Drinking beer in the name of Jesus H. Amen.

Tonight is the first session of this year’s Preston Beer Festival, held at St Walburge’s church. It is not a CAMRA festival, instead being in aid of the restoration of the building which the website describes as “Preston’s architectural gem”. I envisage a dilapidated old ruin of a church, left to succumb to the elements while the Church of England sits merrily on its amassed fortunes.

I’m going over tomorrow night with my fair lady and must admit this will be my first time at this festival, which is a poor record considering it’s in its 17th year and I lived in Preston for two of them. So far this year I’ve been to fairly big festivals – the Winter fest in Manchester, Fleetwood and so on – so this should be a nice change of pace. There is something pleasant about being able to drink good beer in a quiet, yet not solitary environment; I think it’s a happy middle ground between sitting at home drinking bottles on your own and cramming yourself into a Wetherspoons on a Friday night. Clitheroe’s festival in May should be very much the same if last year is anything to go by.

I can never decide if I prefer the small or large festivals, but tomorrow evening should help me decide.

Beer festival · Beers · Clitheroe · Preston · St Walburge's Church

Being from a staunchly working-class background, my only memories of Marks & Spencer as a child was of it being the place that people with white hair who wore pastel coloured slacks went to pay more money for their shopping than could be explained. As I grew up a little I began to see that they get away with it by selling the image – if you “shop at Marks”, it means something in certain circles. Just like wearing Nike means something to other people.

Nowadays I see Marks & Spencer as a shop I simply have no reason to go near. The food costs more for no reason I can see and the clothes are aimed at a demographic whose only link I ever want to have with is being from the same planet. What I didn’t expect was their beer range. Is this a new thing? By chance I ended up in the beer section – it’s not an aisle by any means – and spotted the “4 for 3″ deal that works out about a quid more than Morrisons “4 for £5.50″ deal.

The full range of Marks & Spencer's middle of the road beers. Note: drinking all of these will turn you into a Dire Straits fan.

And to the beers. This has been a troublesome write-up as I’m doing it live over the night, and I’m looking after a one year-old and a dog which has just pissed and shat diarrhea on the floor in front of me. So I must look back on the Cornish IPA in hindsight, as part of a golden age of this night which didn’t involve screaming children and canines with loose bowels. At 5% you’d expect some kind of taste but this ranks among the most flavourless beers I’ve ever come across. No smell, no real taste, nothing standing out at all. It’s bland personified, utterly inoffensive yet totally unmemorable like a drunken conversation at a party with your girlfriend’s friends of friends who you can’t even remember her connection with.

Next, Suffolk Bitter. What is this concoction? Another tasteless one, is what. It’s perfectly drinkable in the way that you buy a carton of Ribena and drink it without expecting it to taste like anything other than Ribena. But it being within expected parameters doesn’t make it good; it just tastes exactly like the last Ribena you bought, just like this beer tastes exactly like the last one.

And on to the Sussex Golden Ale. A near carbon copy of the previous two, tasting just like the most generic bitter you could ever hope to imagine. If you had to give an alien a beer to summarise the entire spectrum of beers, this would be the one to use – slightly malty, slightly hoppy, slightly impatient to finish the damn thing so you can move on to something different. My last great hope for a good finish was Staffordshire IPA, and generally being a big fan of anything IPA I was optimstic. Oh no, cruel night, you wouldn’t even let me off at the end. This is a sharp, strange beer with a feel that’s difficult to swallow and was flat in the glass half way down. A sure sign for me is that if I go more than a minute without instinctively thinking of picking the glass up, there’s something amiss. In this case a lot was amiss as I totally lost interest in drinking the rest and it dragged on for over an hour. Roger Protz said “the beer is straw coloured with sulphur on the nose, a digestive biscuit maltiness and tangy hop resins”… and “very refreshing”. I must have been drinking a different beer because mine made my mouth taste like mud.

