The hanging hooks of a pub’s imagined past

Here we are in the Alexandra Hotel in Derby, a two-roomed trad pub that is always somewhere I make time for whenever I have time in Derby (maybe I’m also paying my respects to the late Simon Johnson as this was where the two of us ended up after a fun afternoon of drinking not long before he died). And so I sit with a glass of Pentrich Citra IPA (hazy, plumpish in its fruitiness and rapier-like in its bitterness) and there is a joy in my heart as I note the hooks that hang beneath the brow of the scuffed, dark brown bar. It’s a habit I have, a tradition perhaps, or maybe a nervous tic, but all too often when I find myself standing (or sitting) at a bar, elbow in a puddle of spilt beer and crushed crisps, I always put my hand beneath the brow and search for a hook, usually something on which I can hang my rucksack (just like the chap has done in the photo). It’s a neat little aid, a helping hand to the drinker, perhaps even a link with the kind of imagined past that some pubs are so adept at. 

Are you a beer man or a cider man?

Are you a beer man or a cider man? Stentorian and fruity, in the sunny river-facing space of the pub in which I sat,  the words floated over my shoulders and disturbed my reading of an old copy of Granta about death and dying. My father enjoyed his beer, came the reply from the woman behind me. Her husband (I presume) said that he preferred wine but was enjoying the glass of cider, for after all aren’t we in cider country (even though I had my back to them I can sense a theatrical wave of the hand). I have always seen pubs as something akin to those pre-radar concrete sound detectors from the 1920s that were thought ideal to pick up the drone of approaching aircraft, reflectors of sound from the people around. It’s one of the most entertaining parts of pub life and I’m sure my own voice often becomes part of the saloon bar song. Are you a beer man or a cider man?

In praise of early doors

Years ago, living in Cambridge, passing the Free Press on a sunny Saturday morning, my mate and I, noting the open door, 10.30am, popped in, with the promise of an early pint, just one, or maybe two, but as all good pub plans used to go in those long ago days, it all unravelled and we emerged, eyes blinking at the strength of the afternoon sun, at 3pm. Despite this, from then on, there emerged a love of early doors, not an obsession, but an occasional treat on a par with greeting the sunrise in June and walking through empty streets and spotting the closed curtains, the world in its temporary grave. Breakfast beer this is not, though I have come face to face with this particular phenonamena, the first time at the Six Bells brewpub in Bishops’ Castle, a visit with 11 other beer writers at 9am, a talk on mashing and fermentation expected, but heads nodding in unison as the brewer/owner Nev bellowed, ‘who’s for a breakfast beer?’.

And so, this morning, another early doors treat, en route to somewhere, and time to spare in between trains. My palate is fresh, the sun is shining and there’s an earthy, carpet-like sourness in the air of the pub into which I walk. Not unpleasant. There’s also a strain of cleaning fluid wafting through the air; a familiar aroma, of which I have a few years experience. Outside on the concourse, where the smokers often huddle conspiratorially in groups, émigrés from both the pub and the offices that tower over, imperious and insect-like in their indifference, there’s a brisk breeze and several tall banners wave and shiver in a way familiar to fans of Kurosawa’s Ran (I’m thinking the battle scenes).

‘I’m just having a second Stella, while Nan’s having a tea,’ giggles a woman draped in luridly coloured scarves, while her bare wrists shine with several bracelets. There’s a chap at the bar — a mop of hair, Ringo circa 63 just out of bed perhaps, hipster jeans, half-mast at the ankle, canvas shoes that my son and his mates wear off duty. ‘A cappuccino mate, large one, extra shot.’ The pub was quiet when I came in. It’s now beginning to fill up, voices collection and rising upwards like bees beavering away in a bush. My glass is nearly empty, a can of Sixpoint’s Bengali Tiger providing an elemental and elegant shot of hops, and the train will be ready to go in a mo. Time to leave but not before remembering that early door on a sunny morning in Cambridge.

