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Novelty Beers – The Session #68

The session. Once a month beer bloggers from around the world take five minutes to all discuss a particular topic. This month, the topic is novelty beers. It was suggested by this months host, Tiffany from 99 Pours. The following quote sums up the brief for this month:

“What novelty beer comes to mind when you think: Is this beer just to strange to stay around? Why in the world would they choose ingredients most beer drinkers have never heard of …what the heck is a qatar fruit? If it’s okay for beer to taste like tea or coffee, why not pizza? If wild yeasts are allowed to ferment beer, then why not beard yeast? If oysters, why not bacon? If pumpkin’s good enough for pie, why not beer? Since hops are flowers, why not brew with actual flowers?”

OK, lets address these points from the beginning and see where this takes me. What comes to mind when I think of novelty beers? Well mostly its the beers which have got strange ingredients which come to mind the most, although it’s not a completely bizarre ingredient in beer I find that the ginger in Badgers Blandford Flyer makes for a beer which is quite novel, and repeatedly I keep coming back to this beer in my trail of thought. Ever since I first tried this beer I have loved it, especially on a hot day. I must admit that I was first drawn to it by the idea of the added ginger and the story that goes with why they add it (apparently their is a fly which has a tendency to bite fishermen in the area around the Blandford River and the ginger helps to repel the fly).

On the other end of the spectrum of novel ingredients, things which really are out there, I can only think of  BrewDog’s Never mind the anabolics. This is a beer which contains several ingredients which are banned by the powers that be in the professional sporting world for their performance enhancing qualities, although this is quite obviously still legal for us mere mortals to drink. These ingredients include creatine, guarana, ginseng, gingo, maca powder, matcha tea and kola nut, most of these things I have never heard of. This is a beer which I most certainly want to try, not so much because of its performance enhancing ingredients, but because with such a long list of different additions to the beer its surely not going to taste like their regular IPA and I’m all for trying something new and different.

As for some of the other questions asked, my response is why not indeed? We should have more innovative beers in the world, without innovation we would stand still and things would just get boring. I say yes to pizza beer (I assume you mean this one?). I say yes to yeast which has come from odd sources, if it’s yeast, then why not, it all does the same thing. Just as long as you have got rid of the beard, I draw the line there. I say yes to flowers and I definitely say yes to bacon (infact I say yes to bacon on nearly a daily basis). A quick Google showed me that at least two brewery’s, Goose Island and Uncommon Brewers, have both made a beer at some point which has bacon in. I really want to try these, as long as they actually tastes like bacon, unlike the bacon bubblegum which I was given the other day, which was wrank.

I think that a brewer should be allowed to experiment. Of course while many of the outcomes may be a success and they may taste really nice, they probably won’t have the same drinkability that our palettes are used to. I know, for example, that Blandford Flyer is a great pint, but I couldn’t drink more than one or two of them in a night, the taste is just not what you expect from a beer, and while its enjoyable, at the end of the day we all just want a no nonsense pint.

Really what I am trying to say is that we, as beer lovers, like variety, if all the beers in the world were the same it would get boring very quickly, and we’d all just buy the same cans from the same place and that would be that. So we want the mad dog ideas along with all the standards to throw something different into the mix.  But at the same time while a different, life-changing, innovative and experimental beer can be wonderful, and I truly hope that the idea of trying new things never goes away, as a general rule they are fascinating to try but are not necessarily a beer which will win the hearts and souls of a generation. They lack the Je ne sais quoi of our regular session beers, our IPAs and our lagers, milds and porters. Brewers probably know this and is why novelty beers are usually in small batches, or just limited edition runs of bottles and rarely make it to the big outlets, although, saying that I did see Banana Beer in Tesco the other day, so what do I know?

A last minute change of plan

The other day was supposed to be Steppingly beer and curry festival. Me and my mates had been planning on going for a while after the great time we had had there last year. Steppingly had everything you could want from a beer festival. There was good beer, good prices, good entertainment, good food and if that wasn’t enough at the end of the night they started giving away the last of the beer for free. This year, however, there have been complaints. Apparently there was too much noise last year and as a result, this year, the council refused the licence. Perhaps singing in the street on the way home last year wasn’t such a good idea.

