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.

52 years ago this month

Here we are, a copy of Mild & Bitter (thanks to Steve who handed it over yesterday in the Bridge), the house magazine of the long-gone Ely brewery of Cardiff. Christmas 1958 it says on the cover, and there’s a cartoon of a humanistic wooden cask on the back alongside some doggerel suggesting a selection of the company’s beers to go with Christmas lunch: ‘When turkey’s served on Christmas Day, My I suggest an IPA? If festive fare makes father groan, then bring him round with Brewer’s Own…And when the moon and stars come out, it’s time for Gold and Silver Stout.’ Stand down Shakespear there’s a new quill in town. Another reminder that beer and food is not a novel invention, but it’s just that drinkers and brewers forgot about it during the nice shiny modern 1960s. Inside the mag there are black and white pictures of long-dead licences (well they would be long-dead now, but were very much alive in 1958) taking up the helm of a new pub, an article on good cellaring (how very Cask Marque), an ad for Rhine wine and one for Babycham, plus a four page piece on the moon (that’s the big pearly thing in the sky not some broken down boozer in Cardiff docks). The editorial sounds familiar: the headline is WHY PICK ON PUBS? and the text contrasts the difference in opening hour regulations between pubs and hotels and clubs and then there’s a spread of cartoons detailing 10 things that a licensee can do — for instance, keep their pubs open during non-permitted hours for customers to watch the TV (but obviously not have a drop), chuck out drunks and allow customers to do their pools coupons in the pub. There’s a sense of cheery optimism running through the whole magazine, a sense of permanence in the attractions of the pub and the brewery’s fortunes — how very poignant to see that within a year Ely merged with Rhymney and then Whitbread turned up in the 1960s. The whole place shut in 1982. Do you think that the people who produced this magazine would have had an idea of what was coming?