Tonight’s weekly Great Lost Bear showcase features Saco’s new brewpub, Run of the Mill Public House and Brewery. For those that haven’t taken the short drive (or train ride) down to Saco Island, this is a great chance to sample some of the brewpub’s offerings. On tap tonight, for GLB’s usual $2.50/pint price, are the Impact Pale Ale, Smelt Camp Strong Ale, and a third beer that is being kept a secret for now. Having attended the RotM opening, I can attest to the quality of Geoff Houghton’s newest brewery (Geoff is also the man behind the famed Liberal Cup in Hallowell). This should be a great evening, with Geoff himself pouring.
Archive for the ‘Watering Holes’
Burton on Trent – The Burton Bridge Brewery
This is no time for neutrality. Burton is my favorite beer destination in the UK, and the Burton Bridge Brewery Tap is where I head when I get here. The hotel in town is the Three Queens Hotel, which is reasonable in price and very comfortable in a mid-range way. It’s also across the street from the Burton Bridge Brewery.
The Brewery started up in 1982, owns four pubs in Burton, and brews traditional ales ranging from a golden to a stout. They supply about 300 pubs across Britain.
The flagship beer, Burton Bridge Best Bitter, is to me everything an English bitter should be. It’s beautifully balanced, noticeably hoppy, with a crisp and clear mouthfeel. At 4.2% it’s not really a session beer, but one can drink it all night and it never gets tiresome.
The brewery tap pub is one of the great places in the world to enjoy an English ale. This is the epitome of a local pub. Both management and customers are welcoming and gracious. If you visit the odds are high you’ll be the only foreigner. Drink quietly for a while, greet others with a smile, and soon you’ll be deep in conversation.
This last visit I got to see the local skittles league in action. They meet upstairs in a room that has seen many uses over the years. The skittles alley is about 50 feet long, surfaced in rough wood. Skittles pins are like New England candlepins; there are nine of them, placed wider than our bowling pins. The center pin is bigger than the others and is worth two points. The skittles ball is hardwood, a bit bigger than a softball, without finger holes, and in this case very worn and rough.
The pins are surrounded by rough boards and netting. This is all manual pinspotting. It’s quite possible to bowl a ball, miss all the pins, and have the ball rebound from the back wall and miss the pins again. A player gets three balls. After that he walks down the alley, collects the balls, and sets up the pins for the next player.
The alley is heated by two coal fireplaces. The fires were lighted before the league meeting, but the first of three matches was noteably chillier than the second and third matches. I enjoyed watching with a pint in my hand and my rear centered in front of an open coal fire.
As you can imagine, there was lots of beer and repartee involved in the matches. Bruce Wilkinson, one of the founders of Burton Bridge Brewery and head brewer, was a participant. Thankfully, his brewing skills significantly exceed his skills at skittles.
Locally in Portland, Maine, Burton Bridge beers are available in bottle on occasion, particularly the Empire IPA. Better yet, Eric Michaud at Novare Res has a firkin of Burton Bridge Best Bitter and expects to put it on soon. Do not miss this fabulous cask ale!
Burton on Trent – Coopers Tavern
The Coopers Tavern is one of the great pubs of Burton, and in fact is a standout in the world. Historically the Coop has been the Bass bottle shop, and once was the brewery tap for the giant Bass brewery across the street.
The Coop is a small pub by our standards, and is a free house. It fearures beautifully cared for beers and a creative rotation of guest beers. The rear bar makes the Coop unique. Most ales are on gravity dispense. The firkins are on a shelf, and are served through gravity taps. Hand pumps are emblematic of cask ale, but gravity dispense is gentler and better for the beer!
Stillage at The Coopers Tavern
Seating in the rear bar is unique: cramped, with a limited number of seats, some of which are on an elevated platform. Drink here and you will unavoidably be involved in conversation with the bar tender and other punters. Daunting to a first time visitor, but well worth the effort.
Manchester: The Knott and The Marble Arch
One of the reasons I enjoy visiting Manchester is the industrial history of the city, and the architectural legacy still surviving. We all know a bit about the roll of the cotton trade in our own 19th century history, including our Civil War. It’s illustrative to see that history from the other side, to see the scale of the industrial revolution in England. Manchester was the center of the cotton cloth industry in the 19th century; cotton came in and cloth went out. The mills were outside the city, but the warehouses, merchant headquarters, and railway infrastructure were here, and there are plenty of surviving buildings.
A good source of information on architecture is the Pevsner series on the buildings of Britain. They recently started a line of paper bound guides to the cities of the north of Britain, and I found the Manchester guide to be a terrific source of both walking tour suggestions and reference material.