In summary, I thought these four Marks & Spencer beers are shit. They neatly fit into the image of the rest of the place – middle of the road and awfully polite. We couldn’t have a beer that didn’t look like beer, now, could we Marjorie! What they appear to have collected is a group of beers which virtually all of their customers will find acceptable, and will think that the regionalised names on the label mean they are “trying real ale”. I find this idea as dangerous to the real ale ethos of drinking mad beers because you never know what the next one will be like, as the attempts to make ale brands big and national eg. Spitfire and Old Speckled Hen. They are taking the essence of real ale and sanitising it for the masses, which I find very wrong.

If you ever find yourself in the beer section in a Marks & Spencer, just keep on walking. You’re not missing any beers you won’t have tasted a million times already.

Beers · Cornish IPA · Marks & Spencer · Morrisons · Old Speckled Hen · Spitfire · Staffordshire IPA · Suffolk Bitter · Sussex Golden Ale

It is a Thursday, the day of the week that hints at coming freedoms yet pulls back your lofty dreams with another day’s work. Thursdays are not great days even if you have a pub quiz to look forward to (and we all know Thursdays and Tuesdays have forever been locked in an eternal battle for the title of Best Pub Quiz Night Of The Week) so it is usually a day my mind wanders to a pint at dinner.

The first hint of spring shines through our beers.

Today we tried a couple of beers, the names of which elude me as the clips were quite grotesque and the lettering utterly illegible. Picture light brown writing on a hay yellow background, in 6pt text, and you get the idea. One of them may have been a George Wright Blonde Moment but I wouldn’t like to be quoted on that. It was pleasant, light, quaffable, or as my esteemed co-drinkee says:

The first pint has a slightly spicy odour and I was richly rewarded with a very hoppy pint almost peppery to the pallet; quite surprising at first but it developed into comforting flavour. The colour was light and its head fluffy and it was a very easy drinkable beer. 4/5 “Good quaffing beer”

That’s a resounding thumbs up for quaffability, then. Note to self: “quaffability” to be considered for inclusion on list of favourite beer phrases.

The other, nameless, one in this photo was a grapefruit beer – one of those pale ales that doesn’t taste anything like beer at all and could pass as a can of weird fruit juice from an Asian grocers. His second one is described as:

The second pint was much darker than its predecessor; at first glance it was almost opaque ; but as the glass titled towards the sunshine it became obvious the ale was a rich dark brown in colour. A creamy head covered a rich almost chocolatey flavour rich with treacle and smoky overtones. Less drinkable than the first but an experience nevertheless 3/5

“An experience” eh? I always like a good beer experience. Even the bad ones aren’t far off being good, because they give you a story to tell. Beer, the gift that keeps on giving.

Overall, it was a good cheeky hour in the first hints of spring sun, filtering through the Postal Order windows as a reminder that summer is just round the corner.

Beers · Blonde Moment · dinnertime drinking · George Wright brewery · Postal Order

Mondays to me are typically a halfway house between feeling slightly jaded after the weekend’s beer exploits, crossed with not really being too bad because I tone things down on Sundays. It’s like that first day feeling vaguely human again after having an irritating cold for a week. This being the way it is, it’s not often I fancy a dinnertime pint on a Monday.

Having had a quiet weekend, though, I got the taste on the Monday just gone and tried a bottle of Theakston XB with my dinner. It wasn’t cheap; £3.15 for the bottle, and this is from a council-owned cafe (Blakeys if you happen to know Blackburn). That’s more than double the price in the shops round here and leaves a bitter taste in your mouth before you even taste the beer; it wasn’t even pulled from a cask, for Christ’s sake.

I went for XB because of the label, to be honest. I don’t like hoppy beers with food and judging by the label I pictured this being a big bastard of a beer with really strong flavours to live up to the food. Medium malty beers don’t work for me either – I always find the only ones that work are dark beers that punch above their weight. Picture what I had on Monday, a Lancashire cheese sandwich, with a flowery beer – does that seem to match up for you? Perhaps it does, taste being individual of course, but for me cheese works best with something sharp and biting, full of its own flavours rather than just a compliment to food.

