Happy

I have seen these beers at the break of day. Commonplace, grey, staid and staying in the memory (for the wrongest reasons); a flash and a flush of bubbles on the tongue, a brisket of carbonic acid house on the roof of the mouth, the brief guff of sweet-corn on the nose (shake-a-leg there), crooked lagers croaking for customers in need of non-reflective refreshment. And it’s in this pub there and where these beers grimace at the bar-top, beery yobs leaning at the counter, come-and-drink-us clowns leering and cheering the nature of brinkmanship. And it’s to this pub I retire for a final beer before the night completely begins its progress towards the end. At the bar-top, having scanned the scowls of low-browed brands, a factory-handled Farange of brands that abandoned their homes in Burton, Glasgow, Northampton early one morning, I order a Guinness, a simple action, a stout that is purely one act, one note, irreversible in its decline, but now, at this time of night, in this part of town, it’s a beer that sounds chimes within the soul. Five minutes pass, the beer poured, the foam soared and then stopped and then topped and then passed past the sour-faced brands of crooked lager and I invest myself with a table and chair in the midst of this big chubby-faced club of a pub in which I feel myself both home and alone. A scattering of men, yes it’s mainly men, swapping tales of turmoil on scaffolds, down-he-went-broke-his-leg-like-it-was-an-egg, in a Yorkshire brogue, thick, yeasty, tarry-voiced, a contrast to the draught of Happy emerging like air from a juke-box that stands, hands on hips, bold as brass, beneath an altar-like scene of TV screen, upon which Gareth Bale, Alice-band intact, gurns and turns and shoots…but doesn’t score. Ah, the Guinness, creamy and in the theme of stout, watery coffee, a finish that fails to find a backer, a funder, a clouder, but in this ineluctable moment there’s something about this pub that brands me to it, that makes me want to join in and sing with Pharrell. Happy.

Roll out the barrel with the British Film Institute

Terry Jones and Michael Palin arse about as a couple of landlords in search of the perfect pint of Guinness. Pythonesque parodies abound: Jones is the oleaginous type, while Palin is more of a bumbler in this trade short for Guinness. A couple of cheery coves do a tour of English pubs towards the end of the Second World War (wonder where they got the petrol?), ending up getting their last orders in Battersea where one wall is given over to snaps of the local lads in the forces (there’s a real Powell and Pressburger feel to the thing). British movie matinee idol Michael Denison smoothes his Technicolor way through a winning hand of favourite inns in the 1950s (forerunners of the gastro-pub perhaps), the sort of place a fellow punts his girlfriend to. Meanwhile there’s 20 minutes or so about Bass as they move into hotels and clubs and keg and consider themselves part of the leisure industry — this is the moment that lager had been waiting for as we are shown a German brewing executive been greeted by the Bassers.

These films and more are all part of a fantastic DVD double set called Roll Out The Barrel that the BFI sent me last month. Featuring 19 short films made over the last 70 years, this DVD is an exemplary series of snapshots of British pub life. There is a sense in the earlier ones of the supreme importance of the British pub; it is not a place where people go to get colly-wobbled (as the puritans who hate pubs would have us believe), but where they socialise, be part of their community and take root in its very soil. As the years pass, lifestyles change and the old ways get stranded and left behind, like driftwood on the beach. The final film is from 1982 and is a Brewers Society sponsored 20-minute item narrated by Brian Redhead and featuring Bernard Cribbins*.

Roll Out The Barrel is masterly in its evocation of the British pub and all who sail on it. No doubt there will be some who will use it to keep banging on the big dark, negative drum for the death of the pub (and yes 16 close a week), but for the moment I would suggest you revel in the warm glow, the naïve modernism, the trade advice dressed up as comedy and the mixed sense of nostalgia it evokes, though not always correctly (not all the boozers look like the sort of place I would want to spend a night in, while the keg fonts dispensing uncraft keg are a real beer passion killer).

Roll Out The Barrel is released June 11, £22.99 and can be bought here. 

Every time I read or hear The Cribb’s name I cannot help thinking of the priceless moment in an Alan Partridge sketch when a precocious schoolboy asked him who’d played the lead part in the Hamlet Partridge had claimed to have seen — ‘er, Bernard Cribbins’ came the reply.

The best beer in the world for 15 minutes is…

Here’s an experiment: on the way back to Somerset from a tasting (ooh look there’s Newbury dashing past), I decide I want a drink with my packet of crisps. Arkells 3B, Strongbow, Carlsberg or Guinness? What a choice, and all in cans. I plump for the latter, I haven’t drunk it out of a can for years and recently have been enjoying the odd pint at various rugby clubs as I follow my lad around the schools and clubs of the west country (oh look it’s Wednesday it must be Glastonbury or is it Tavistock?). So there’s a can of Guinness to the right of me, some of it spilt (Hungerford rushes by, an enticing looking Fuller’s pub by the station), but most of it in a plastic glass — such connoisseurship.

Why am I doing this? I think it’s because I spend my time being precious about my beer — had a swift half of Schönramer’s Roggen bier at the White Horse on the way back to Paddington and very good it was; I like their beers a lot, I remember being introduced to their brewmaster Eric Toft at the WH a few years back. Maybe one can be too precious and forget that the majority of beers that people drink are the sort of beers that I dismiss. Budweiser — I like rice with curry not in beer. John Smith – shaving foam. And so on. But, strangely enough, Guinness is still regarded with fondness.

So how does it taste? It’s cold, it’s got some body to it, some roast burnt notes, no creaminess, singed chocolate/overused coffee beans, fast finish, not unpleasant but — and here is a big but — given that I have spent the lunchtime evaluating beers like Brooklyn Chocolate Stout, Wms Bros’ 80/-, Aventinus, Jaipur and Glazen Toren’s magnificent gusher of a Saison, d’Erpe Mere, it has a lot to live up to.On the other hand it’s suiting my mood of the moment and perfectly acceptable. So for the moment it is the best beer in the world (though I might have a cider at the Plough before getting the bus home when I get into Taunton).

The landlord drops a glass

Sunday afternoon pints. My mate’s been in the Bridge since 2pm and you’d think he was celebrating Ireland’s win over Italy given the amount of Guinness he has shipped onboard. I’ve just popped in for a quick Otter Ale and then the landlord drops a glass behind the bar. A cheer resounds, which takes me back to my youth — whenever anyone dropped a glass in the pub a cheer would go up. I had not heard this sound for years. Is the survival of this tradition akin to the sort of folk memories that associate a huntsman on a horse with the marauding Norman knights from hundreds of years ago? Or just loutish behaviour by my mate?