This left me and my mates with a problem, what to do with our day of planned drinking, now there was no beer festival to attend? A quick Google showed that there was another beer festival in Letchworth. That’s not too far away, but looking into getting there without driving would have cost a fortune. Instead we plumped for a visit to Toddington.

Toddington is a small village nor too far from us. It was always supposed to be a really good night out, which is in no small part due to the large number of pubs in the village centre. Last year there were seven, since then The Bedford Arms has been sold for redevelopment, The Sow and Pigs (one of the few pubs to be in every single edition of CAMRA’s good beer guide) has been put on the market with planning permission to be converted into four flats, and The Red Lion has been converted into Ritzy bar and Indian Restaurant. Why is it that all the pubs in the world are being converted into Indian restaurants? Why never Chinese or Italian or anything else for that matter?

Anyway, this leaves us with The Angel, The Oddfellows Arms, The Bell and The Griffin, which we visited in that order.

So what were they like? The Angel, a Greene King pub, obviously just been refurbished, everything was still a bit new but nice enough, signs up for live music, quiz nights and other events which no doubt keep the locals happy. There was Greene King IPA and St. Edmunds on cask, I decided on for the latter. This was the only pub that I saw all day to be showing an in date cask marque certificate. Free WiFi as well is always a bonus.

Walking past the memorial garden and its duck pond and just a little bit past the village green, we entered The Oddfellows Arms, although we nearly used the wrong door and ended up in the village library. This was an old building with low ceilings and blackened oak beams throughout. This pub has probably been here in one guise or another for hundreds and hundreds of yeas. There is no sign that it is a tied house, three guest ales, which I guess rotate a lot judging by the hundreds and hundreds of pump clips which they have suspended from the ceiling. There was a cask marque on the wall but it was well out of date. I had a pint of Chugborough Brewery’s Butler’s Revenge, and very nice or was too. No WiFi here and poor mobile signal meant that it was a nightmare trying to update my untappd app.

The Bell, which is just across the main road from The Oddfellows Arms, was easily my least favourite of the Toddington pubs. There was very little seating, and what there was were huge sofas, and massive tables, which weren’t all that comfortable. Sticky floors and a general feel of grubbiness didn’t help, but the final thing was the only real ale they had was off, Doom Bar as well! One of my favourites. Making the best of a bad situation I had a John Smiths. I don’t know if the others felt the same way as me, but we did leave pretty quickly.

The final pub in Toddington, The Griffin, always looked to me, from the outside at least, like it would have lots of little snugs. Old upholstery on the seating, which was wearing a bit thin, possibly a dog, charming landlord and probably only just switched from candles to light bulbs at the turn of the millennium. What impressions you can get from the outside of a pub. The inside couldn’t have been any more different. Polished floors, modern bar, white washed walls. I’m guessing that my vision of this pub was probably correct about a year ago. When a new manager thought that (s)he knew best and decided to scrub away all of the character from the place. This modern approach did at least mean there was WiFi though. I has a pint of the guest ale, Vale Brewery’s Gravitas , which confused the bar maid. She readily admitted that lots of people had been asking for it, and yet she was surprised every time by the strange request. Deary me!

We finished off in Toddington with a game of pool in The Griffin while we waited for our lift home.

Looking back I would have to say my favourite pub was The Oddfellows Arms. It had a good range of ales to choose from. The bar staff were friendly, there were books on the side which could be read by anyone and there was more charm and character than any chocolate box lid. In a way, I’m glad the beer festival was cancelled  it gave us a reason to visit the pubs of Toddington, which, at the rate they are closing, is something that we needed to do sooner rather than later.

Old Worthy

Some time ago I got a message on twitter asking if I would like to try some beer. Well, it would be rude not to, so I replied to the message, they then asked my address, which I gave them and that was the last I heard about it,  that is until this weekend. When I got back from work on Friday I found I had a parcel waiting for me. Sure enough, inside was a bottle of Old Worthy.