XB does, I must say, work well in these situations. The flavour is intense and lingers even while eating. It lasts just around the right time to match an easy-paced dinner break, so a fifth or so will be left for you to finish off when the food’s out of the way. I wouldn’t call it a great beer if I was out drinking – its strength and potency make it a slow one to get down and it’s definitely more suited to a casual dinner hour. However, on the occassional evenings where I knock together a few cheeses, breads and fruits and fancy a couple of beers to go with it, I’d definitely give XB another go.

Additional note: this would be a very efficient beer for getting banjoed in a short space of time.

Beers · Blackburn · Blakeys · Theakston · XB

According to horse racing people, going to The Derby doesn’t feel like going to The Derby anymore. Not since they moved to a Saturday from it’s previous long-standing slot on the first Wednesday in June. In it’s original place in the calendar, people had to take the day off work to go to Epsom for the race- it felt mischevious, it felt naughty, it felt deliciously like skiving. And now it doesn’t.

Well in the spirit of such devil-may-care bunking off, me and m’colleague Richard took this past Wednesday off work and set off to sample the Rail Ale Trail that is to be found headed out to the east of Manchester. At it’s heftiest this particular excursion can take in 8 different stops along the way between Stalybridge and Batley but only half of these paid host to us over the course of the afternoon – though another drink was tied on in Manchester at Official BadPoo Mighty Pub the City Arms Inn.

Two light ales and a debate on the merits of tiles in pubs.

Proceedings got underway at The West Riding Refreshment Room on Dewsbury station with a couple of perfect session-starting pale ales from Yorkshire’s Rooster brewery and Durham brewery‘s Magus. They both slipped down easily, light and refreshing- only serving to strengthen our belief that pale ales are the ultimate way to get a day’s session drinking underway; though this decision was only reached after lengthy and appropriately grave debate. In fact, like many of the establishments on this journey, The West Ridings is a place where a man’s conversation can turn easily to the most heightened of philosophical musings. Naturally, we choose to go on and wrestle with that most unwieldy of beasts- is tiled decoration in a pub acceptable?

This debate rattled on for so long, and we got so comfortable in the pleasant surrounds of this station bar (the food smelled particularly alluring) that we briefly forgot we were on a tight schedule and came close to missing our train. Luckily the journey from our table to the platform and onto the train took less than 10 seconds so disaster was happily averted.

Huddersfield next where, in the Head of Steam, you’ll find 4 rooms of varying decoration; including a games room, where you’ll find brilliant old-fashioned two-player arcade table machines nestled amongst the Connect 4. We take up residence on the platform side of the pub in a room clearly set up more for dining than drinking. This is a good hint at what you absolutely must do if and when you find yourself in this establishment. You must eat here.

For they serve proper chips. Big, crispy, fluffy, gorgeous, proper chips.

We both plumped for the usually safe option of a sandwich and some of those chips for some lunch as we hoped to avoid eating too much and being struck down by the dreaded affliction of PCL (Post Consumption Lethargy, acronym fans). However, owing to the size of the chips and the butties being made with the world’s fattest slices of bread, it’s a close call and we only just get away with it after wofling the nosh down.

Food and beer in the Head of Steam.

In between gorging on foody delights, we had the time to take in the decoration and a couple of pints. Decoration first, which in the room we were sat is a beguiling mixture of railway based art and promotional material for various Drinks That Time Forgot (Virgin Vodka! Carling Premier!). This is probably an attempt to differentiate themselves from most station bars which content themselves with plastering the wall with various bits of brass from engines and lots of old signs- all very pleasant and evocative but a little bit akin at times to drinking in a skip.

As for the beer – there was 11 listed to pick from and we ended up sampling Organ Grinder from the Brass Monkey Brewery as well as Whispers and Lightyear from the Glentworth Brewery who appear to name all their drinks after aspirational 80′s nightclubs. All beers were nice though, unfortunately, rushed at the death owing to The Huddersfield Dash. This is a tradition at Huddersfield where, every time I do this ale trail, I forget that the platform you arrive into Huddersfield on is not the one you leave from if you want to get to Marsden. This leads to a last-gasp charge across the station- an easy activity normally but difficult when already a few pints into a session and in the early stages of digesting those chips and that massive bread.