Sharp

The sign makes me smile. It’s outside a pub on the road to Exeter, a pub that is primed and cocked for the Easter weekend. As we drive past I see the sign that makes me smile. ‘Something for the kiddies, Good Friday Easter egg hunt, 3pm, SHARP!’ So what makes me smile? The use of the word kiddies seems archaic, as if the person who wrote it wasn’t used to dealing with kids; it makes me wonder if this Easter egg hunt for the kiddies is something that has been put on under pressure perhaps, from an area manager, brewery rep or partner. And then the exclamatory use of ‘SHARP!’ — now that really made me smile. If dealing with kids you’d expect a free and easy manner, but this suggests something closer to a sergeant-major ordering reluctant recruits about, getting them to do something on the double. And this sign makes me then think about the language that publicans and brewers and their PR people use — sometimes it feels as if a Thesaurus has been dredged with a deep sea net and all manner of words have been brought to the surface, some of them lying there, flapping about and gasping for breath. Things are, of course, awesome; let’s smash it (what? a window, a tea cup?); it’s all been brought to the customer with passion (what with blood, sweat and tears? sounds a bit unhygienic to me); and naturally everyone is ready to rock. And back in that pub this afternoon the kiddies will be expected to turn up sharp at 3pm and look for their Easter eggs. Woe betide any that turn up late.

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.

In a hotel bar in Poděbrady

In a hotel bar in Poděbrady, a small town on the River Labe (or Elbe), east of Prague, north of Kutna Hora (a depressed vicar of a town where I found a closed brewery in 2011 as well as a church full of human bones). It is a small hotel bar, slightly smoky, serving just PU, a TV over one wall, ice hockey on, a marionette hangs from the ceiling.The hotel and its bar is next to the river, and the bar has eight men inside, a beer waiter in black and white, CCTV on legs, constantly watching over the drinkers, who has an empty glass, who is due to finish, who is ok for the moment but still drinking quite swiftly. Glasses of Midas-like golden beer topped with thick foam are brought out, the foam as white as the snow that last night dis-robed itself so obligingly on the grass bank I can see outside through the window; the beer bracing in bitterness, seductive in sweetness, resiny, a fine expression of Saaz, a resounding bitterness in the finish. No other beer is sold in this hotel bar. The conversation of the pub people interrupts my daydreams, the yarns and yawns at the end of the working day, and I catch the eye of the waiter as I drain my glass: another one please and for a moment we are the best of friends. 

This is a place past which I walked on my way to see the Labe (or Elbe) flow by, a mighty river it will become, a river that will cut and thrust its way through the Czech lands before taking a name change on the border, and there was this hotel, looking comfortable and casual, offering the sight of people sitting at a table, glittering glasses of beer in their hands, a sense of bustle and consolation somehow being transmitted through the window, interpreted and acted on, in the act of myself walking through the door. And I am so glad I walked through that door, for once inside I found the sounds and sights of pub life that always make me feel happy - for is not happiness possibly the mark of every pleasing pub or bar that impresses? 

Picture this

Here we are in our pubs, safe and secure, fastened in from the storms outside, coming and going, talking to each other, talking to dogs, giving them a pat on the head, all of us with a drink to hand. Here we are in this place, the pub, where we return tomorrow night, the night after or next week, our laughter and words raising to the rafters like smoke from a fire — does this laughter and do these words linger on the ether so that future generations might perhaps hear a whisper that might or might not have come from the person who stands against the bar, laughter and glass in hand. I like the idea of pubs as repositories of experience and feeling — after all people have had such a great time in them (and continue to do so) over the centuries and war and riot and chaos and the smoking ban will not stop these scenes from continuing. These are taken both on a Sunday lunchtime and on a Friday evening when people descend on this pub (as they do most days) and use it as a social club, which is no bad thing. Those that want pubs where fights and football and bad form are the norm should look elsewhere.

