Pint Of Ale

Last month I received a case of East Green from Adnams, a beer that claims to be the UK’s first carbon neutral beer. It’s a cracking marketing angle - carbon neutrality and general environmental concerns are the ‘new organic’. East Green has been brewed using the most energy-efficient process they could manage and using ingredients as local to the Suffolk brewery as possible. To get right up to the true ‘carbon neutral’ though they’ve had to add a little offset subsidy for each bottle brewed.

However sceptical you may be about a carbon neutral beer, carbon offseting or the whole ‘green’ angle, I think that Adnams needs to be commended for trying. Their new brewery has been designed with energy efficiency in mind, but how does the beer taste? Sarah, Matt and I all sampled a bottle or two and we were very impressed. Unfortunately, I have not been able to write much for Pint Of Ale of late and we drank the East Green some time ago. We’re going to pop to Tesco to buy a few bottles for a proper review soon, but in the meantime, we’re giving a big ‘thank you’ to Andy at Adnams for the East Green. The ale was very easy to drink - it could easily be a summer session beer for those long lazy Sunday afternoons in the garden. Drink a couple of bottles to ease your environmental conscience as your barbeque burns away in the corner of the garden!

I’ve started to notice the occasional pub turn up on Facebook, like this one from my home town of Crook in County Durham:

The Kings

It’s good to see pubs embracing this kind of marketing. Most pubs don’t have websites. Of those that do, it’s unusual to see a decent one. Some are amateurish, some only work on Internet Explorer, some are entirely Flash-based and therefore inaccessible to a whole cross section of society (people with visual impairments, people using older browsers, people with mobile phones, iPod Touches, etc) and some are just plain awful. Websites can be expensive for small businesses and are usually a low priority. Using Facebook to advertise has several advantages:

• The Facebook site is accessible. It works in all browsers. It works on mobile phones. It works on iPods. It looks professional, it is well designed, it is useable.
• It allows a pub to interact with its customers. Changes, comments, offers, events, etc are all immediately highlighted to the people who matter most - the people who already love your pub.
• An online community builds up around the pub. Friends of your customers begin to see your name. An active and social core develops around you.
• All of this costs nothing and it only takes minutes to set up.

Facebook came of age in the UK during 2007. I’ll watch with interest how many other pubs begin to crop up on my radar and how well they can leverage what social networking sites can offer.

I’m writing this while sitting looking out of one of the Barony Bar’s large windows at the rain lashing down on Broughton Street as England play Scotland at Six Nations rugby on the telly above the bar. This is a large pub with an excellent choice of ales on the bar, including Black Sheep, a little taste of home! The pub’s interior is unspoilt (and is on CAMRA’s Scotland National Inventory), with beautiful tiles running along the bottom third or so of the walls. Etched whisky mirrors adorn the walls.

According to the amusing and informative menu in front of me, the Barony is built on land popular with witches and “followers of the black arts” in days gone by. I’ve read a couple of reviews on the web about this pub “smelling of wee”, but it smells fine right now. Although there was about seven cask ales on the bar, I’ve opted for the local Deuchars, one of my favourite pints anyway. It doesn’t disappoint today.

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A bottle conditioned ale from the CoOp, brewed by the Freeminer Brewery in the Forest of Dean. It’s a 5% light golden ale with a pleasant aroma and with a pleasing pour. I’m into my fruity ales at the moment and this one has hints of orange that lead to a very bitter finish. It’s a refreshing ale that would be suited to a summer barbeque. This is perhapss the best bottled ale I’ve sampled in quite a while and it’s good to see the local shop selling a beer of such quality.

The Dyneley Arms used to be a deep green rendered monstrosity on the crossroads of the A658 and the A660 at Pool in Wharfedale, but it was gutted by fire in 2002. Recently it has been a building site and over the last year, a gleaming sandstone building has emerged - all signs of the green render gone and replaced with what looks like new mixed with original Yorkshire stone. There was no hint that this was going to be a pub once more - it looked more like a set of smart flats. But recently the Dyneley Arms sign has reappeared and tonight at 8pm, the pub officially reopened, more or less as it would have been in 1850.

