Breaking hearts

It’s playing in the background, ‘never gonna break my heart again’, what Coward called the romance of cheap music, and I ponder on the beer in front of me, Zundert Trappist, and I wonder if a beer can break your heart, or for that matter can a brewery break your heart, or is the hurt that some of us feel when a beer or a brewery vanishes similar to the two minute emotions of a song — transitory and enduring only as long as the song echoes in our thoughts?

And as I drink I think back to the morning as my coach pulled into Victoria at 6am and I saw a guy walking up the road, in full early 60s rockabilly (or was it greaser?) regalia — peaked hat, leather jacket with badges and slogans written on it, including one for the Pirates (Johnny Kidd and the Pirates I think), old school bike boots with white socks rolled up at top, jeans tucked in, denim new and durable, an outfit that was popular when the Beatles drank Mackeson, London Pride had an ad campaign based on an LP and Albert Seaton swigged his body weight in beer on a Saturday night and fell down the stairs in his local pub…

And the point is that this man was both celebrating and mourning a past he would never know, but things have moved on and those who want to drink the beers they drank in the past will find that they too have moved on, meanwhile the Trappist beer is ok, sugary and blanket-like in its smoothness, but I feel like I’m back in that coach watching the rockabilly guy, reliving a beer that never knew its past but is content to stride along the pavement, unafraid of what contemporary time thinks, undaunted in the pomp and passion of asking the past if it can answer the phone or come to the door or unfurl its flag and never break your heart again.

Death becomes the Pine Box

‘Bruce Lee was brought here when he died and his coffin was carried out by Steve McQueen and Lee Marvin.’ A pause in the conversation. A sip from a glass of Speedway Stout — chocolate, vanilla, booze, darkness visible. I looked at the man next to me at the bar, friendly, tattooed, probably politically aware in a way I’m not, willing him to continue the conversation, he was drinking North Coast Old Rasputin. ‘I guess there would have been others helping to carry it but the Cooler King and the Wand'rin' Star man are the guys.’

In Seattle at May’s end, stumping the streets, listening to the singing fishmongers in Pike Place Market and asking the barman at the Elysium bar Avatar why the place was so quiet on a Wednesday night, I went up the hill to Pine Box. A former funeral home (this brief home to Bruce Lee), this was the bar that most people I met recommended I should visit. So I did.

Inside, there was hip-hop in the background, which I always used to enjoy, and stools at a long bar, with 30 taps behind, the steel glittering in the light. Robust, young, friendly, lively, noisy — I liked the noise, the starling like chatter, it reminded me of a Brit pub on a Friday night, people unafraid to have a few beers and make sounds that might frighten those who come in with a smartphone and a list with which they would like to tick off in silent. This was smart beer drinking, enjoyable beer drinking, pleasurable beer drinking, beer drinking as a joy rather than a duty (which is what I’ve always said), beers from the likes of Rodenbach (Grand Cru), 21^st Amendment, Hopworks Urban Brewery (Kronan the Bourbarian Baltic Porter) and Hair of the Dog (Session IPA), all thrusting their way forward, all vying for space in my glass.

‘Any ghosts here,’ I asked the barman. He handed me my serving of Kronan and smiled and went on to serve someone else. I relaxed and listened to the river run of voices and wondered which one was the one who wasn’t really there.

Jam Jar

When I was a kid my brother and I had a guinea pig that we called Reginald (to be honest it might as well have been Regina, we had no idea what gender it was). Its hutch was in a greenhouse and during the winter I would fill a jam jar with hot water, wrap it in a bit of old blanket and hope that it would work as a sort of hot water bottle to keep him warm. It seemed to work as Reg survived this particularly cold winter but it does feel a bit daft when I look back at it now.

I thought of Reg for the first time in years when enjoying a glass or two of Lagunitas IPA in the Hops and Glory in Islington. It’s an amiable and easy-going kind of pub, named after a certain book that anyone with any interest in beer should read and majoring in (let’s not beat around the bush) craft beers. So there I was with my first pint of Lagunitas’ IPA and decided that I needed another to get to the heart of what the beer was all about. Another please, the bar man nodded, would I like it one of Lagunitas’ branded ‘jam jars’. He showed me it and yes it looked like a jam jar. Does it hold a pint I asked? It did. I’ve drank from some curious glasses (if I order a glass of Kwak in my local there are always people who have never seen the test-tube-in-a-wooden-bracket glass before and it seems to cause a minor sensation but then we live in the countryside and we still turn out in droves to watch the air ambulance land on the football field) and once at Boston airport I rather enjoyed a glass of Sam Adams from that peculiar glass that the brewery developed with the aim of enhancing the flavour and aroma of the beer (I thought it worked even though the glass’s shape reminded me of that bloke’s face in The Scream).

