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...

Pleasant Surprises

So, yesterday, a piece of work we were installing in a local arts venue worked first time we plugged it in (I was really expecting there to be hardware and software fiddling about to be done) and we thought we ought to go and get ourselves something to eat ahead of popping to The Eagle to watch football.

So we found ourselves in the Soup Shack.   This place is from the same stable as the Belgian Bar which we visit quite often and and enjoy its slight quirkiness.  This place is also definitely quirky, too.  Well, mad as a box of frogs, to be honest...but in a good way, I think.

They have a load of beers on keg (about half are Beer: Me beers which are good but not astounding), they also do sandwiches, tapas and, as the name would suggest, soup.

I have to say it's not the easiest place to understand - so it's hard to see, from the counter, what food is available and the staff were a little confused by the beer but all in all it's really friendly and fun.

We had a pint of Holler "Stout" which was more of a black IPA, and a pint of Franklins Pils.  We also had a bowl of soup each - he: muligatawny, me: chicken & chorizo.  Even though it was an incredibly hot day there was something very pleasant about what felt like a light, but proper lunch with beer.

Definitely worth going back to and we almost certainly shall.

After a return to the gallery to check all was well with the installation, we headed to The Eagle for beer (Woodfords and Purity - both fine, but not stunnng) and the 3pm match...then home for good canned beer (Beavertown and Brewdog) for the 7pm match.

Today we're not going to the pub to watch football but there's plenty of beer left in the fridge, we've got a cool lounge and a comfy sofa...what more could a girl want?

Don't be That Guy...

Beer is getting incrementally better in Eastbourne...

...you don't see it every day and there's still a reasonable chance we'll be disappointed when we go somewhere but, more and more, we can get a decent if not astoundingly good pint.

There's a new bottle shop with a couple of keg lines, the "Soup Shack" which has opened as a tap room and there's even a micropub in Seaford (we've not been there yet and, yeah, I know it's not Eastbourne...but it's accessible by bus).

Still, the Best Beer buddy and I find ourselves wanting very specific experiences from a pub (or equivalent).  So yesterday we strolled to The Lamb to have a reasonably quiet pint and to watch a bit of football.

One room was full of loud, revelrous blokes who clearly were monopololising the bar staff.  The other room with a TV had families in it (loud families, at that) - so things weren't ideal.  Nevertheless, we settled down with a pint and after about 40 minutes (before the footie even started) the loud buggers from the back room seemed to leave.

We decided that maybe moving to back room would be more conducive to a quieter pint.

I grabbed two more pints and the Boy brought the other stuff - following a few seconds behind me.  The door into the back room was stiff and there was a huge dog lying on the floor but no one made any attempt either to help me with the door or move the bloody dog out of the way.  I was now a little tetchier than I'd been before.

Once I finally got fully into the room I'm greeted by a middle-aged bloke (remember, I'm middle aged too) who announced loudly "The perfect Woman!".  Suddenly I felt enormously wearied by the encounter.  I looked him in the eye and just said "Dream on..." and found a seat.

His mate found the whole thing hilariously funny but I felt a little ashamed.

A second or so after S appears with our stuff and joins me and the bloke went quiet and turned around.

I recounted to S what had happened and he gave me a grimace of solidarity - and asked "was it really that offensive?"

Then I realised just how overused the word "offensive" is.  No, it really wasn't offensive at all.  It was tiresome.

I'm really lucky, I rarely get hassled by blokes (never have) and if I do it generally bounces off me as a mild irritation.  These days I'm also self-confident enough to deal with it.  But spare a thought for women who see it day in, day out...they get their qualifications and abilities questioned all the time.

So if you think an "appreciative" quip as a woman appears in front of you bearing two (or maybe even three) pints is jolly an friendly gesture, please don't be that guy.  If someone is struggling with a bar door think about opening the door for them, eh?  Be *that* guy instead.

On a less grumpy note I'm reading the superb "Miracle Brew" by Pete Brown it's a work of love and passion (much like really good beer) and I can barely bring myself to put it down.  It's coming out in paperback soon...which will make it a little easier to heft.  Go and buy it.