This is a Sam Smith’s pub, so the ale on offer is Old Brewery at the fantastic price of £1.38. The pub looks amazing. It has been completely renovated to an exceedingly high standard, from the gleaming stones and ornate car park lamps to the rich, traditional wallpapers and deep oak inside. This is no “modern conversion” - there are no open spaces in this pub. We counted about six small rooms, each decorated in deep, rich, traditionally English colours with traditional, cosy curtains and the odd coke-fired real fire burning away. It’s difficult to talk about a pub’s atmosphere when it’s only been open 20 minutes, but this place felt cosy and friendly, and I am sure that this will continue.

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As with many Wetherspoons we’ve visited, The Sir Titus Salt is an impressive building conversion. Named after the industrialist Mayor of Bradford who founded the town of Saltaire just up the road, this used to be the city centre Windsor Baths. It is a large, open space with a mezannine balcony running around the edge. The original iron and glass roof is held up by a central iron column rising from the ground floor. It’s an impressive building.

There were at least five ales and a cask cider available last night. The ales hailed from across the country, from Greene King’s IPA to the much more local Yorkshire Pale from the Saltaire brewery.

I stuck with the Pale, a fruity, hoppy light beer which was similar in taste, if not as strongly-flavoured as the brewery’s Sundowner which Matt and I sampled in The Owl last week.

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It’s been a while since we’ve been to the Aviator in Yeadon. We popped in for a lunch time pint on Friday. Last time we were here, the only ale choice was mediocre Flowers. Today, we could choose from Black Sheep,Bombardier and Landlord. I opted for the Tim Taylor’s Landlord, from just up the road in Keighley. It tried to taste its flowery, fruity, hoppy best, but blimey, it was cold! It was chilled to within an inch of its life which really distracted from its fabulous taste. It’s good to see a town-centre chain pub stocking decent ales, but really, hold back on the refrigeration!

January, 1998. A 20 year old IT student in Sheffield called Mike made a new year resolution. The kind that only a 20 year old student with only 10 hours of lectures a week could make - to drink in 100 pubs before the year was out. This student (who’d never heard of real ale and liked nothing more than a cold Carling) would diligently record each pub in an Access database and then write the software to turn the pubs from the database into a website containing each review. This was 1998, when you browsed the net using Netscape, or the fast gaining Internet Explorer 4. When even the websites of large companies were single-column grey affairs peppered with animated men next to “under construction” signs. When nobody had heard of web accessibility and when if you had a 32K modem at home you were really cutting edge.

I was sorting through some old backup CDs tonight and I came across the original Pint Of Ale. In 1998 it was called Mike’s Pubs. Later that year, my “web developer” skills on the increase, it became Down The Pub. It was hosted on Fortune City and it even made an appearance in a 1999 issue of Internet magazine as one of the “top 100 home pages in the UK”!

Looking at these sites now, it’s hard to hide the embarrassment of some of the content, but I’ve uploaded them to this site in all their horrid orange glory:

• Mike’s Pubs
• Down the Pub

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When Matt and I visited the Smiths Arms in Beckwithshaw last year, we thought that the food looked good. The Good Beer Guide references the food too, so Sarah and I thought we’d give it a try last Saturday. I really like The Smiths Arms; it’s a pub with history and the beer was excellent on both our visits. On Saturday I stuck with Daleside Blonde, a gorgeously fruity, hoppy pale ale from the Daleside brewery in Cumbria. The food was OK if not dazzling. My steak and Bombardier ale pie was good but there wasn’t anything to set it apart from many other steak and ale pies in pubs all over the country. I thought the mash was a little laclustre, it would have benefitted from more butter or milk.. After the food we retired back to the bar and supped some more Daleside - the beer made the visit worthwhile. And the company too, of course .

I met Richard last night for a long-overdue couple of pints. We started in The Owl, the pub Matt an I were in on Tuesday night. It was busier than Tuesday but we found a seat in the back room and nursed our Sundowners. It’s really good to see a pub turning itself around and the choice of ales is excellent, although I think our pints tonight suffered by being the last two from the barrel. There’s one thing odd about The Owl and that’s the position of the seats in the bar. They’re arranged as a bench along the wall that faces the bar. Richard and I walked in to order our drinks and felt the eyes of all the regulars drilling into our backs. This was probably imagined of course!

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