Back to the jam jar. As I write I’m still trying to work out my feelings about it — yes it was simple and utilitarian, easy to hold, and the perfect alternative to the handled dimpled hipster’s choice mug (the sort of glass you’d imagine Ukip members drink from), but I’m still not sure whether it’s a bit of a gimmick. What does it say about the beer in the glass? That it’s ordinary and down-to-earth? That nobody really cares how it’s served. That it’s quirky (as in Timmy Mallet rather than Dali)? On the other hand why shouldn’t an IPA become as John Doe as PBR or Bud? It’s a lovely beer, being spicy, peppery, hoppy, fruity, dry and bitter over several layers, a beer that given time I would have studied for the rest of the evening. Yet, the jam jar haunts me, I wonder why?

Black Cat blues

It’s that moment that never leaves you; it’s the memory that itches, that demands to be scratched; the memory that you also use as a security blanket, a warm comfort against whatever assails your day-to-day life. It’s memory as a motivator: George S Patton with a speech that emboldened his guys to go up north after Normandy. It’s the memory as a firecracker sparking off a spitting, hissing, fizzing firework display of light, fire and noise within the cranium; it’s Marcel Proust dipping his biscuit into a cup of Rosie Lee and being brought back to his childhood.

For me, tonight, today, tomorrow, memory is the cold clear day, the crispness of the air, the big sky, and then the glass of Orval in the pub, but also the sight of Westmalle Dubbel in the fridge at the back of the bar, all of it taking me to one destination: Bruges. Which is where I was two years ago this week, researching the bars for an article for the Sunday TimesTravel Magazine (paywall I am afraid).

There is one bar, amongst the many I visited, that plays with me, that remains with me; not because it had great food (Cambrinus); not because it had a delightful crepuscular sense of seclusion (’t Poatersgat); and not because you have to go there when visiting Bruges (’t BrugesBeertje). This bar somehow takes me back to an imagined past, a mythical (in a personal sense) past, a past that I feel I might have briefly experienced back in the 1980s, but perhaps I didn’t.

It’s the Black Cat, a small corner bar at the folklore museum close to the Jerusalem church, one of Bruges’ hidden treasures. When I visited there were six beers, both bottle and draft, and I chose what was called Trappist Steenbrugge, a dubbel that was rich, dark and chocolaty. Even though it was part of the museum I felt I was drinking in a bar that would have been part of old Bruges as the large clock ticked away, reminding myself of mortality and time’s fleeting passage. The bar displayed bits and bobs of Bruges’ past, had wooden tables and chairs and a 100-year-old music box that worked if you put half a Euro into it; there was even a colourful vision of Gambrinus on a barrel raising a toast. A couple of men sat quietly in the corner as if meditating on their beer. Something about the bar (and the museum) gave me a false memory of the past, the feeling that I used to visit bars like this in the past (whereas in reality I was in school) — it’s a museum bar for Christ’s sake and yet it’s playing havoc with my memory.

The clock ticks, voices hum, the glass of beer on the lips revives and once again a bar takes me somewhere else in time, to somewhere I might or might have not been. As Yukio Mishima wrote at the end of his amazing tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, ‘memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here’. For me that is the great, magical, enchanting strength of a bar or pub — it can sometimes make time fade into the shadows and let reality becomes a confusion of memory. And all with a glass of beer to hand.

Moeder Lambic Fontainas

A long straight bar, solid wood tables Guardsman-straight, arranged in rows, the elements, the hardness, an Atlantic coast bashed by the waves, Cornwall, Brittany, Kerry, take your pick, the sense of being rooted to one place. The glitter of glasses from behind the bar, tubular stainless steel from where the beer flows; signals and signs and symbols dashing through the air and by this way drawing in the drinkers. Moeder Lambic Fontainas.