So what was it like? Well, I’m sure you can see from the picture that it was a light golden coloured beer. It was highly carbonated, as is often the case with bottled beers. I found that it was a bit too fizzy for me I’m afraid, but that’s not to say that it spoilt the drink. Far from it, I really enjoyed this bottle.

Taste? Well first of all, all I could think was that I found it to be particularly sweet. I was expecting there to be a more hoppy taste to it than there was, which I found slightly disappointing. Also I didn’t really find much of an earthy, peaty flavour, which the bottle talks about. There was a more grassy, lemony feel to it, although that doesn’t quite put justice to what I was tasting. There was another flavour in there which I can’t put my finger on. I want to say rubber, but that would be doing the beer a disservice. What ever it was I found it worked well with the other flavours.

I would say that I should have let the bottle chill a bit before drinking, this bottle had been left on the side all day and I fear was a bit too warm to judge fully. I would also be interested to see how it differs when it is on draught. I have been trying to find if there is going to be a cask version available, but the website is a little sparse. I would guess that Old Worthy would make a good cask ale, not being quite so sparkling and also being kept at the right temperature in the cellar would help to showcase the flavours in the beer.

Final verdict:

6½ / 10

I would guess that a cask version would score higher, but for me it was slightly too fizzy and the flavours a bit unpronounced.

So what was it like then?

Three gallons of cider to drink. That was the upshot of the last post. I had one gallon of Ben Crossman’s Home Orchard Special (7.%)and two gallons of Thatcher’s Cheddar Valley (6%).

The Cheddar Valley is a cider that I am used to and like a lot, that is why I get a batch every time I pass through Somerset. It is a bright orange colour, not clear in the slightest. Very little in the way of carbonation to begin with, the longer the bottle was kept closed, the more there was because the cider is still fermenting in the bottle. To taste, at first it seams a little watery, definitely not harsh like some ciders. There is very little in the way of tannin. A second taste reveals more of the apple flavours, again, no strong cider flavours. This is a very easy to drink cider, too easy. It has none of the strong tastes that some really traditional ciders have but does have a sweet, juicy flavour, which, although isn’t just apple juice, does remind me of sweet, sugary drinks that I had as a child, I think that may have something to do with the colour though.

The Home Orchard Special, a lighter colour than the Cheddar Valley, more clear to look at and a lighter, more straw like colour. There is a much stronger aroma from this than Cheddar Valley. To taste, it is much drier, slightly hard to get your mouth around at first, especially when I haven’t had a dry cider for a long while. The Home Orchard Special is slightly bitter as well but I found to be a much more pleasurable drink, once I had gotten accustomed to its flavour.

Of the two I would choose Ben Crossman’s over Thatcher’s, I found the Thatcher’s, while pleasurable, to be either too sweet or too watery at times, where as once I had remembered what to expect from the Crossman’s I found it to be more rounded, more flavoursome and on top of all that, more entertaining to buy.

Mini cider tour of Somerset

Recently work has taken me to Somerset. I am seeing cider in my future. The job turned out to be quite strange, working over night in a gym, sleeping for the first half of the day, having lunch time specials in the pub attached to the hotel for breakfast (curry and a pint for breakfast is odd, really). We then finished the job at about 5a.m. one morning.

We made the most of our hotel room, having a shower and a few hours kip before we had to check out, but by about 9a.m. we were awake any way and headed for home. Home, that is, via a couple of cider outlets.

We were originally planning on just going to Thatchers Cider, it is a stop we usually make on the return journey from the south west, first discovered when we did a job in the town of Churchill, one town along from Sandford, where Thatchers have their factory. However, on this trip, while we were driving up and down the country lanes looking for a café, we drove past a farm with a sign “Farmhouse Cider”. How could we resist?


