I used to be bitter but now I'll drink anything

The road to selfie fulfillment

It was three years ago that I started taking selfies whenever I stopped off for a beer on my way home. I would take a picture of myself enjoying whichever beer I’d chosen, sometimes one of the pub, and I would upload those pictures to social media along with comments about the beer, the pub and whatever changes I observed in both.

I’d been doing my drinking this way ever since starting work at Roehampton University, some four years earlier. My long commute there and back involved changing trains at Clapham Junction and one evening, when my train got cancelled I decided, rather than sit for half an hour and wait for the next one, to wander out of the station and find somewhere to have a pint.

Just a short walk up St John’s Hill I found the Falcon, a large Victorian London pub with snob screens, an island bar, etched mirrors and a large range of ales. The next week I did the same thing again and gradually, over time, my visits became twice weekly and it stopped mattering whether a train was due or not.

Sometimes I would drink a beer that I knew – London Pride, Sharp’s Doom Bar, Timothy Taylor Landlord, Hopback Summer Lightning – but from time to time I would come across one that I didn’t know. I’d always been fond of stronger bitters and when I saw one called Jaipur India Pale Ale, weighing in at a hefty 5.9 abv, I decided to give it a try.

It wasn’t quite an epiphany. I didn’t throw my arms to the heavens, as my wife Charita would probably have done, and cried “YES!” but I did think to myself, in my quiet English way “This is a really nice pint!” In truth, rather than light up a new pathway for me, it had connected me to the beers that I had fallen in love with as a much younger man.

My beer drinking days started, and almost finished, in the 1960s. I was a bit of a goodie two shoes growing up, and didn’t start visiting pubs until I was 17, but even so I managed to consume enough beer to realise that I disliked it intensely. Most of my drinking was done at parties, and generally from massive cans from Watneys, called Party Sevens. I also tried Whitbread Tankard and Double Diamond, which were on sale in most of the pubs that I drank in. I hated them all.

As a consequence it was lager that I drank through most of my time at university and it wasn’t until I went to stay with my brother and sister-in-law, the summer before I started my first real job, that I was introduced to proper beer. We went to Norman’s local in Hyde and I must have asked for a lager only to be told, in no uncertain terms, that I was having beer.

I took a sip from the mug he had placed in front of me and pulled a face. It was Tetley’s bitter and it was bitter. In fact, it didn’t taste anything like the beers I had grown up drinking. It tasted nothing like lager either, although the flavour was much stronger than anything I’d been used to. I wasn’t convinced at first by this new departure and it took a while before I was won over.

At school and university, it had never mattered to me which brewery owned which pub. Everywhere sold lager and while there were certain brands, like Harp, Skol and Heineken, that predominated, it never made that much difference to me which of them I was drinking. They all tasted more or less the same. Now that I’d tried “proper” beer I soon began to realise that there were variations in its flavour, often dramatic ones.

Full of the novelty of my new discovery I started to get curious about the different breweries. When in Manchester I looked out for Boddingtons pubs or Holts, which between them dominated my home town of Eccles. In Surrey and London the most reliable names were Youngs, Courage and Fullers. There were also a lot of Charringtons pubs and although their standard bitter, Charrington IPA, was a dreary muddy ale they also sold Bass, a sharply hoppy, slightly floral beer, which quickly became one of my favourite brews.

There were noticeable regional variations. Most of the pubs that I went to in the south offered two “real” beers : a bitter and a best, or special, bitter. A tiny handful offered a mild as well, but this was rare. Manchester, by contrast, almost always offered draught mild, often at the expense of the stronger bitter.

Youngs pubs were the ones that I preferred when I was down south. Their bitter – always referred to as Ordinary Bitter – had a very distinctive sharp, hoppy flavour and the Special Bitter was a delicious fruity blend that bore a clear relation to its weaker brother. The other reason for favouring Youngs was that their pubs had a definite house style – big comfortable armchairs, solid dark wood fittings and a quietly opulent air.

Once I had got the measure of the commonest beers I began to crave novelty. That’s when I discovered free houses. These rare beasts weren’t required to sell beers from one specific brewer and from one visit to the next there would often be new beers to try. That was how I discovered beers from Bateman’s, Adnam’s, Timothy Taylor, Samuel Smith and Ruddles, among many others.

