South and North

This is the last of my posts about my trip to the UK a few weeks ago, mainly because I didn't really take lots of pictures of the many beers I drank while I was there. For example, I have no pictures from the wonderful pub crawl I went on in Inverness with a long time friend of mine, unless you are interested in Aitken founts that is (and if you are interested, Black Isle Bar & Rooms on Church Street is the place to go). Even for this post, I only have a couple of pictures.

With the conference over, we arranged to meet at Piccadilly Circus, but I had about 90 minutes before meeting up, so I dropped my laptop at my hotel, nipped to Westminster Abbey to get a key chain of the venerable building for one of my sons, and experienced unexpected garden envy.

To get to Piccadilly Circus from Westminster Abbey, I had decided to skirt St James' Park on Horse Guards Road, past the Horse Guards Parade - being an army brat it was instantly recognisable from many viewings of Trooping the Colour on TV. Before you reach the Parade itself, you pass Duck Island Cottage, which had the delightful garden you can see above, it made me miss my little garden back in Virginia.

I have to admit that walking around the City of Westminster was one of my favourite things, and the stroll from Westminster Abbey to Piccadilly was a delight, though obviously with a distinct lack of traffic cones on the statuary. Even so, I had badly mistimed how long it would take, and so ended up at Piccadilly Circus a good 30 minutes before I had arranged to meet everyone else. What to do then? Well, find a pub obviously, so I looked up pubs in the streets just off the Circus itself. St James Tavern it was then, a corner pub where Great Windmill Street meets Shaftesbury Avenue. Finding a spot at the bar, I may have mentioned this before, but I loved being in buzzing, busy pubs again, I squeezed in and ordered a pint of London Pride.

By this point in my trip, I was having an identity crisis, as I was actively enjoying pints of best made with crystal malts, and London Pride fresh from cask is such a lovely beer, even without a sparkler on the swan neck. Perhaps it is a case of absence making the heart grow fonder, and in many ways this is stating the obvious, compared to the stuff we get in Virginia, proper Pride is night and day. I reviewed my Old Friends post about Pride as I was drinking this first pint, and the biggest difference is the brightness of being fresh, and the hops are actually obviously present. Since returning to the US, I have longed to just sit in a London pub enjoying multiple pints of fresh Pride. As it was, I had time for a second before meeting up with the folks I was at the conference with.

I wish I could remember the pub that we went to immediately after meeting, but eventually we wound our way to a Sam Smiths pub called the Glasshouse Stores. This was the first time I had ever been in a Sam Smith's pub, and unfortunately they didn't have any of their famous beers on cask, everything was keg. Having got our orders in, I started on my trek through the various bitters available, we snagged a seat, all the while keeping a beady eye on the table in the charming bay window, so we could relocate once it was available. It wasn't long before we took our opportunity, and by this time I had relished the dark mild as my precursor to the bitters - a lovely beer from memory, the kind of thing that would make for a wonderful autumnal session with the rain pouring outside. I had also had the first of a couple of pints of Sovereign Bitter. Eventually though I would settle on the Old Brewery Bitter as my tipple of choice, no doubt lamenting aloud that it wasn't on cask.

Apparently we moved on to a few other stops, but I have no pictures of those, either mental or on my camera - yeah, drinking at scale happened and it had started to gently rain...I may have got myself a little turned around walking back to my hotel, but eventually I made it to my bed and gratefully collapsed in a heap.

The Westminster Arms

I have something of a soft spot for Kent's Shepherd Neame. It was their Bishop's Finger that got me into better beer than the keg swill I would drink as a younger man after all, as well as a friend in Prague having been a barman in an SH pub. Whenever I get back to the UK, which is nowhere near as often as I would like, I will pick up a few bottles of Shepherd Neame beers, usually the aforementioned Bishop's Finger, but also their Double Stout and even <gasp> the India Pale Ale. However, and for obvious reasons, Shepherd Neame pubs are few and far between in the Highlands of Scotland, and I don't think I have ever seen a Shepherd Neame beer on a beer engine at any of the pubs I frequent when I go home. Having a few days then in London was the opportunity to find the nearest Shepherd Neame pub to my hotel and dive into their range a bit more.

Given that my hotel was just yards from Westminster Abbey, said nearest Shepherd Neame pub was The Westminster Arms. On arriving at my hotel, being given the key, and heading up to my room, I opened the door to discover that it was still in the throes of being cleaned. As such, I ditched my main case, slung the bag I use as a laptop bag over my shoulder and wandered off to locate the pub and catch up with work over a couple of pints.

Thankfully it was a mere 3 minute walk, and what a delightfully charming pub The Westminster Arms is (photo credit: the image is from the Westminster Arms website). Apparently the pub has recently undergone a refurbishment, and as I went through the door, I was presented with an archetypal British pub, as Tweedy Pubs would say, "a pubby pub". Everything was wooden, there were nooks and crannies with stools and ledges for drinking at, and on the bar a clutch of handpumps. I knew immediately what I was going to have, partly because there wasn't Bishop's Finger on the pumps, but also because I wanted to start with something a little more sessionable.

