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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 Cheese
has 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 |