Harveys Country

We treated ourselves to a proper day off, yesterday.

It's been rather manic with our work over the last couple of weeks.  We run a local community-based organisation that teaches people of all ages creative and digital skills.  Sometimes we lead or support sessions, sometimes we're designing things for sessions or for people who have asked us to, sometimes there are meetings. Oh so many meetings.

Monday saw me working all day on a grant funding bid to see our organisation take the next step in its evolution.  These things always, but always, go right to the wire despite all our efforts to prepare well in advance.

So it was a fairly intense day.  And it rained all day so not much hope of getting out into the fresh air.

Tuesday was forecast to be dry, sunny and cool.  So - we decided to go to nearby Lewes.

We figured that if it turned out too cool to linger in the outdoors, we could at least take refuge.

We walked around 5 miles through a nature reserve and, for me at least, clambering through a barbed-wire fence surrounded by hedge (alway check the tide times, children...remember some rivers are tidal). So by the time we got back to the town we were, naturally, well up for a pint.

If you know beer, you'll know Lewes.  It's the home to one of the best-loved "traditional" breweries in the country:  Harveys.

I'd never drunk Harveys beer in Lewes so I thought it was about time we did.  So we went into the John Harvey.  We were delighted to see Olympia on the bar so we had a couple of pints of that and relaxed on a traditional pub bench seat surrounded by the remnants of Fermentation Tank no17 which had be thoughtfully repurposed as a curved snug enclosure.

Naturally, the beer was as good a pint of Harveys as you could hope for, and the surroundings were unapologetically proper pub-like.

Thence to the Gardeners Arms which is another very down-to-earth place.  I had a pint of Downlands and the boy decided that he should remember that beers come in colours other than pale.  So he had a black IPA - which was lovely, too.

We weren't too moved to have anything else there and we had a Harveys Gift voucher burning a hole in our pockets so we went to the Brewery Shop which was an absolute delight.  We got bottles of Star of Eastbourne and Tom Paine and some cans of Elizabethan Barley Wine which they've called "Tin Lizzie".

We'd heard that the Elephant and Castle had a brewery co-op within it which makes beer for the pub, so we hacked our way up the hill to fnd out what they had.  As it turned out the brewery co-op isn't quite a productive as we might have hoped so we had 360-deg APA and something else that I can't remember.  Both good but not stunning. 

After that it was time to eat so we headed to a Thai restaurant we'd been to before to round off the day.

It was a lovely day out, and the pubs did a good job but I think I was a bit disappointed that nothing there took me by surprise.  Never mind, next excursion day we've got another couple of places in the county that we'd like to do a bit of walking and drinking...you never know...

The Fear of Disappointment

We've been to Bristol, briefly, again.  Mostly it was to see a comedy gig:  the most excellent Mark Steel, but also to prepare the flat for the arrival of family visitors who were going to use it to get away during the school holidays.

We had a meeting on the day we ideally wanted to travel and so there was no way we were going to be able to do the usual arrival in late afternoon (ticket restrictions between Paddington and Bristol Temple Meads being what they are).  So we decided to revert to the "after work" travel pattern, instead.

Best beer buddy drives but generally doesn't enjoy it.  I can't drive.  This means we're both very, very comfortable with train travel since we do it so often and we can usually read the signs when something isn't going quite right.

We arrived at Victoria about 20 minutes late but since we had several hours to kill before we could get a train to Bristol, we weren't overly fussed.  Our vague plan was to mosey over to Paddington, then wander out to get something to eat and drink.  This, despite the beery situation near Paddington not being ideal.  The rationale being that it's just easier to be closer to your leaving destination to manage potential hiccoughs better.

However, when we tried to make our way to Victoria Underground there was a queueing system in place.  We had no idea if this was normal levels of queueing for that time of day or something else.  We didn't wait to find out.