View Mini cider tour – Somerset, Aug ’12 in a larger map

It was just gone 9a.m. and we turned off of the road and on to the driveway of a farm house. On the right, the house, in front of it, the a well kept country garden, and on the left an orchard. This was a good start. Past the house and the driveway widened and allowed for space for many cars to park. In front of the parking was many old barns which were looking a little worse for wear, you could see from where we were that there was many old farming machines inside, which had fallen into disrepair, they were rusty and the paint chipping off of them, clearly these hadn’t turned a wheel in years. Also, there were old tractors and ploughs, which also looked unused. These had scattered on them, around the and over them, bottles and plastic barrels with identical stickers on them on them.

We got out of the van and followed another sign, directing those wanting cider to a small thatched out building on the side of the farm house. We went through the door and inside were two old men trying to fill a bag-in-a-box from a barrel which must have stood six or seven feet tall. Next to this barrel were three others, each with a different label on them; sweet, medium, dry and farmhouse special. I wanted to take a picture of the scene to share on this post, but, not wanting to seem like a tourist, I decided not to.

The two men struggled on trying to fill this bag. Eventually, they had filled it enough and just had the task of doing up the cap and threading the nozzle through the cardboard. The conversation between the two men was as follows (and please remember when reading this that it’s Somerset, so read it in your best Somerset accents):

“If you just screw that cap on while I hold the box”

“I think I’ll get the cap on quickly, while you hold the box like that”

The cap gets screwed down. One man tries to start threading the nozzle through the cardboard

“Don’t worry about that, I’ll do that when I get home”

“Will you do this bit when you get home?”

“I will”

“OK then”

The box is put on a counter, next to a till, above which is a a traditional poem about cider, framed, probably older that the combined age of both of the gentlemen, and a certificate from the council which allows the sale of alcohol.

“You’ll do that when you get home? Will yeh?”

“I’ll do that when I get home, I will. So how much do I owe you?”

“£7.65”

“Well, If I give you ten” hands over a £10 note “and one, two, fifty, sixty, five” counting out coins “and then you can give me five back, and then we’ll be sorted”

“I can” he confirms “But I can only give you coins”.

What follows is the most complicated swapping of coins I have ever seen in my life before both men come to the conclusion that they are settled. All of this was very funny to watch. I felt like I was a fly on the wall on a West Country Soap opera. The man then took his box of cider and left, but not before the man running the show confirmed once more that he would be OK to sort out the nozzle and the cardboard once he got home.

Once the man had left, the other man, who by now had made it obvious that he was the man we needed to see about buying some cider, turned to us and said “Those bags-in-boxes are a bugger to set up right, you know”. I can’t exactly remember my  reply, something along the lines of “oh yeah, I can see”. He then asked us what we wanted, and I pointed and the barrel with farmhouse special. The short man, grabbed a gallon plastic bottle from the shelf and shuffled along to the barrel (for anyone who drinks at The Blackbirds, think Ken). He then filled the bottle with the cider, while he was filling it he asked us,

“have you had this before?”

“No” We replied.

“Ahh, its got a bit of a kick to it, this one!”. I thought to myself, if the eighty-something-year-old cider making Somerset yokel thinks that this one has a bit of a kick to it, then what must it be like?!? Or was he just making a bit of a warning, sussing that we’re not local and probably not seasoned cider drinkers like himself. Either way, the 7% label was enough for us to know that it would have some sort of bite.

Once filled, the man shuffled back to the counter and put the bottle on the side. “Now”, he said,”I don’t know if you have noticed this sign, but I have to check” and he gestures to a black and white  A4 photocopy which in block capitals read “YOU MUST BE 18 OR OVER TO BUY ALCOHOL”, perhaps some of the locals are not aware of this fact. We confirmed that, yes we were both at least 18. He then turned to a piece of paper right next to the till, hand written, was the price list. £8.65. Can’t say fairer than that for traditional cider, straight from the barrel.

As we left a woman had walked in. Clearly a local. “Hello Mr. Ben” she greeted the old man as we left (remember Somerset accents). On the drive home we commented on the characters we saw in the farm house. We suppose that these are all locals which make fairly regular visits…and from there the mind went away with us about really local things and strong accents.

For reference the farm was Ben Crossman’s Farmhouse Cider. Mayfield Farm, Hewish, Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset BS24 6RQ.

