If you have ever written a letter to Tim Wetherspoon (his lesser-known boyband name) please stop reading now, for the coming paragraphs will only antagonise you and prompt you into spending the next three hours sat at your desk penning a furious response, something along the lines of…

Dear Richard,

Myself and my wife have always greatly enjoyed your fine tales, drinking adventures and reasonably priced exploits in drunkenness. However, your recent mockery of Mr Tim Martin by means of illustrating how shit the food his miserable teenage staff make was, I must say, beneath the belt. Myself and my wife have many a time enjoyed Mr Tim Martin’s reasonably priced shit food, washed down with a pleasant drink – often “gratis”!!! In future, please leave this stalwart of great British business out of your so-called “discussions” of comically inedible food.

Regards,

Mr P Dimmond, Nuneaton

You will pass it to your secretary to proof-read, studiously ignoring any suggestions she makes; then you’ll email it to your wife at home, basking in the glowing reply she sends half an hour later. “Susan! Have this in the next post, post haste!” Please, if you don’t like hearing a bad word about your favourite local reasonably priced retailer of food and drink, stop reading now and save yourself that letter.

Over the last decade I’ve seen a lot change in my town, Blackburn, in ways that haven’t been seen in similar nearby towns. Quite a lot of pubs have disappeared and there are a few reasons why: first came the trial of late-night licensing in a few select pubs in the town centre. Blackburn was a guinea pig for this around the turn of the century, so I caught both sides of the scene, before and after the changes. First it was 1am, then 2am and by now it’s 4am. Everybody loved this at first – it was a chance to go out at a normal time and if you fancied, stay out an hour longer! Brilliant. Indeed it was, until the shift began towards people realising they could stay out later, so they could stay at home drinking first and come out later. Net effect: town centre pubs became mostly vacant until 10pm within a few years of this change.

The second cause has been the shift in drinking habits among my generation and the one beneath me. Alcopops and ciders have enabled younger and younger people to begin drinking in their own groups. They tend to favour bars and clubs – what I call anti-pubs – and a shift began around a decade ago that converted some of Blackburn’s old pubs into bars. Virtually instantly, that’s a place off the map for anyone who enjoyed a normal pub. On top of that, the bars don’t open in the day so it’s become a pub desert during the afternoon. It’s only an aside, albeit a sad one, that many of these converted bars are now closed altogether so whole streets have become pub- and bar-free.

The Postal Order: the scourge of real pubs. Courtesy of Cottontown.

And so we come to what I’d suggest is the third cause: yep, you guessed it, JD Wetherspoon. In Blackburn’s case it’s the Postal Order, occupying a grand old building pretty much right in the town centre. The effect when it opened was immediate: queues three or four deep at weekends and busy during the week. As Blackburn has died off, this has died off with it, but the proportional effect is still there: it always has a larger share of the trade than anywhere else in town, even if the total trade is lower. On any given afternoon, if you took all the old men, all the students and all the drunks out of the Postal Order and redistributed them across the town centre, there’d be enough business to keep three or four pubs alive.

That’s the first thing I’ve always vaguely resented the Postal Order for. I’ve always gone in there, had some good times over the years, but at the back of my mind I’d have always been happy to pay an extra 50p to be in a proper pub. Why didn’t I just go to a real pub, of course you’re asking? Well, that’s my point – Wetherspoons played a part in killing them off. If you haven’t been to Blackburn I can’t begin to describe what a desert it is in the town centre for an actual, normal pub. If you’re looking for some dinner and a pint, well, you’ve got two choices – there or O’Neills. That’s it. I resent them for crumbling away the choice of pubs in this town.

The second thing I’ve always been a little bitter about is that the place isn’t even good. It’d be much more palatable if the ultimate mega-pub in the world had shot up and the opposition had died off naturally – but no, the Postal Order has just emerged like a giant turd mound and swallowed everything beneath it. It’s battered, it’s always messy, the staff are so underpaid and overworked they change every week and don’t give a damn. Losing our genuine pubs to this beast is like Mike Tyson losing his arms at the peak of his career to some poxy infection he got from a splinter. One of the standard replies people always give in that apathetic, apologist voice is “well, the food’s alright…” purely to justify that they know they keep going back for the cheap beer. Well, the food is shite and you know it. These two recent experiences, by myself and Alex, made me realise just how little people are willing to accept in the name of a cheap drink. Exhibit A:

I think this is a Japanese innovation, boil-and-eat-in-the-bag.

Come on, Mr P Dimmond from Nuneaton, what is that?! I know you only defend the place because it’s the only pub you feel safe going in these days and your ego needs some assurance, but how many times have you seen shite like this and mentally glazed over the absurdity of it by rationalising that it’s cheap or just repeating the mantra, “the food’s alright”?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit B:

The most appetising ham, egg and chips you'll ever have fortune to witness, courtesy of Alex.

I think it has become a too well-received piece of wisdom that the food in Wetherspoons “is alright”. It has, in effect, become a byword for saying “the food is shite but I want a cheap beer so I’m still going to go there”. This apathy has ended up with the only pubs I can go to for dinner in this town being a Wetherspoons, an O’Neills and a place that sells toasties to students with house music in the background. Tim Martin, credit to him, has built a successful business upon people’s levels of tolerance: until something is truly absurd and unacceptable, they will tolerate a great deal in the name of a cheap pint.