Back to the pubs! Manchester is full of worthy pubs; I’ll just mention two of my favorites. The Knott is to the south of the city, on Deansgate. The pub is built into a railway arch and trains rumble over constantly. Two attractions keep me returning to the Knott. The cellar manager here is truly dedicated to presenting cask ale properly, and to exploring both traditional and innovative styles of brewing. His house beers are from the Marble Brewery (below): the Manchester Bitter (4.2%) and the Ginger Marble (4.5%). The Ginger actually is pretty good. His other four pumps offer a delightful mix of ales.
The Knott
The Knott Inside
The Knott also offers terrific food. The chef is serious about his food, works in an open kitchen, and enjoys discussing the menu. Each dish is prepared individually, and he cheerfully entertains requests to modify dishes. When they’re not busy it’s a bit like having a private chef.
The Marble Arch is a short walk from Manchester Victoria Station, and very close to the site of the National Winter Ales Festival. That of course means it’s mobbed on festival days. The attractions here are the architecture and the beer.
The pub was built in 1888, designed by Darbyshire and Smith, a firm that pioneered in the design of fireproof cotton mills and theaters. This interior features exposed cast iron supporting beams for the roof, and walls and ceiling completely covered in glazed tile. The place is well worth a visit. The Marble Arch puts me in mind of the Black Friar in London. Their styles are completely different, but both offer stunning insights into the tastes of a long gone era.
Unfortunately I failed to bring my camera. Both visits…
The beers at the Marble Arch are produced next door at the Marble Brewery. The beers are excellent, and the brewery is noted for producing organic and vegan ales. They have five regular cask ales, and rotate through seven seasonals. The brewery has been producing since 1997.
Rails to Ales in Manchester
It’s Tuesday, I’m back in Portland, and well behind in posting reports from my trip. I’ll catch up in whatever sequence occurs…
On Saturday Marcus, Briony and I decided to take a break from the National Winter Ales Festival and to explore some of the well known pubs accessible by rail from Manchester. These are not just pubs near railroad stations; for the most part they are pubs actually in the stations. Our plan was to go out to the furthest point of our journey, over the Pennine Mountains almost to Leeds in Yorkshire, and pub-crawl back to Manchester.
At the station we ran into four beer friends from Sweden intent on making the same sort of journey, so we all piled into an 11:30 train.
Dewsbury
View From The Car Park
Our first stop was Dewsbury, about forty minutes from Manchester Picadilly Station. The West Riding Licensed Refreshment Rooms is in a very impressive historic station building. The pub was full of locals enjoying beers and late breakfasts. We were disappointed they don’t serve lunch on weekends and decided to to take our chances on food further down the line.
The beer here was in great shape. I jumped on an old favorite, Burton Bridge Best Bitter (4.2%), (more about this in a coming post), then had a Timothy Taylor Landlord (4.3%), a perennial award winner. Landlord is becoming more available as the brewery seems to be increasing production to catch up with their enormous popularity, but I still rarely pass up a chance at a pint of Landlord. Of course it helped that we were almost literally in their back yard.
The Swedes At The Bar
Marcus & Briony Stationside
After a bit we noticed that the Swedes were gone, and a train was pulling in, so we decided to be on our way. Part of the fun on this crawl is that it’s possible to drink up, get out the door, and jump on a train in less time than it takes to make the decision.
Huddersfield
Our second stop was at the King’s Head, another pub built into the station. Here the feature was four Timothy Taylor beers, a bonanza, something I’d never seen. In addition to Landlord they had Golden Best (3.5%), Best Bitter (4.0%), and Ram Tam (4.3%). Ram Tam is a black beer with red highlights when backlit, combining caramel, malt and hops in a very soft flavor experience.
In The King's Head
At the King’s Head we met a group of couples, beer enthusists from Yorkshire, who were working their way towards Manchester in celebration of the birthday of one of their mates. After lots of conversation we agreed to join forces at their next stop, lunch at Marsden just down the line.
Marsden
The Riverhead Brewery Tap is a short walk from the train station, in the middle of the village of Marsden.The spot is a storeybook site in a valley, surrounded by green hills full of grazing sheep and stone walls. The village itself is constructed of stone, and boasts a river (the Colne) and a barge canal with a tiny lock.
The pub is owned by the Osset Brewery (founded in 1995) and is the site of the Riverhead Brewery, which Osset bought in 2005. Riverhead is run as an independent operation, using their original recipes. The result is a pub which features both Osset and Riverhead beers. I tried the Riverhead March Haigh (4.6%) as well as the Osset Pale Gold (3.8%) and Silver King (4.3%). All were excellent.