We then drove down the road for about 15 minutes before getting to Thatchers. Thatchers is at the other end of the traditional cider making industry. Crossman’s was a thatched out building with a few barrels in it and a till. Thatchers is a massive factory in  the middle of a tiny village, which makes it look more out of place than it otherwise would. In front of the factory is a small factory outlet, which sells all of the Thatchers products. There is a barrel section in the shop, which has guttering in the floor to deal with spillages, the barrels here are obscured by walls and wooden surrounds, only the front portion is visible, but you can still get your cider straight from the barrels. Thatchers have their traditional (dry, medium and sweet) as well as their cheddar valley (medium and dry) available, all their other varieties are bottled and are also available for sale, along with beer from Cheddar Ales  and local cheeses. They also have merchandise (bottle openers, t-shirts, books etc.). Nothing like it is at Crossman’s. Somehow, in here, it feels like a bit of a tourist trap, so I didn’t feel out of place taking the odd snap.

I had told my friends we were going to be coming here already, so I had an order list to for-fill. I asked for 5 gallons of Cheddar Valley Medium, which was duly processed by one lad while a young girl processed my credit card, something which I don’t think Mr. Ben had even heard of. A helpful assistant helped me to the van with all the bottles and we were ushered out quietly, politely and effectively. Although the staff here were very polite, I doubt many of them were working there for more than the summer holidays, I don’t think, although I am often wrong, that they have the passion for cider which Mr Ben has. Luckily their not making the cider, only selling it. It was interesting to see the two sides of cider making, really small scale, to quite large.

Now, I have three gallons of cider for myself to drink, and there is a small note saying that it is best to drink it within 5-10 days. What rotten luck.

A good investment

I thought I’d take a few minutes to share a recent email that I received about making good investments. I know it sounds dull but trust me, you’ll like this…

If you had purchased £1,000 of shares

in Delta Airlines one year ago, you would have £49.00 today.

If you had purchased £1,000 of shares in AIG insurance company one year ago, you would have £33.00 today.

If you had purchased £1,000 of shares in Lehman Brothers five years ago, you would have nothing today.

If you had purchased £1,000 of shares in Northern Rock three years ago, you would have nothing today.

But, if you had purchased £1,000 worth of beer one year ago at Tesco’s, drunk all the beer, then taken the aluminium cans to the scrap metal dealer, you would have received £214.00.

Based on the above, the best current investment plan is to drink heavily & recycle.

The email goes on to give this little statistical gem…

A recent study found that the average Briton walks about 900 miles a year.

Another study found that Britons drink, on average, 22 gallons of alcohol a year.

That means that, on average, Britons get about 41 miles to the gallon!

Ice CUBES? No thanks!

I just read a very interesting article, on the website www.ginjourney.co.uk, about the perfect ice cube. The long and short of it is that your best off with water that has been boiled, to make your ice cubes. You should make them as large as possible and you should make them spherical. It carried on to links for where you can get spherical ice makers, so they do exist. A quick Google shows that there are several different designs, which all work on a similar principal, of shaping normal ice cubes. A Japanese example can be found here, and an American one here. I also found an instructional page on how to make your own. Following a link from that page I found another video which shows how to make perfectly clear ice, which would be cool, having clear ice balls. Also I have found on eBay trays which make smaller ice balls on a much more cost effective scale.

I thought all of this was pretty cool and thought I’d share. I wonder how much better a G’n’T really is after all this?

Rail Ale Trail

Yesterday I was rummaging through my wardrobe trying to find a shirt and… I found one. Why do you want to know this? Because this shirt was a reward for completing the rail ale trail between Watford and St. Albans. This put me in mind of an old website which I made and never got round to putting online. It was basically the one of the previous designs of this site that never made it online, along with the posts that I put on it for testing. The following is my original post about how I got my t-shirt…

At the last beer festival I went to I came across some leaflets. They were for a new scheme which is being introduced to promote pubs in and around the towns of St Albans and Watford. The idea is very simple. There are 15 pubs which are near to the railway stations at both towns and at the stations in the towns which are between the two. After ordering a drink in each pub you can get a card stamped, get a stamp in each one and then you can send off for a t-shirt.