Babbling voices raising like steam from a street grill in some 50s noirscape, guttural Flemish, fluted French, English flitting in and out like bats twirling through the air of a summer’s evening. Bowls of stew, sweet, fulsome, meaty, a sleet storm of flavour; stoemp ladled out, creamy, buttery, root vegetable, potato mashed and smashed; rough and rugged cuts of charcuterie and pungent cheese that stills the restless tongue for a while. Moeder Lambic Fontainas.

The beer selection, chalked up, V for Victory, the resistance fighting back perhaps. Tapped into glasses come along the likes of Cantillon’s Kriek Lou Pepe and Fou’ Foune, De Ranke’s scorchingly bitter Hop Harvest 2012 and the same brewery’s ever dependable Cuvee, plus many others, whose names stand out on the blackboard, chalked up there: V for Victory. Moeder Lambic Fontainas.

Thank you Brussels.

English Pub

For a moment you might think of the front of an old galleon, rigging done away with, landlocked and laid up until the anchor of time drags it into the depths; or maybe there’s a more metaphysical effect on the senses, the Jaffa orange light that washes on the top window and its surround of brick and flint conjuring up the vision of a shelter from the storms that toss and turn us through our everyday lives, a haven, a den, a cave, an inn. The leaf-free branches of the neighbouring trees are traced across the sky, nature’s idea of a child’s squiggle (and what are the graffiti artist’s epileptic daubs but a child’s squiggle in adult clothes?), reach out to the redbrick chimney — late Victorian, early Edwardian perhaps? — that lifts itself in the style of a perpendicular beacon up to the heavens (an ironic gesture on the behalf of the builder given the closeness of the city cathedral?), and behind the curved façade, beyond the shipwrecked benches, is the pub to which I am drawn to on this winter late afternoon, when that season’s mockery of a sun wipes itself out beyond the bland, mole-blind cloud cover that drapes itself across the sky with the finality of a shroud. Inside, through the door that has seen thousands stride in search of that indefinable something that only the pub can provide: a glass of beer, a tot of rum, a snifter of red, a plate of bread and cheese, ham and eggs, fish and chips, the prospect of conversation, compatibility with one’s fellow man or woman, the consolation of silence in a corner with a book, a journal, an iPad, the passing of time, the passage of time, the ease of time that the pub provides. And in this pub I know as soon as I pass through the door that I will choose a glass of Adnams Southwold Bitter, a break-dance of a bitter, flexible, complex, simple seeming, the crisp biscuit-like, grainy body mixing it with the deep voluminous orange notes from the English hops that gave themselves to this drink of mine. And in the Adam & Eve I finish my glass and turn the page of my book and tune in and out of the voices of those who come in here day after day and decide that I will have another one. In this pub and that pub and every pub there is always time for another glass of beer. 

La Capsule Lille

Six silver stainless steel tubes stand on the bar at La Capsule in Lille and reflect the world — 18 inches high, miniature silos, places of storage from which beers such as 5AM Saint, Duchesse de Bourgogne and Mikkeller Snowball emerge. The tubes reflect a distorted world, a world that exists as long as these tubes keep being polished, a looking glass world filtered through a post-industrial gauze. Alice fell down a hole and took up a job selling credit-enhanced dreams long ago, so these six tubes at La Capsule will do.

And what do they reflect?

Two men, out on a Monday night, laughter brought along like an extra friend, guttural northern French, glasses of St Bernardus’ fragrant, orange blossom witbeer to hand, a bright bosomy beer that emerges from the glass and demands a chicken samosa; meanwhile a quartet of students, two guys, two girls, sitting at a high table near the door, one of them darting in and out with her mobile, quench their thirst on what I know from overhearing their orders is Roman’s Epsom salts fury of a Pilsner. I and son sit in a corner, I with a Abbey Des Roc Brune, he with a cola, talking over the day’s battlefields.

There’s a definite Belgian beer bar feel about La Capsule: dark wood along with the shining stars of stainless steel mix and merge; the lighting is dim but the music is refreshing different, being what seems to me a nostalgic soundtrack of Antwerpian hardcore metal disco from the 1990s.

And it strikes me, as I have another glass of Vivant’s luscious, sensuous triple, that the sort of beer or bar I like is reminiscent of a tilted smile from a beautifully imperfect woman; a feeling that has its ups and downs and peaks and troughs and rough edges and smoothed out corners, all of which make life more interesting than if you are married to Barbie who makes the perfect dinner every time but really leaves you feeling: is that it? It is a beer or a bar that is worth taking a journey with to see what happens as time passes.