Cloudwater

Scraps of conversation swirl in the air, torn pieces of paper, rising, whirling, falling, settling on the ground — sour mango salt two weeks same pale ale cold chain time — phones are handled and deployed, words tapped out, memo to self, this is what I drank last night, the rumble of trains above, deep, brutal, an imagined blow to the solar plexus, the echo inside when I knuckle tap the corrugated metal that lines the walls, reminiscent of the kind of container architectural fantasists might call home and the rest of us a container. There’s a daub of colour on a banner at the back of the railway arch (for this is where I am), with more colour-filled banners tacked to the curved ceiling. The bar in the corner has wood for its counter, but below, its base looks as if it wouldn’t be out of place in a garden centre feature. The beer menu is printed on plain paper, with the beers listed beneath the titles of yeast, malt and hops. I have a 2/3rd glass of the Helles Tettnanger, which with its light grainy malt, clean lemony notes and dry and juicy finish reminds me of fresh Augustiner Helles. I then have the Super Noble, an amber lager brewed in collaboration with US brewery Notch. It’s rather delicious, cool and crunchy, full-bodied and boding well for my soul with every sip. Meanwhile, more drinkers talk and amble and gesticulate about me, a crowd of boots and trainers and the odd pair of brogues and hoodies and pea-jackets and a couple of dogs. Not bad for the first night of the Cloudwater Bermondsey tap.

• Early days I know, it needs time to warm up, it’s a bit cold perhaps, but it’s early days and I will be back. 

London, Saturday morning

London, Saturday morning. The sourness of a smile when the owner of the smile realises that life has taken a wrong turning and the profitable journey that this person, this owner of the smile, this moaner of every mile taken, thought that they were embarking on, is not the most appropriate way to describe Kernel’s London Sour. Instead, I would be thinking of an expansive smile, a hug perhaps, a friendly nudge in the ribs, a salad of avocado with mozzarella, rocket, basil upon which balsamic vinegar has been spotted, a cradle of civilised behaviour, a juicy, well-tempered kind of beer, a spike of sourness, a palate-changing game, a rounded, grounded kind of beer that tarts, rasps, fruits, Berliner Weisse’s it up like nobody’s business. Then there’s Partisan’s X-Ale, which seems to suggest the sort of beer that hopheads tremble alone at night in their garrets about. ‘It’s a Victorian mild,’ I’m told by Partisan Andy, who I originally met at the Jolly Butchers in the company of Pete Brown. He supplied the British Guild of Beer Writers with his deep and gastronomically able Quad last year, a robust cluster of dark flavours that soar out of a glass, the mast of an arc of flavours that park themselves on the palate with a mallet-hard persistence. I grew up despising mild, the skinflint’s beer as we used to say around the table in the King’s Head, northern old men’s muck, towels and hankies beer; but that gulping sound is me swallowing words, galloping backwards in time and bringing back favour: X-Ale is the kind of beer (if this mild be a beer) that lounges with a long-limbed languor, a beer full of fortitude and luxuriousness that — for once — puts mild into another, more enjoyable, bracket of sensuality. Over at Brew by Numbers the voices are throwing shapes, the voices are knowing and fateful. A man with a flat cap onto which a brace of roe deer’s antlers are embedded stands with his friends; I think I get the message. In my glass goes the Coffee Porter, which gives me a message — drink me; it’s brittle and bright, brisk and breakfast-like; a beer with which I would normally start the day perhaps? And finally I go into another railway arch, where Anspach & Hobday call themselves home and a double IPA plinys it for me, a great blast, a deep, deep well of orange, the kind of deepness in which you can imagine a Game of Thrones bad guy is thrown, alongside an ecstatic bitterness, an all encompassing bitterness perhaps, that lifts its arms to the air and thanks whatever deity it presumes to worship on this day that was a Saturday in Bermondsey.