Regularity

In Victoria Wetherspoons as the chimes at midnight approach with a glass of Siberian Red and I watch the people come and go. The crowd is thinning, but there’s still a forelock of drinkers, one of which I notice. He looks lost, he checks his change, he looks flushed, he looks nervous, he looks like he wants to heed people and talk, his plastic bag is faded, his hair is white, his coat is clean, his smile is perplexed, his shoes are shiny, his trousers are gravel dark, his long coat is a gabardine the colour of brawn, he lifts a magnifying glass to the lager font, he’s patting his pockets, he’s got his beer, he’s left the bar, will it be the 00.10 to Ramsgate or the 00.06 to Woking that he wants, he looks at them all on the departure board, the 00.42 to East Croydon it must be then, his tie is fired with stripes of service and then it’s the 01.00 to Brighton that he must be on, but then when I look up again he’s gone and I suspect he’ll be back at the same time tomorrow night.

Wetherspoons

Civilized, very. Are you still serving? We are sir. I like the sir bit, inspires confidence. Look at the blackboard. A pint of Old Empire. This is so civilised I say, the bar man smiles. It’s 11.50pm on a Thursday night in the Wetherspoons at Victoria. The beer is brought to me. Freshly pulled, sulphury, nice twang of bitterness. Just what I need at the end of the night. 12.20am. A man in the corner with a rucksack that suggests hostels and a long journey into the night sits in the corner, quietly musing over a beer. I leave having finished Joseph Roth’s White Cities, an account of the alcoholic writer’s dispatches from France. He was a socialist but strangely enough never got over the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I love him for his incisive interpretation of events happening in Germany in the 1930s but also because he was aware that the stories of those with whom he hung out with in bars were also worthy of history. And that is why sometimes I feel I should celebrate Spoons — it doesn’t always get it right but it does give a chance for the forgotten to have a decent beer.

San Devizes

I don’t really do news on this blog and I certainly don’t do exclusives, so apologies if you the reader (all three of you) have already seen this one: Mitch Steele from Stone has flown into the UK to brew a beer at Wadworth’s for the forthcoming Wetherspoon beer festival. Are these things collaborations or is it more of a case of an American brewer trying his hand at a cask beer at a traditional Brit brewery? Whatever the answer I like the idea of a hybrid love child of Arrogant Bastard meets Old Henry (or whatever emerges from San Devizes, as it is now to be called) and look forward to trying it in the autumn. You’ve got to hand it to Spoons, they do come up with the goods. 

In this Wetherspoons…

This is a Wetherspoons in Llandudno in North Wales. It is the Wetherspoons which was once a cinema. At the age of 14 I sat in the first tier of seats, possibly to the right, and watched Clockwork Orange (along with most of the 4th and 5th and 6th form). I also sat there and watched the Exorcist (twice in a week) and had a crafty bottled Guinness in the cinema bar, that was when I was in the lower 6th. I think my parents saw films here in the 1950s — certainly not Bergman but I would like to think they queued up for Wilder (that’s the director by the way). The last film I saw here was an Austin Powers one, possibly the first. Nowadays when I return to Llandudno (as one must, but it’s hardly we’ll always have Paris), I go there to get the free WiFi and remember the movies I saw over the years (I have a pint as well, it’s got better over the last couple of years). The other cinema I used to go to (I saw a lot of Bond and Carry On movies there) was pulled down and is now a fortress of warden controlled flats. Cinemas, like pubs, have their own memories and like the Proms audience currently acclaiming a rather excellent performance of Listz’s Faust I acclaim Wetherspoons for their sensitivity in adapting somewhere that was so important to me when I was growing up.

I commend Wetherspoons’ latest beer festival to the nation (but don’t start too early)

 Goose Island’s founder Greg Hall stands in the middle of a room with a glass of ale next to him on the table. He’s checking his phone but as soon as we’re introduced he’s on song. We met a couple of years ago at a White Horse dinner, but I don’t think he remembers me, but so what. We’re both here to do a job. On the other hand he makes two of my favourite beers in the world: Goose Island IPA and Bourbon County Stout. ‘They called up and said that they would like us to make Honkers’ Ale,’ he says in response to my stock question about how come he’s involved with Wetherspoons (it’s a quick visit and I have a train in an hour). ‘It’s hopped with Styrian Goldings as per normal and uses Goose Island’s yeast, but it’s 3.9% as opposed to 5% in bottle. The idea was to do an English version of Honkers’ Ale.’ It’s good talking with the man (and I hope to visit his home town in the autumn), but I’ve got another sight in my targets given the time. Big in a rugby shirt, chatting with his father, no doubt recovering from the previous night’s visit to Brecon (and the eponymous brewery’s hospitality) is Richard Chennells from Zululand brewery. A man who looks like he would be happy to scrum down in the front row (I’ve just seen Invictus and remember how I chuckled at the team’s disgust with a crappy beer at the start of the movie — if anyone ever says that beer doesn’t matter show them this scene), he spends his time brewing and also seems to have time to visit every brewery in SA for a book he is working on; if you are heading out to SA this year for the football check him out (or read my forthcoming article in Scoff). Elsewhere Val-Dieu’s elfin brewster chats with Belgian tour expert Podge and I’m sure that there is a brewer guy from Hawaii wandering about as well.

Say what you like about Wetherspoons (and I will when I walk past one at 10am and see the pasty-faced groaners on their third pint of whatever’s their tipple), but they do confound. It’s cheap grog, cream-steam nonsense, lots of coffee, alkies having urgent conversations with each other at 11am, but on the other hand… For the last several years their beer festivals have featured foreign brewery collaborations — these have featured the likes of Stone and Kiwi 1001-ers Epic, while their current one introduces that unknown quantity, South African craft beer to the mix. It might be cask (and I speak as someone whose belief that cask-is-everything is so tempered, specially as I arrived after having lunch with the ever inspirational Alastair Hook over in Greenwich), but it’s still pushing beer to people who think that it begins and ends with the alpha and omega of brown and bitter (or even the sort of gold elves die to bring out of the mines of Leuven). Sadly, I had to leave as the hardened boozers of the Guild — Cole, Brown, Protz, Evans and Dredge — were getting tucked in, but Wetherspoons’ latest beer festival is something I would commend to the nation (but don’t start too early, 11am is respectable enough). 

Third Reich Brewing in Wetherspoons

Just reading Italy’s Sorrow by James Holland, an excellent account of the last year of the war in Italy. On a beery note I’m struck by a reference to counterfeit messages from Italian males spirited off to Germany for forced labour; one of them has this presumably fictitious chap extolling the virtues of Berlin and how he’s ‘swapped wine for good beer’. Given that this is was supposed to be sent mid 1944, not only was Berlin under constant attack and probably not that lovely, hadn’t brewing been stopped in the Third Reich in 1943? Typical Nazi mendacity or did brewing continue?
BTW this post come courtesy of Wetherspoons’ WiFi in Taunton, near the station prior to a trip to London for the British Guild of Beerwriters AGM. The WiFi works and the Exmoor Stag is rich and malty, not freezing cold, leaving the sort of lovely lacework a laceworker would be proud of (though I cheated by noting that three pints had been pulled before it was my turn to be served — it is a lottery) — there are a fair smattering of boozers who have reached the stage where their mundane conversations have taken on the import of a political summit plus several chaps with their straw hats taking a break from Somerset’s cricket ground (I feel like doing that with cricket full stop). Oh dear, a little stout chap has rolled past splattering the walls with a gush of swearwords.
BTW that’s Nottingham at night not Berlin in 1944