I took my pint, went downstairs to the basement bar, and found myself a perch at a table, set my laptop up, and took my first ever mouthful of Master Brew.

Master Brew is Shepherd Neame's ordinary bitter, with an ABV of 3.7%, and clearly it is in the tradition that naysayers often deride as "boring brown bitter". It is, though, anything but boring, at least in my opinion. It was moreish, deeply, deeply moreish in fact. I think that first pint was gone before I had even been able to hook into the wifi and log into my email. I had to head back upstairs to the main bar to get a second pint as Master Brew wasn't on the downstairs hand pumps. One of the many things that I loved about this, and to be fair most other bitters I had in and around London, was they were properly bitter, with dollops of hop bitterness to scrape away the crystal malt character - weirdly I was starting to become sure I needed to do some experimentation with my house bitter. What was going on? Had it been on the pumps downstairs I might never have ventured from it.

It was during my second pint that a group of Americans made their way down to the basement, and proceeded to make me almost despair that real ale will ever be anything other than a niche in the US, so embedded is the collective ignorance of cask ale in the popular consciousness. Yeah, sorry folks, we writers can blather on as much as we want about places doing real ale, but it's not getting outside of our bubble. One of the group approached the bar and ordered a Spitfire, but a lady sat in the booth they had plonked in yelled across the bar to "make sure you get the Spitfire lager, not the cask, the cask is warm". Now, I prefer Master Brew and Bishop's Finger to Spitfire, but this notion that unless your beer is as cold as penguin feet it is "warm" really needs to be put to bed. I may have started ranting via text message to my long time collaborator, Mark. I had at this point moved on to Whitstable Bay Pale Ale for a palate reset, when across the bar I heard the most ridiculous thing I have heard in many years, and here I quote:

"don't tell the pastor we are in a pub drinking beer".

Admittedly I have some sympathy with this, given that when I was studying theology with a view to a religious calling, I would often go to the pub to unwind and the thought of being spotted gnawed away at my guilt riddled soul. But, you know, I don't recall ever announcing to the entire bar that I really shouldn't have been there, and to not share this information with the leadership of my church. It reminded me of folks I know who when in Prague moved their beer to the other side of the table for pictures, so their religious friends wouldn't think they were drinking when it hit social media. Thankfully, though painfully slowly as the group worked its way through their one pint of Spitfire lager for about 45 minutes, they eventually toddled off steeped in English sin, so I had another Master Brew, beautifully cask conditioned, at perfect cellar temperature, and everything a English bitter is at its best, or most ordinary, if you get my reference.

Having caught up with work, had a fantastic rambling chat with the lads behind the bar - top fellows! - it was time to find some food, maybe another couple of beers, which we'll get to, and get myself prepared for the conference I was in town for. Clearly though, if I ever find myself staying in Westminster again, the Westminster Arms will be top of my list for pubs to get back to, it was just a perfect afternoon of great beer in a proper pub.

Is It Worth It?

Over the weekend the landlord of the Gunmakers in London tweeted about a female CAMRA member (yes, really, a female member of CAMRA - do they get issued with beardy wigs?) requesting her 20p discount for the pint she had just ordered and then being horrified at the price. The pint in question cost £3.90, which at current market rates is €4.67 or $6.14, and no CAMRA discount was forthcoming.

This got me thinking about the price of beer in a pub, because to be perfectly honest, it wouldn't bother me all that much paying £3.90 for a pint of cask ale right in the heart of London. When I was in Paris over the Christmas holiday, I was paying €8 (£6.68/$10.60) a pint at the various Frog and Rosbif pubs we went to. Even here in small town Virginia, Charlottesville is about three-quarters the size of Inverness, I regularly pay $6 (£3.78/€4.51) for a proper pint, as in an Imperial pint or 20oz, in the few places that serve them. The usual price for a 16oz American pint is about $5, which equates to £3.15 or €3.77.

I am deliberately not including the price of drinking the best lager in the world in Europe's most beautiful city, because the economics of beer are completely different in Prague - the most expensive beer is Pilsner Uruqell, while the phenomenal Kout na Šumavě 12° is usually about two-thirds of the price.

So, what am I getting when I pull up a stool at the bar and hand over my 6 dollars, 4 quid, or 4 Euro 50? Obviously I am presented with a pint of beer, hopefully with a nice head sitting atop the beer itself - I am not bothered about losing half an inch of beer in the glass to head, though I can imagine those asking for a 20p discount would quibble about that as well. A portion of the money, which having just changed hands is no longer mine, goes to the pleasure of having my beer handed to me by a member of staff. If I wanted to pay for the pleasure of getting my own beer, I'd install a coin slot on the fridge door. Assuming that the Gunmakers has electric lighting and some form of heating, a portion of the money will go to paying the bills, and of course the tax man wants his cut. Also, let's not forget that the landlord needs to make a living or there won't a pub for me to drink in.

It would be an interesting pie chart to see exactly where this £3.90 actually goes, and I would guess that the profit on a pint of cask ale in central London is fairly small. I also wonder if this is the main reason for the many pubs shutting across the UK these days, there simply isn't a decent living to be made.

The question then is, how much do you pay for your pint when you go to your local, and do you feel as though you are getting value?