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| The Salisbury - a Victorian Pub |
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| The Nut Tree - smallest pub in England |
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| fish and chips |
Pubs are still the great equalizer in Britain. Working blokes and financiers, who fancy a pint, rub shoulders in what has always been a sharpened axe to the English barriers of class, the Pub.
The first time I drank Brit beer, in decades past, I’d been warned with the standard poppycock. “They drink their beer flat and warm. Terrible stuff!”
Yeah, it’s terrible to sit your bottom down in an historic and infinitely comfortable place, warm yourself at a fire while sipping a bit of liquid history and chatting with the locals.
Expecting something akin to warm spit? Got news for ye. First, let’s get some things straight. Brit beer is not served warm. They keep their kegs in the cellar, with a temperature of around 50ºF (10ºC). That’s not going to get frost on your fingernails, but it’s not exactly bikini warm. Secondly, Brit beer is brewed with top acting yeast, rather than American and European bottom feeding yeast. What’s up with that? Less natural carbonation remains in the beer. I’m not going to go into malts and hops and how many monks can dance on the head of a barrel. You can read about it yourself, well into the night.
When I say historic, what do I mean? I’ll give you a quick glimpse. The Mayflower Pub sits next to the dock where tradition has it that ‘the’ Mayflower sailed for Southampton and on to the new world.
Then there’s The Grenadier, a club for the Duke of Wellington (of Waterloo fame) and his regiment.
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheesehas direct ties to Dr. Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Wilde, and Yeats, among others.
Blackfriar Pub, dating to 1905 and built on the site of a Dominican friary. This architecture is simply outstanding. All marble, inside and out.
Back to beer. But, let’s stop calling Brit beer, ‘beer’, and call it what it is, ale. Playing with linguists? I don’t think so. Ale has a different, heavier flavor and generally a darker color. Even Bass Pale Ale has a deep amber glow. In fact, to my well-trained taste buds, ale is a different beverage all together. Comparing Brit ale and American beer is like comparing coffee and tea. Both are warm beverages served in cups, but after that…
Time to cut the idle chatter and race into a pub. Pub is short for Public House, meaning anyone 18 or older, with British Pounds and pennies, can walk in and order up. I do urge one word of caution, order only traditional ales. The rest are fizzy crap. Traditional ales are the ones the cute bar maid pumps when she pulls on one of the array of long wooden handles. Check the bottom of the pull and you’ll see the name of the ale and the percentage of alcohol. For my money, the lower the alcohol content, the smoother the brew.
When I first caught on that English pubs were God’s way of rewarding lechery and sloth, way back in the 1970s, I purchased a thin book called CAMRA’s Guide to Real Ale. It had a sparse list of pubs around England that offered traditional ales. CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, arose in the 1970s as a response to so many big brewers doing things the easy way and adding large squirts of carbon dioxide, to weaker and weaker cousins of what used to be. A hue and cry (both of them at once, apparently) rose up from the throats of those in every Middlesex village and farm. “Save our ale!”
The happy result is that traditional ale is now available in nearly every pub and the CAMRA Guide to Real Ale has expanded to the thickness of the London Telephone Directory. But, alas, every sunny day has a lingering black cloud. British pubs are disappearing at the rate of some 50 per day. Why might that be? Prices. The cost of a pint has doubled in the past decade, mostly due to rising taxes on alcohol. Without being political, there does seem to be a direct relationship between people having less money to spend and people spending less money. It’s not just the tax on beer, but also the taxes on the pub businesses. The ban on smoking has also taken its toll.
Still, there are some 57,000 pubs left, serving 2500 varieties of brew from about 500 brewers. Here are some general styles you can find, all of them richly flavored:
Bitter – lighter amber colored. Light head. Usual alcohol content is about 4.6%.
Mild – definitely darker. Creamy head. Alcohol closer to 4.0% or a tad below.
Stout – Guinness is the most popular brand. Darker body, with a thick, creamy head. It’s said you can write your name in the foam and it’ll be on the bottom of the glass when you finish your stout.
Those are very general terms and brews vary widely. Do what I do. Forget all those tales of what other people think Brit ale is. The detractors are flat wrong and not even warm. Experiment. Try a half pint of this or that. You won’t be sorry. If you’re lucky you may even find a pub that brews it’s own. Now, that’ a place worth spending some time.
"If you took a guy from the 10th Century and brought him forward in time, the only things he would recognize in the world today are churches and pubs," said Peter Brown, the author of "Man Walks Into a Pub," a history of pubs and beer.
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| Inside Blackfriar Pub |
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| Entry to the Bunch of Grapes |