On to Marsden and, with a tight schedule to keep, we foresake the trek down the hill into the village itself (recommended if you have the time) and drop into the Railway which is on the station’s doorstep. This pub is not officially part of the Ale Trail- possibly owing to it being a Marston’s pub and therefore light on the independently brewed stuff. It’s a nice place though and there is a dartboard on which a quick round of 301 is despatched (no doubles to finish though, as we don’t have a spare fortnight) while we sup a Wychwood Dirty Tackle and Marston‘s Sweet Chariot- you may be able to spot a rugby theme.

A little deviation from the suggested route, but it saved time.

Game of darts over we settle down to read through Innspeak – a fine example of the magazines put together by real ale enthusiasts and usually frothing over with intriguing adverts for lovely looking pubs, notice of upcoming beer festivals, news about Debbie and Steve who’ve just refurbished the Lamb and Flag, and borderline hysterical invective against the government for whatever new law or taxes associated with drink that they’ve just come up with. These magazines are, almost without exception, brilliant and- since their written by enthusiastic amateurs rather than ego-riddled journalists- infinitely more informative than almost all other printed publications on the market. Plus, in the case of Innspeak, you get to find out about this issue’s Star at the Bar, the lovely Michaela who works at the Cross Inn, Halifax. You don’t get that in the NME.

A short stint on another train that we can watch arrive from the bar takes us to Stalybridge’s Buffet Bar and their choice of 7 ales from which we select Blair Atholl by Little Ale Cart and The North’s London Calling (or that could be the other way round, we never figured it out). Again, these are both very quaffable and it’s nice to report an entire days run without a single dodgy pint. Our conversation by this stage is hitting the ‘Hatching Mad Plans’ stage and there’s various talk of elaborate drinking holidays which’ll almost certainly never get followed up.

One of the few remaining Victorian station bars.

All this takes place surrounded by the Buffet Bar’s slightly odd decor of 70′s wood panelling and 50′s leather chairs all contained, in the bit we were sat, in a very 1990′s suburban conservatory. On the walls, meanwhile, the usual old fashioned pub paraphenalia (adverts for Martini and Bovril etc) and supplemented by a few maverick touches- like a certificate for a Domestic Millinery exam from evening classes at Ashton-Under-Lyne in March 1912.

Beyond this lies Manchester and our final drink of the day at The City Arms, but his isn’t part of the ale trail and this particular pub needs BadPoo consideration on it’s own sometime in the future rather than here.

And that was our day. I’ve done this ale trail on a weekend before where it’s so popular that the arrival at every station is marked by a mass charge to the bar by the dozens of people who’ve ended up on the same schedule as you. The descent down the hill into Marsden on these days really ought to be reclassified as an extreme sport. Far better is to skive the day off work and do it this way, on a weekday afternoon when you have have that little naughty thrill I mentioned earlier and where two men can find the time and freedom to experience 2 of the great means of opening the mind up to thought and contemplation – travel and a pint.

And where we can decide that yes, tiled decoration is acceptable in a pub.

Beers · Brass Monkey brewery · Buffet Bar · City Arms · Dewsbury · Durham brewery · Glentworth brewery · Huddersfield · Innspeak · Little Ale Cart · Manchester · Marsden · Marstons · Rail Ale Trail · Rooster brewery · Stalybridge · West Riding Refreshment Room · Wychwood

Celebrating the Lake District’s most beloved author, in beer form. 

The list of great Blackburnites is both grand and many. Lee Mack, Carl Fogerty, Corrie’s Wendi Peters. None of these however have ale in their name. Not according to Google anyway. Alfred Wainwright spent most of his days meandering around the Lake District and writing about his jaunts. Lucky bugger. His book was recently turned into a TV show. Much like Coast, but with less boats and that no mental shouting blokes. 

In 2007, Thwaites decided to honour his achievements with an ale. Originally just a seasonal, it proved so popular they decided to produce it all year round. Good call. Like the good man himself, the beer originates in Blackburn and is available unsurprisingly in northwest pubs. If you can’t get to a pub, you can order it online or buy it in Waitrose or EH Booths. 