"Where shall we go?"
"Old Faithful"

Old Faithful, being the Cask Pub and Kitchen in Pimlico.  We've been going here from time to time as long as we've known each other.  We know roughly what direction to set off from Victoria although we're never quite sure how to find it...somehow we always do.

When we arrive - via a slightly different route than the last time we went - the place is already heaving.  It's the post-work crowd and we despair of getting a seat.  However, there are a lot of spaces around due to poor space-packing-algorithms and it doesn't take S long to enveigle us into a perfectly good seat.  There were a few interesting pints and a couple of burgers and everything was grand.

Our stroll back to Victoria was via the best route ever and before long we were on our train to Bristol and not long after that, safely tucked up in bed.

Coming back was a curious thing, though.  We arrived on time at Paddington, popped across the city, only to find that all was not well with the trains heading south.  Although everywhere indicated that trains would run roughly to time, we knew better.  We decided that, as we didn't have any particular plans for the rest of the day, we might as well cut our potential stress levels and head off to The Cask.

Now here's the thing.  We'd been drinking in Bristol for a couple of days we know the local favourite beers really well.  In the Cask there was nothing familiar on the bar so we had to just take a punt at a couple of pints but we were both very cautious.  Whereas on the way to Bristol, we were very gung-ho we found ourselves, now, not wanting to be disappointed by our beer choices.

It's not like drinking beer is particularly expensive so paying about £4.50 for a pint that you then don't like very much is hardly the end of the world.  We also know that the first taste of a beer often surprises you and you frequently enjoy it more as you drink more.

So why the hesitancy on our part?

I really don't know.  There's no logical reason for it.  But there's definitely something about having spent time where we know at least 5 or 6 breweries' beers are almost always to our taste.

Maybe we're not that far removed from the blokes in our local pub in Eastbourne who only ever drink Harvey's best, or Wadworth's 6X. They know what they like...

Suffrage

OK - not really about beer...but I promise beer will come into it.

It seems appropriate for a woman who doesn't, in all honesty, quite fit the traditional (and increasingly outdated) model of "A. Real. Woman." to say something about what it is to be a woman 100 years after some women (my grandmother wouldn't have been eligible at the time) got the vote.

Actually, I have to say I've been enormously fortunate in my *ahem* fifty-something years.

My father frequently did both laundry and cooking in our household as his shift patterns allowed more lattitude than my mum's frequently unsociable hours.  He never complained.

Having requested a haridryer for Christmas, and it arriving without a plug attached (that's right, children, we had to put our own plugs on things, and even when the appliance failed you never threw good plugs away) my dad said "it's about time you learned to put plugs on things" and proceeded to teach me.  I was nine.

When hands were needed around the house for whatever task - wall papering, painting, woodwork, fixing the washing machine, making pies or stew - it didn't matter what gender you were, you helped.

These were the first steps for feeling an equal member of society - even though our society (five in our immediate family) was a pretty small sample.  Actually, it extended wider since my Aunt's household (where I also spent a significant portion of my time) had no time for "that's a man's/woman's job".

Work, when I started it, was less equal.  But having been given a good grounding in both sticking up for myself and having no truck with "that's a man's job" I didn't take all that much notice of the apparent barriers.

My first long-term partner - the man that was so desperate to introduce me to the delights of beer (there, you knew it was coming) was from a family like mine.  Men and women alike just getting on and doing what's needed.  As a result, and in spite of an education in a seminary of all places, he loved that learned to love beer, he loved that I enjoyed a spot of DIY, in fact my love of computers was what got us together in the first place.  I didn't need to assert my equality with him - he never doubted it.

And now, my Best Beer Buddy - again delighted, not threatened, at my interest in beer, sport (sometimes), computing, electronics and so many other things not traditionally aligned with my gender.  Never once makes me think he sees me as anything less than a equal partner.  Yes, we do different things around the house; in work and in household projects but that's because the best work comes when you play to your strengths.

So I'd like to give a shout out, on this day of all days, not only for the women who started the fight for equality but for the men who have never doubted that equality was a right, proper and thoroughly desireable thing to have.

Oh, and DRINK MORE BEER!