The food here is superb, and the group meal was both convivial and satisfying. Part of the fun was enjoying such a good time with people who were strangers an hour beforehand. One more reason to beer-tour outside of London…
Stalybridge
Our last stop was the Stalybridge Station Refreshment Rooms, another excellent station pub of longstanding fame. I only had time (and capacity) for a Flowers IPA before we bade farewell to our new friends and headed back to Manchester while they returned to Yorkshire.
All in all a terrific day combining three of my favorite things: great beer, trains, and lively conversation.
Beeston: The Victoria Hotel
Beeston is a railway stop about five minutes outside Nottingham. I knew about the Victoria from the Good Beer Guide, and have seen it over the years from the train, so decided this was the trip to chance a visit.
The Victoria is a gem, consisting of about five large rooms strung out along the building. They do a very large lunch business, and were packed for the lunch period when I visited. Most customers for lunch were office workers, with a smattering of local, probably retired couples.
Good Food!
This is another Castle Rock pub, but their approach to beer is a bit different. They serve 12 cask ales, and only three or four were Castle Rock beers when I was there. The rest were guest beers. They have a strong emphasis on local breweries, and in fact are having a festival of local brewers next week.
Author Doing Research
Two beers really stood out here. The first was the Dark Star ‘Over The Moon” from West Sussex, an exception to the local theme and a favorite of mine. Dark star is a frequent visitor to NERAX. This beer was dark, almost the color of a Porter, though it’s certainly not a porter. It’s hoppy, smooth, and full of malt flavor.
The second surprise was the Funfair ‘Blueberry Stout’. Well, if some brewers can dump in oysters, why not blueberrys. I couldn’t resist a pint, and it was actually very good. It had a creamy head, a mild roast, and a distinctive, light flavor note that I dare not call fruity.
Funfair is a tiny local brewery launched in 2004, based in Ilkeston.
Nottingham: Castle Rock Beers
Nottingham was my first stop in the Midlands. This is an old city: the first recorded settlement was in 868, and in medieval times it was the gateway to the north. Today Nottingham is a wonderful beer destination. The enthusiasm here for good beer and good, creative food from local ingredients in my opinion matches any place in the UK.
The beer community in Nottingham is keen on a variation of the locavore movement, and loca-beers (beers brewed within 20 miles) are proudly promoted. There is a surprising range of local breweries to both encourage and support this movement.
One series of events that fueled this loca movement was the purchase of a local brewer, Hardy and Hansons, by Greene King, one of the giant ‘New National’ breweries. The New Nationals (others are Wells and Youngs, and Marstons) are strong supporters of cask ale, but also tend to consolidate breweries for efficiency and cut corners in the interest of cost reduction. Once Greene king acquired Hardy and Hansons they quickly closed the brewery, moved production to their other facilities, and put Greene King beers into their chain of pubs around Nottingham.
Outrage at the H&H closure seems to have fueled the growth of local brewers. Castle Rock Brewery began in 1998 with a brewery in central Nottingham, and now produces about 100 barrels a week. They own a string of local pubs in Nottingham, and dominate the Good Beer Guide listings in the central city. This trip I enjoyed three: The Kean’s Head (excellent food, clean, great location in The Lace Market neighborhood), The Salvation (a historic old building, well cared for beers), and the Vat and Fiddle (The Castle Rock brewery tap, a full range of beers in great condition).
The Castle Rock beers are well made and good representatives of Midlands brewing. Their flagship is the Harvest Pale (3.8%). It is yellow straw in color, clean and crisp, lightly hopped with a bit of citrus in the flavor. It is a very accessible brew; two different bartenders mentioned that it was useful in training lager drinkers… A heavier beer is the Preservation (4.4%) a stronger taste and more of a copper color, but maintaining a smooth, light mouthfeel.
My favorite pub in Nottingham this visit had to be the Vat and Fiddle. While I was chatting with the barmaid the assistant brewer came in to get glasses for their production tasting. He was busy, but when he found I was an American interested in Cask ale he stopped to chat about the beers. Later on I mentioned to the bar maid that I had tasted one of the Castle Rock seasonals (Snowhite) and didn’t think it differed too much from the Harvest Pale. She immediately put samples of both on the bar, said Harvest Pale drinkers think the Pale is much hoppier. Well, it was, but not by that much.. Later, I commented that I hadn’t seen a Castle Rock dark beer. The bar maid said ‘just a minute’ and disappeared down the cellar stairs. She came back with a quarter pint sample of their next seasonal brew, the Blackbird Porter (4.4%) a wonderfully smokey, malty brew. If you go, don’t miss this place, it’s right near the train station.