A pub fantasy for Christmas week

And it’s now when I get to thinking that cause it’s Christmas, the brakes go on, the pace loses pace and I grab more time to meander along the byways and pathways of pub and beer fantasy…and so there I am thinking about some of the places I would like to sit down and study my beer in during these few days before Christmas…and for some reason I’m first at Bateman’s Visitor Centre, not a pub as such but a place for me that takes me to the heart of Bateman’s beers, which I rather enjoy…for a start I love getting off the train and seeing the windmill poking up above the village, George Bateman’s bottle collection, the smell of the brewery during brewing time and — when I was last there at least and I hope this hasn’t changed — the chance of having a glass of Salem Porter…and while I am in the east, I will travel down to Essex, first of all dropping into Walberswick to enjoy a glass and a meal at the redoubtable Anchor, before continuing to the Thatchers Arms in Mount Bures. On the border between Essex and Suffolk it sits and here I would savour the company of Dylan the dog whilst feeling the sashay of flavour that is Crouch Vale’s Brewers Gold…then to London where I would leave the craft beer bars for another day and embed myself in the Royal Oak in Borough…an afternoon in this marvel of pub life in search of the secrets behind Harvey’s Porter is time well spent…I would sit there with the Buddha of contemplation on my shoulder, in search of a sense of enlightenment until it be time to take the journey westwards and home…so I’m on my way home and it’s the Red Lion in Cricklade that will prove to be my next stop (actually I tell a lie, I fancy a quick visit to Oxford where my recent plunge into re-watching Inspector Morse can be emboldened by a glass in the Turf Tavern – it should be a bit quieter now that the students have famished themselves off to families far and wide)…ah the Red Lion, the pub where the locals gather to discuss the world and the price of beer, where the ales on show include old school bitters, new school goldies and grinning, palate-grabbing hop devils, all of which are the ideal accompaniment to time at a table catching a glimpse of a clock taking its time to circle the dial…and I would also enjoy the fried pea fritters with a bowl of the Red Lion’s robust, country-style chips (oh and to finish, two of three times, there would be a bottle of Odell, or maybe a Le Baladin beer)…home nearly so I would stop off in Bath and go to the Old Green Tree, deep in its womb of pubbery, a place where I went to immediately after the rugby world cup in 2003 and where recently engaged in a conversation with a woman as if we were old friends (which we were not)…and if there is time a jar of Bellringer at the Star higher up in the town, a warren of rooms that for me engage my senses with the box of delights that is the pub…but this being a fantasy I’m back home though with my much beloved local pubs and for that I give much thanks…

A pub is a pub is a pub

A pub is a pub is a pub. In the cellar bar I go, in the area around Prague Castle where tourists refugee themselves about during the day, but when the light went on Monday night and the mist came down like the proverbial wolf on a flock of sheep, it became quiet and mysterious. Magical Prague, footsteps on the cobbles, a shadow hurrying by on the other side of the street, the watery yellow light of a bar or a hotel. And so I came to U Hrocha — in English the Hippo. A cellar bar, or if you want a man cave with honorary women, smoke everywhere, the robust cuisine of Czech food (six men stabbing away at a big platter of pork in the centre of their table). Beer? PU on tap. Décor? Nicotine yellow paint, arched ceiling, stone. This is the pub as a hideaway or if you want a concert hall with the noise of people (men with the honorary women) enjoying themselves. Walk in, there are looks and then people carry on with the business of the very opposite of sensory deprivation: chew, slap, slash, eat, the men are eating, the women are eating, Svejk is eating. Beer in the glass, a glass full of beer, snow white soft foam on the top of the glass. Drink. A pub is a pub is a pub.  