The notes on the bottle invite us to ‘savour a refreshing golden beer with soft fruit flavours and a hint of sweetness’. As long as the fruit flavours don’t consist of bananas and kiwi fruit, we should be onto a winner. I’m first greeted with a pleasant but light aroma that smells simply of beer. It doesn’t give anything away about the actual taste. There is no bitterness to this drink, if anything sums up sitting in the early afternoon summer sun, probably by a lake or river; this is beer for the job. Very, very drinkable. This is the ideal warm up to evening session or the pint you have with a lunchtime bite. 

This is also where the beer falls down. It’s eminently drinkable; I could drink this by the case. Problem is the taste betrays the 4.1% volume. It tastes so light that I could quite easily neck this without it touching the sides of my mouth. The sweetness provides for a very nice drink, but one I could probably accompany with some toast before leaving for work. I’ve discovered the first drink I can class as a breakfast beer. 

I like this drink, the taste is very refreshing. My feelings are that it should remain seasonal. Brilliant summer lunchtime drink, in March however, I feel somewhat short-changed.

Beers · Thwaites · wainwright

Tesco’s beer selection was poor tonight. My continued search for Titanic Stout goes on. Not wanting to leave empty handed, I opted for a bottle for Ruddles County as I’ve never had it before. The bottle promises the flavours of dark toffee and a crisp bitterness. At 4.7% volume, it seems the perfect partner for a good hearty meatloaf cooked by herself.

First impressions are that it doesn’t have any particular aroma to it. I know it’s not wine but I like to start tasting my ale before it actually hits my tongue. Without a particular smell, there’s less anticipation of the wonders to follow. Maybe it’s jut me. As for the taste, well I couldn’t taste toffee, not at first but after about half a pint, the toffee flavour appears and lingers for a while. The bitterness was crisp but not overpowering. There’s a light hoppy taste which sits well.

If I had to look for a negative for this beer, it would have to be that although it isn’t bland, it has a generic taste. The generic taste is enjoyable and I’m sure there’s an apt time and place but as for something new and exciting? This isn’t it. Maybe it suffers from having been around for a while. Is it nice? Yes. Would I drink it again? Certainly.

Did it rock my face? No, not really.

Can I still taste toffee? Yes.

Beers · Ruddles County

My attempt at sophisticated drinking got as far as finding the first glass cup I could lay my hands on.

Tonight’s beer is a familiar one to most, Morland’s Old Speckled Hen.

This is one of those beers that you can’t avoid and nearly everyone has heard of, but I’ve never figured out why. Even my local Spar has it, and their real ale choice is this and Newcastle Brown. Indeed, that’s why I’ve ended up buying a bottle of it to take home, when my normal approach is to try anything with a mental shiny label and a name like Yoko Ono’s been dicking about with a Swedish dictionary.

I get a little sick of seeing it everywhere because the taste is so generic; there are a thousand other beers just like it and no reason not to try them rather than sticking with the same bloody thing over and over. In this way it’s guilty of being one of those ales that become so popular that they become ubiquitous, lose their charm and are eventually dethroned from their shiny position at the forefront of the bar. Spitfire suffered that fate some time ago if you ask me, and Greene King’s IPA is so common there’s no real appeal to getting another pint of it.

The beer reminds me of the first pint of Tetleys I ever had, which I thought I’d like based on the smell of beer wafting out from pubs, but actually felt queasy after drinking because it was so beery. I think that’s what sums it up for me – it’s one of the worst possible beers you could give to someone new to bitter. Everything about it is ultra-beer and if you don’t have the stomach for it, it won’t go down well.

These guys at BeerAdvocate (which is a misleading name since all they advocate is reducing everything down to a list of its chemical elements while slagging off the people who made it) come up with some staggeringly complex descriptions of it, while still failing to describe to anyone what it’s actually like to drink. So you should know:

• ONLY drink it if you can deal with shuddering slightly after each sip rapes the side of your tongue,
• DO NOT buy a pint of this if you have 20 minutes to kill before a train and think you’ll “slip a cheeky one in”, as you’ll curse the pain of trying to force it all down in the last five minutes,
• DO buy a pint if you don’t really like real ale but want to buy a pint of it in front of some blokes from work at Friday dinner so they think you’re a proper man who knows shit about beer.