I soon had my favourites – Holts, Boddingtons, Brakspears and Adnams among them – but the stronger beers, perhaps because I drank them less frequently, always seemed more exotic. Sometimes these were just the stronger bitters, like Fullers ESB or Gales’ fabulously fruity HSB. Other times they were old or winter ales. I had read about Theakstons’ Old Peculier long before I came across it in a pub in Brighton.

HSB is still available although the Gales brewery was bought out in 2005, ironically by Fullers. A year later Youngs merged with Charles Wells. HSB is not the beer it was but I’m reading reports that Youngs beers are back on form.

Many of the beers that I fell in love with in the 70s are still available but most of them don’t - or won't - taste the same. Happily, the torch has now been passed to brewers like Thornbridge, who are responsible for Jaipur IPA, and many more whose beers don’t taste like anything I’ve come across before!

The Craft Beer revolution

One important discovery that I made, at the same time as I was adjusting to life as a beer drinker, was the existence of the campaigning organisation CAMRA, or the Campaign for Real Ale. Through them I learnt that the difference between beers like Tetley’s bitter and the likes of Double Diamond and Watney’s Red Barrel was the way that they were brewed, or rather the way the beer was treated just before it left the brewery. Real ale underwent a secondary fermentation in the barrel, which continued even after it was set up in the pub cellar, whereas the likes of Whitbread Tankard weren't afforded that luxury. This made it easier for pub landlords to look after the beers. In fact, they didn’t have to do anything, other than connect the pipe to the barrel. The point of kegging, as it became called, was that the flavour of the beer was unaffected by being loaded, unloaded and tapped – and it lasted longer. The downside was that it didn’t taste of anything much at all.

CAMRA became enormously important to me, in particular because of their annual publication, the Good Beer Guide. In it they listed, town by town, county by county, the best pubs as chosen by the local branch members - what beers they sold and any other notable features, such as hot food, pub games and whether the actual building had historical value. For years my pub visiting was driven by which pubs had been listed in the guide.

The first hint that CAMRA might not have all the answers came on my first trip to the United States in 1997. This wasn’t a holiday either – it was a job exchange and I was going to be there for six months. Much as I was looking forward to the experience I was more than a little anxious at the thought of going so long without access to decent beer. I needn’t have worried. In the first month I was there I drank beers from Samuel Adams of Boston, Sierra Nevada of California, Pete’s brewery from San Antonio and a whole host of others. It did help that one of the librarians where I worked was a keen student of what he called the microbrewery scene.

Whether I was drinking “draft,” ie keg beer, or bottles, I could recognise that slightly flat aftertaste you get with beer that has stopped fermenting but these ales still had flavour and lots of it. There was usually more malt than hops present but these were beers I was happy to drink. Thereafter, whenever I went on holiday, I sought out the local brews whether I was in Prague, Rome, Budapest or Berlin. It didn’t change my attitude to British beers though. I still avoided keg and even bottled beers had to be bottle-conditioned. 

The first clue that the beer scene might be changing came when I paid my annual visit to Manchester in 2014. While crossing Albert Square I noticed a restaurant A board advertising “craft beers”. I was puzzled by the words but didn’t investigate. Later that day I went into one of my favourite city centre pubs, the Grey Horse on Portland Street. As well as pumps dispensing Hydes Mild and Bitter there was a third promising a limited edition craft brew. I was intrigued but not so intrigued that I wanted to try it. It was a new beer, it might be OK, but I only got so many chances to drink Hydes Bitter, which I always enjoyed, so that was what I ordered.

But I now kept coming across references to this new beer style and I started to wonder what it was. I had noticed a steady increase in new breweries in Sussex over the previous few years, with names like Langham, Hammerpot, Long Man, Arundel and Downland appearing at my regular Brighton drinking holes like the Evening Star and the Stanley Arms. But why “craft” and was it related to the growth in breweries?

Eventually I discovered that, like many a marketing slogan, the term “craft beer” could be defined any number of ways. It quickly became evident that many new breweries were using it, rather than the more CAMRA-friendly “cask ales” or “traditional ales”, to attract customers. Some of these new-kids-on-the-block were tiny operations, others were larger, some were well-established brewers that had set up smaller, experimental operations within their larger organisation. But there was one key fact that stood out - craft beer did not necessarily mean real beer.