Port Street Beer House and Cantona stare-alikes

Indie rock fans on the Veltins. Young guys with wispy beards, trying to stare like Eric Cantona, a look that says ‘I’ve got a glass of IPA is Dead and I’m going to drink it’. Student girl at the bar laughs when she says to no one in particular how good her glass of My Antonia is. At the back of the room, there’s a table with four blokes, after work beer men, dedication writ loud in their disdain for fashion, pint of whatever he’s having. Moravka for me mate. Look around: there are lads in here wearing the sort of blue, white-edged windcheaters that normally blend in with white pumps, flicking through the beer menu, oohing and aahing and ordering Infrareds all round. Meanwhile, in this space in which the architecture is of a hip and happening bar — smartly sanded floorboards, reclaimed perhaps, soft light on the cusp of going harsh, austere seats and tables, the very shock of the post-modernist new, two floors — I’ve joined the Eric Cantona stare-alikes with a glass of BrewDog’s IPA is Dead, Sorachi edition, which I don’t care for that much (and I’m probably alone): soft pungent hop, bitter shrieks of a banshee in an old Irish country house at the back of the throat, unbalanced, reminiscent of old footage I once saw of an experimental wartime tank with too large an engine that landed on its side. German I think it was. Still, you have to try this things and I guess I’m alone in my disinclination to order another glass. If I shut my eyes I think I’m in some new craft bar in the US or even Belgium (minus food of course), but I’m in Manchester, at the Port Street Beer House, which fortuitously was only a couple of doors away from where I was staying that night. 

Marble Arch, a wonderful place, was where I’d earlier dined on battered poached egg and Marble Chocolate (in a glass). I do love that place with its touches of Victorian/Edwardian high drama especially something that I never noticed before: a couple of old pics of a starchy middle aged couple, he perhaps a university big wig and she just happy to bask in his shadow; next door to her, a black and white etching from the 1950s of a flat capped bloke with pint in hand. Is this a deliberate placing? The democracy of the pub in action? Then there’s the joy of people watching with Pint in hand: a couple of students on a date, she almost embarrassed to be ordering beer; at the bar two sporty blokes, one a newcomer to the bar who asks have you got anything like Tetley, while a postman taking a break from the nearby exchange curses the moment he spilt beer on his trews. 

But back to Port Street, it’s new and smells new, is almost self-consciously new, and ironically enough — after Cask, the Rake, Euston Tap etc — it’s not the shock of the new, it’s just new. And I like this newness, and then I wonder maybe this is part of a new wave that won’t be permanent. Further furrowing of the brow: is this a problem? 

With our pubs we want a continuity, an ossification even, because the majority are linked to their communities and their communities have been there for centuries in one way or another — we want our local to have some link with those who have been before even if the place was a dive before it was jazzed up (it’s like a pub that spent 20 years on the scrap heap: you conveniently forget that and hark back to how it might have been on VE night or when Queen Victoria died, even though it was perhaps crap then as well). Something like Port Street BH works in a city, where there are fewer roots and links and life is fast flowing, especially places with plenty of students coming and going. Port Street BH has no sense of history; you do not walk into it and admire the friezes or imagine what happened here on Christmas Eve 1954. On the other hand, Port Street BH is like being handed a blank sheet of paper (or even empty shop) and told to come up with a concept; it’s like writing: before the word there’s an empty space, it’s one’s duty/job/inclination/urge/desire to conquer that space and fill it with words. In that sense, the creators of Port Street BH are just like writers.  

And so, what am I trying to say? I visited an ale pub with some time on its hands earlier on in the evening and found it dead boring (despite a goodly number of taps) and not the sort of place I wanted to linger, I am not going to go into the details, I am sure that there are plenty of people who like it, but it was wasted on me and reminiscent of why I avoided plenty of London pubs in the 1980s. For that reason I can only applaud Port Street BH to the hilt and urge you to live for the moment and grab a beer amid the aroma of newly sanded floorboard. 

Is this a Brains pub?

Is this a Brains’ pub? The City Arms. The barman nods. In name only says the chap at the bar as he looks through the mullion-paned windows at Gate 3 of the Millennium Stadium. I was going to a match at Arms Park in the 70s, he continues, bumped into Stanley Baker with a trilby on his head, bit of a tough nut he was, he’d had a few as well, he was off to the rugby. Wish I’d had a camera. He died a couple of years later from lung cancer. Do you like what they’ve done here I ask? Not bad comes the reply. But is it a Brains pub? 