Perhaps I should have addressed all of this to Tim Wetherspoon himself. Let’s have a try.

Dear Tim,

I have always enjoyed your reasonably priced selection of fine ales, stouts and porters. Being a single man I have no wife to share these with, a fact which often sends me to sleep at night in a sinking pit of gentle weeping, but your occasional “meet the brewer” nights more than make up for this.

However, I must take umbridge with the decimation of my local pub scene at your hands. Like the Stay Puft Man rampaging through the streets of New York, you have wrought devastation in a seemingly carefree manner. I am left wondering if myself and a small bunch of maverick friends must cross streams in your award-winning yet strangely jaded urinals to put a stop to your rampage.

Please cease the expansion of your soulless empire at the earliest opportunity and allow a few real pubs to flourish.

Regards,

Richard

Blackburn · food · Ghostbusters · J D Wetherspoon · Postal Order · pub closures

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

The pump clip for Turkey's Delight by Smiles Brewery

There’s nothing like a spot of bestiality to warm the winter cockles and put a weary drinker in the mood for Christmas.

Now, you may have thought that the comic potential of shoving your hand up a turkey’s arse had been exhausted by the time the Carry On team were busily crafting an entire genre around flying items of clothing, but Smiles Brewery don’t want to give up the ghost just yet.

Witness, friends, the sheer enthusiasm of both the fister and the fistee on this ale’s clip. Is stuffing a turkey such a fun pastime? Is stuffing a live turkey even better? Do turkeys really grin in anticipation of the fun ahead?

If you’re anything like me, the peculiarities of this clip won’t have even registered while you were ordering, which does prompt me to wonder what it takes for a clip to stand out if a spot of jolly animal fisting doesn’t do the trick. Even the terrible pun in the name passed me by at first, and as Paul Bailey said last month is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Another of these curiosities is that Smiles as a brewery no longer really exists. Being a new name to me, I did a little poking around and found that originally hailing from Bristol, it ceased to be in the middle part of this decade. According to ascorbic on everything2.com, who claims to have been involved with those high up in the brewery:

“Over New Year 2004/2005, Smiles Brewery went into liquidation. The pubs were transferred to a new company (Smiles Pubs Ltd.) and the brewery was closed. The rights to brew Smiles beers were sold to the Highgate Brewery. The results have not been good, with the beers showing little resemblance to the Smiles beers of old.”

If the beer list on that page is anything to go by, I would have guessed that today’s Turkey’s Delight may well be a rebadged Golden or Glorious 12th, both of which share the same 3.8% ABV. But it seems to have been a seasonal beer since at least 2006, which would tie in with brewing moving to Highgate a year earlier. Perhaps those who remember Smiles’ beers in Bristol before it closed down may be able to illuminate this question.

Despite only forming in 1978, Smiles became quite a big player in the Bristol brewing scene and according to this excellent history on Flickr, by the early 90s it was brewing 8,000 barrels a year with a staff of 115. Of its early outlets, it seems only The Ship in Lower Park Row is a survivor, this including its most popular venture, The Brewery Tap, shown below courtesy of Quaffale.

The Brewery Tap - Smiles Brewery, Bristol

Sadly not long after this, Smiles began to suffer in the face of competition from other real ale brewers in the area. By 2004, Smiles in Bristol existed in name only and is now brewed over 100 miles away in Walsall. Its future still cannot be said to be certain as Highgate Brewery itself recently went into administration, possibly threatening its contract brews. The Brewery Tap itself was, it seems, virtually destroyed by a “renovation” in 2006 – a sad and familiar sight to many drinkers, as seen below in a photo from Bristol Pubs.

Colston Yard - formerly of Smiles Brewery, Bristol

Richard Brookes, the local CAMRA chairman at the time, sums up the frustration in a way we’ll all understand:

“The pub’s absolutely gutted, the bar is smashed, there’s rubble on the floor,” he told the Post. “You are not talking about a minor renovation here.”

The concensus, which I must touch with a bargepole since I suspect a heavy case of “beer nostalgia” may be at play here, is that the beer is no longer what it used to be. Whether that’s the case or not, I’m sure it’s something different at the very least. Turkey’s Delight has an odd citrus smell, bordering on the manufactured aroma of a bottled juice drink like Kia-Ora or a Netto-brand washing-up liquid. The initial taste is nothing like that though, indeed I had a flashback to my grandma trying to force-feed a caramel chocolate bar down my throat during some Christmas long gone by. The lingering impression is of a very normal beer with a curious smell, and I suspect Wetherspoons have chosen it as one of their Christmas beers precisely because it leans towards the mainstream rather than the darker winter ales you might expect.

It is funny how a half of bitter in the Postal Order in Blackburn can lead you on a walk into the past of a forgotten Bristol brewery.

Beers · Bristol · Highgate Brewery · Postal Order · real ale · Smiles brewery · Turkey's Delight · Walsall