I’m not sure when the penny dropped with me that this didn’t have to be a problem. Maybe it was while Charita and I were on a family holiday in Rome, and I drank a couple of superb IPAs in Bir & Fud, a trendy bar in the Trastevere area of the city. Both were keg. What I do know is that when we came home, and I went back to visiting the Evening Star, I started to pay as much attention to what they had on keg as what they had on cask.

I still think that kegging beers compromises the flavour but since so many new beers are stronger than they ever used to be it isn’t the problem that it used to be, at least not to me.

So how might CAMRA go about promoting keg, always assuming the members agreed to do so? How about : “Beer so good it’s Un-real!”

Beer notes : Stone – Ruination DIPA 

One of the features of the craft beer revolution has been the reinvention of old beer styles. IPA stands for India Pale Ale (or, in some versions, Imperial Pale Ale). Either way it dates back to the days of the British Empire. IPAs were brewed strong because, once brewed, they were shipped over to India. The continuing fermentation that took place in the barrels generated sugars which helped to preserve the ales. IPA is thus usually, though not always, high in abv (alcohol by volume).

The concept of the Double IPA is an American invention and the first DIPA was produced by one Vinnie Cilurzo at Temecula CA's Blind Pig brewery, back in the 1990s. Now such a brew involves a massive amount of hops, usually added at different stages of the brewing cycle, with an increase of malts as well to keep things balanced. Not surprisingly DIPAs are usually 8% plus.

Stone is another California brewery but their beers are now becoming widely available here – I’ve even seen them in Tesco’s! Ruination is a wonderful beer, for me the acme of DIPAs. The smooth, vanilla taste gives way to a vicious yet exhilarating hop burst. It’s very more-ish but at 8.1 abv, one is probably enough.

Pub notes : The pubs they are a-changin’

It’s getting more and more common these days to switch on the news and hear about another pub closure, and it’s often in a town or village where there’s not much else to do. There are two trends in the other direction that I think are encouraging and might help make a difference. One is the community buy-out; the other is the micropub.

The 2003 Licensing Act simplified the regimen of local authority licensing. One of the consequences of the change was to encourage the licensing of premises with no prior alcohol licence, such as shop premises. The first micropub was opened in Herne, Kent in 2005, since when there has been a steady growth of them around the country, to the extent that a book has recently been published which lists them all.

A micropub usually has two features that traditional pubs don't – a single room for customers, and beer served straight out of the cask. There are several now along the coast from Brighton : Worthing has the Brooksteed Alehouse and the Anchored in Worthing, then there’s the Georgi Fin in Goring, the Stanley Alehouse in Lancing, the Old Star in Shoreham and the Watchmakers Arms in Hove. The philosophy in all of them is a return to basics : just beer, cider and wine. No hot meals, no TV or games machines, just good ale and chat. And you will get talked to!

My favourite, and happily the nearest to my Portslade home, is the Watchmakers Arms, literally a stone’s throw from Hove station. Run by two couples, all of them from a teaching background, it’s the archetypal small, welcoming pub. There are always five cask ales on, at least one will be a dark ale and most are from local breweries. The opening hours are a throwback too, to the days when pubs were not allowed to open in the afternoon; during the week the Watchmakers is closed Mondays and thereafter it’s 12 till 2 and 5 till 9 while hours are longer on Friday and Saturday. 

I stop off usually on my way home from work and the early evening shift is other commuters like me who have just got off the train. I will generally sit with my pint, get my laptop out and start to write but then I’ll hear someone on the next table talking about the high cost of some craft brew, or raving about the Vibrant Forest ales that the pub showcased the week before and I’ll want to add my own comments.

“But that’s the way pubs have always been!”

you might comment, and you’d have a point. The truth is that too many pubs have become impersonal and this move back to everybody talking to everybody else is one of the best things about micropubs. It’s great to see it coming back!

Notes on the illustrations

Brighton readers may recognise the venues where the pictures were taken but for the benefit of those who live far from this blessed town - sorry, city - the pubs featured were :

1 and 2 : Brighton Bier Haus
3 : Evening Star
4 : Not a pub at all but the back room of our house in Portslade Village
5 : Watchmakers Arms