Oh yes there’s Brains Dark, SA and Bitter, but there’s also Marble Best (grapefruit star crossed with tangerine, mouth-catching bitterness that clangs away like a demented bell-ringer), Abbey Vale’s Resolution and Otley’s O5, plus others (14 cask in all). Taps and bottles also proliferate. The interior is honey-coloured distressed wood, while remembrance is the theme of décor: sepia-toned prints of yesteryear, old gents, old teams, old towns, rugby, beer and a label of the year award for 1989 for a Brains commemorative beer. This has only been open in this guise for several months, but I like — I’m not sure that the old boy nursing a half of SA does.

I wish I could stay longer but I’m off to Pontypridd prior to brewing with the Otley boys tomorrow (with BAD on tour in Aberdeen this is obviously the week for karaoke brewing). As beer bars start to emerge in all sorts of places (I hesitate to use the word grow, there will always be a pedantic desire for the statistical basis for the word grow and I don’t have it), the City Arms is a refreshing, warm and civilised celebration of beer, and rather brave of the brewery. Yes, this is a Brains pub.

Pub time

The clock strikes six and here they come, one strolling from a shaded lane, another two or three emerging from small doors in cosy thatched cottages, while a couple, hand in hand, stride purposefully across the church’s ancient graveyard. You can almost set your watch by them. We’re in the Suffolk village of Laxfield, picture postcard, the sort of place that Americans visit to remind themselves that England, their England, is still here. And at the centre of their imaginings is the village pub, in this case the wonderful Low House, or King’s Head as it officially known. Through the door, low ceiling, a pub without a bar, a queue for an Adnams, served straight from the cask (in my case a glass of Lighthouse). Great beer and a great looking pub, but I’m not writing about the Low House here (that’ll be somewhere else) — I’m more intrigued by pub time. The sight of those pub-goers emerging from their hiding places and wending their way to the pub as the clock struck six was fascinating; it’s almost as if us pub people have an internal clock that enables us to know when opening time is. 

It’s the same in my local, Woods, when the clock in the church tower that overlooks the small square where the pub resides, strikes six and here we are, several of us, waiting for Will the barman to unlock the bolt. Three out of four pubs in town close during the afternoon, so there’s a sense of ceremony, the end of the working day, as we tread the wooden boards and make for the bar. Proper Job please. 

When I was in college, when pubs weren’t open all day, several of us would always miss the 5pm lecture on a Friday evening so that we could be knocking on the door of the Free Press, eager to get into the snug before the CU boys. Us CCAT lads would love it as we dealt with our pints overlooked by a variety of varnished plaques and sculls and then a head would appear through the door, disappointment already growing like a stain. It pays to be on time with pubs.

How pubs can sometimes make you go all philosophical

Sitting in the No 2 Smoke Room at the Adelphi in Leeds, the former Tetley’s tap I”m told, a Timmy Taylor in my hand (I couldn’t quite bring myself to order a Tetley’s, it’s not a beer that I’ve ever really enjoyed). Amazed by the well-preserved aspect of the place, the Victoriana on show, the wood panels, the frosted etched glass and the feel that there are rooms everywhere to discover. It’s late afternoon and the sun is streaming in warm and relaxing, encouraging me to linger over my pint (though it’s not the best Landlord I’ve ever had). Outside trees’ branches remain bare and folk scurry about in their overcoats, but here in the pub, unable to see through the frosted glass, I can maintain the illusion that this dreadful winter has ended and spring is here. This is the pub as a creator of an alternative reality, a bastion against the outside world, the weaver of dreams. Pubs can move you away from the mundane things of real life. I don’t get that feeling in Café Nero, where it’s just a case of loading up on caffeine and hoping that they have free wifi.