too.

Lazy, sloppy "health" messages from a government who aren't serious about really tackling root causes isn't going to make me change my behaviour.  I'm not condoning my drinkng but I believe it conveys some positives to my lifestyle too and it's foolish to totally ignore them.

Meanwhile, I  will continue to have the odd alcohol-free day even though I notice no particular benefit from it since it's a balance kind of a thing - much like eating my greens, no?

On Being Mansplained to...

...on the subject of murky beer.

So I've remarked before that Eastbourne is a bit behind the beer times in terms of modern beer styles.

Even at beer festivals, they have a bit of tendency to go with beer styles they know and love (lots of emphasis on trad bitters and nice, but unremarkable golden beers).

This week our local's beer festival was being set up and a new beer was set up and ready to go.  I ordered a pint of it for the boy.  It was described as a "bitter" by a local good, but not very adventurous brewery.

When it came out it was about the same colour as Hophead but was a tiny bit hazy.  I looked quizzically at it and said "you're sure that's it?" - what I meant was that I expected it to be browner.  She looked and seemed concerned.  "Actually, I'm not sure it's ready yet - it's a bit hazy.

I smiled and said, "I'm used to cloudy beer...it might just be unfined"

Then the bloke next to me chirped up "Oh, it looks OK I think.  It's a bit murky but perhaps that's just condensation on the glass and then proceeded to rub his finger down the glass (WTF?).  Girl behnd the bar still looked worried.  So I said "it'll just be easier for me to try it..." and did.  It was fine.

It was probably a beer designed to drop clear but it didn't seem any the worse for its haze.

"Ah yes", the bloke said "I told you it was OK".

Now, here's the thing.  I get a bit annoyed when blokes tell me that they think they know more about beer than I do.  But it's expontetially worse when the know-all in question had just bought a pint of Fosters for his mate and a pint of nitro-Guinness for himself.  In a pub with 5 cask beers on.

I didn't say anything else to him.  I couldn't.

Still, on Friday when the festival proper started I particularly enjoyed the pint of (unfined) Holler which was as murky as a perfect pint from Tapstone.  Maybe Eastbourne's starting to catch up.

Nice place, this...

One of our neighbouring towns held a four-pub tap-takeover this week.

I was supposed to be attending a meeting in the town so we planned to slaughter multiple ornithoids...however, events overtook and the meeting was moved.  So we went to Lewes, anyway.

Four pubs were in the tap-takeover:  The Patch, Elephant and Castle, Brewers Arms and the Black Horse.

We don't drink in Lewes often, but we're reasonably familiar with it and its pubs.  That said, we started with The Patch which is a cafe/micropub which we didn't know at all.

They had Tiny Rebel and Siren beers on keg lines.  We grabbed one each and sat in the closest thing we could manage to be a corner and enjoyed them.  Best Beer buddy suggested moving on to the Elephant and Castle after the first one.  On the walk around he confessed he didn't really feel comfortable in The Patch. It's true that, as a longish, thin space it felt like we were in a corridor.

So, we hoofed it around to the Elephant and Castle; a place we've been to a few times - none of which were wholly satisfactory (though I couldn't tell you why).
They had Great Heck brews on.

We grabbed a couple of pints and sat (in a corner).

The beer was good (if not as cool as I'd like) but, again we only stayed for one pint and moved on.

We landed in the Brewers' arms which had Loch Lomond beers (the brewery I least wanted to try).  It was busy in the notionally posher front bar.  I went to the bar to get a couple of pints and the boy headed to the back room to find a seat.

A bloke at the bar made a well-meaning (but annoying) "ladies first" comment at the bar which had me sighing an potentially writing this pub off as "not my sort of place"...but I carried our beers to the public/locals/sport bar and sat down.

We both relaxed a bit more.

We had a second pint and headed out for food and skipped the Black Horse.

I'm not sure I'll ever really be able to predict what pubs and bars we'll find comfortable and those we won't but I guess we just keep trying!

As a footnote - in the italian chain we ate in I ordered beer, he ordered a glass of wine.  The waiter (who had taken the order) returned and tried to give me the wine.  Plus ca change...

Wetherspoons: Beer Weathervane?

We mused, as we walked to Hailsham on the Cuckoo Trail, whether there would be decent beer to be had when we got there.

There was an indication that one place (which we'd never previously heard of) that appeared to be promising in terms of interesting beer - so that's where we headed when we arrived.

There was one sorry pump of Doom Bar in evidence so we performed our best disappointed about-face and went to the place that is consistently in the GBG:  a Wetherspoons.

As we went through the door, I have to admit my heart sank a little since it was the usual range of clientele and cheap food cooking smells.

The beers on the front bar were not familiar and yet I kinda knew that they wouldn't be exciting.  We saw more pumps around the other side so we crept around with hope in our hearts to be met by ... Abbot Ale and Ruddles (there may have been a token Doom Bar as well for full effect).

So I went with the more interesting of the other beers (Sadlers, something or other) and the boy stuck to cider (which was, thankfully, proper bag in a box sort of a thing).  The Sadlers was a good rendition of a premium bitter and in very good nick, at a good temperature.  But it wasn't really what I wanted, was it?

As we sat in the pleasant garden we both recounted tales of the days we (separately) enjoyed Wetherspoons for its ability to showcase beers we hadn't heard of and supply interesting styles.

We wondered whether this is, in fact, that the beer/brewery scene in the UK has improved so much and excites so often that it's no longer possible for the chain to acquire really interesting beers from young breweries and sell them at the ridiculously low prices that is their USP.

I hope so.

And far from deingrating them as an organisation (political leanings of the owner aside) - they do a thing and they do it to a specific standard.  It's not my bag of spanners but I get to choose whether I use their services and so does everyone else.

Always Looking

It's really hard to impress me with beer these days and it's increasingly difficult for me to tolerate pubs without good beer.

As a birthday trip for the Best Beer Buddy we got on a bus to Seaford.  Searingly hot, though it was, we shunned the indoors and grabbed a bus.

Our main destination was a micropub at the tiny station buffet.  It's had a lovely makeover and we'd been desperate to try it for a while but never quite find the time.  So we arrived around 4pm and were greeted with a lovely, interesting list of potentials to try.

We each picked a cask beer and took a seat.  Sadly, the beer was a little bit warm and, although in good condition, that took the edge off a bit.  Then they announced the place was closing at 5pm and reopening at 6pm.  It kinda disrupted the mood but we left graciously and promised to return.

We then wandered off to find "The Old Boot" which was OK ish and with more interesting beer than we had anticipated but nothing to keep us there for more than one.  So we sloped around the corner to the Wellington Hotel which we'd really like to love but I don't think they sell quite enough beer during the week so often the beer that's there is a little bit sub-par.  The beer was fine but, again, not really as cold as I'd like.

It being mealtime we found a Chinese restaurant around the corner which was perfect but by the time we'd finished there we weren't really up for more beer.

Ultimately we left Seaford, once again, feeling like it could be so much nicer than it is in reality.

That said, we'll probably try the micropub again...but when it's a bit cooler.

Since then, we've been back to the Eagle a couple of times with the result that we've been very pleased with the quality and choice of beer.  Fingers crossed they keep it up.

We're off to Bristol before too long - no doubt we'll remind ourselves of the range and variety of beers available there and hoping that the trend continues down here...