So, a thumbs down from me. It’s not a bad beer, it’s just a pretty intense version of its type.

Beers · Greene King · Morland · Old Speckled Hen · Spitfire

Wigan’s beer festival is just getting underway as I write this, and I’ll be over there tomorrow afternoon to see what it’s like these days. I haven’t been for a good six or seven years, when I went with a few of my uncles, we all fell out and ended up making a frankly bizarre attempt to con our way in with an out of date CAMRA card. That it was about 50p to get in didn’t seem to matter to us after five pints around Wigan beforehand.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a little less stupid as I’m just over for the afternoon session with my sister. Oh yes – the afternoon “quiet session”, my second favourite piece of beer terminology (behind “drinking career” but just ahead of “session beer”). Having been to quite a few afternoon sessions now, I have found that it really is quite a good description for the atmosphere, a blend of studious beer appreciation with banter without the din of a blues band in the background.

I’ll report back on how it goes, along with a look back at Wednesday’s day out with Matt along the Transpennine Real Ale Trail.

Beer festival · Beers · CAMRA · Transpennine Real Ale Trail · Wigan

What would wine be like if it had grown up English? Or, to put it another way, what would real ale be like if it was French? What I’m getting at is this: the French like to make things complicated. Paris, for instance, has 3 seperate underground rail networks all on top of each other, while it’s only possible to utilise the language over there properly if you know the gender of a coffee table.

This love of needless complexity is best demonstrated via wine through which the French have taken the relatively simple process of fermenting grapes to make a pleasant alcoholic beverage and infused it with all sorts of rules and guidelines about what wine should be consumed with what food and a style of writing tasting notes that would leave James Joyce in his ‘Finnegans Wake’ days breathless with their impenetrability.

Meanwhile in Blighty, the brewing industry has been missing out on this trick for years and has only recently tried to gourmet itself up and now it seems every bottle worth it’s salt comes with a flowery description of the rapture you’ll recieve when you shove the drink into your face. Which makes tonight’s beer all the more intriguing.

From the label on the back of a bottle of Purity Mad Goose (current frontrunner for the coveted Badpoo award of ‘Beer That Sounds Most Like A Peter Gabriel Era Genesis Album Title’) and you’ll find a thorough breakdown of what’s gone into the brew- Maris Otter, Caragold and Wheat Malt with Hallertau brewing hops and Cascade and Willamette aroma hops since you ask- but beyone that the preview of the taste is limited to ‘great hop character and citrus overtones’ which you can pretty much deduce by reading the words ‘Pale Ale’ on the front.

Frankly, I’m not sure this will do anymore. We live in a world where not only are our alcoholic drinks dissected in tasting notes before we actualy taste them, but film trailers handily condense all the good bits of a movie into 2 crash-bang minutes and TV shows actively promote what’s going to happen in them just so people will tune in to see exactly what they’ve been told would occur actually occurring. Now I find I’m venturing into a bottle of beer without a detailled guide and full set of directions.

It’s a good job, then, that this is a belter. And that’s all I’m going to tell you- go and try it yourselves. If the people at Purity want to keep a little mystery alive before you taste their wares than I’m not going to spoil the party. Except to say that it’s got a great hop character and citrus overtones.

However, to finish, we can take a different cue from the world of wine and discuss what sort of thing this drink would be a perfect accompaniment for- much in the same way that we all know Merlot is nice with steak and it’s a terrible faux pas to drink a dry white while eating a Mars Bar. Here’s a few examples of things which would be enhanced by a pint of Purity Mad Goose:

- Chicken
- Fish
- Pork
- Crisps
- Nuts
- Watching ‘Cheers’
- Doing the hoovering
- Juggling
- Yelling
- Life

Beers · mad goose · pale ale · purity · review