The other day me and some friends decided to try and do this all in one day. The day we had chosen was also the same day as a friends birthday party, which we had to be back for later that night, so we couldn’t be too late. We decided to start at the furthest point for us, Watford, and work back towards St. Albans. The map of the line and where the pubs are is below, the red line is the path of the railway itself and the blue line is the route  we planned to walk from the stations. The flags are the positions of the pubs and the trains are the position of the stations.

We got to the St. Albans Abbey Station a few minutes after the train had left, this gave us our first lesson for the day: be on time. There is a single train which runs back and forth on the single track which makes up this line. There are no passing loops and no ways of improving the running times so if you miss your train you will be waiting until it comes back again (roughly 45 minutes). This meant that when we got to Watford we were already close to an hour behind schedule.

We used the map which was inside the leaflet to guide us to the first few pubs. There are only three in Watford so it did not take us very long. After visiting these, which were nearly all filled with football fans (it was the day of Newcastle vs. Watford), we went back to the station. The platform for the Abbey branch line is not near to the other platforms and is therefore difficult if you need to use the station facilities. This is how we learned our second lesson of the day: Go to the toilet when you see one, the pubs may have them but the stations don’t (except Watford, which is difficult to get to). When we got on the train there were toilets, however, they were locked and the conductor would not open them.

It wasn’t long before we got to Garston. A quick bit of advise for all of those who are doing this. Be quick in Garston. To get to the pub which is written up as being in Garston on the leaflet you have to take the left exit out of the station when you have your back to the line. You then have to walk down the footpath to the end of the line. Take a right and follow the road, cross over when you see Falcon Way on the other side, follow Falcon Way to the end, go under the motorway, follow the footpath through a wood and then when the footpath opens up into more of a road the pub is on the left. This is quite a long walk (at least 10/15 minutes I would have said). Bearing in mind how long it takes to walk there and back, we had a swift half and ran back to the station. We willed the train by about 40 seconds, watching the train pull out of the station just as we were running back up the footpath.We had already missed one train today and now a second, getting back on time for the party wasn’t looking promising.

WARNING: If you find yourselves in the same situation as we did, infact even if you don’t I still suggest the following. Come out of The Old Fox and take a left, then walk to the next pub (The Gate). Do not go back to Garston. If you make the train you have to deal with unhelpful conductors and if you don’t then you have to wait for 45 minutes in Garston. Garston is one of the most unwelcoming places I think I have visited in my entire life. Seriously, suicide is preferable to spending any great length of time there. We were stuck for 45 minutes and we were already depressed by it!

Brickett Wood has only one pub to visit, two of you are going the other way to us, because you will want to walk from here to The Old Fox, thus spending as little time in Garston as possible. The pub here, The Gate, is a nice little pub which is reasonably prices and does a lot of cheap food. The home made pizzas for a fiver is what stuck out for me. Plan to spend more than 45 minutes, have a couple here and something to eat. It’s about half way and you will be getting hungry by now, I know I was, but we had time to make up with the trains we had missed so we didn’t eat.
To try and make up some time we decided to try to fit in both of the pubs at Park Street in the space between one train and the next, 45 minutes. It is possible, I know because we did it, however, we did have to run to catch the train. If someone out of your group is a fast drinker, send them ahead to hold the door at the station. Also, if you don’t like dogs then you may have a problem at The Falcon, not a problem for us though.

We now only had to get back to St. Albans to find the final pubs, have a swift drink and get back for the party, however we still had a couple of little niggles before we were home and dry. First one was the conductor on the train. He decided that for the last little bit of the journey we would have to pay again. Lesson #3: know what ticket you need and buy that. We had just bought a return from St Albans to Watford, he had seen us get on and off for all of the other journeys, but for this last little bit he said that “these tickets are not day rovers and we must buy another one”. Now I have checked on the service operators website (http://www.londonmidland.com) and they do not operate a fare evasion fine on this line, presumably because there are no ticket machines at the stations and you have to either buy your ticket from the conductor or at Watford / St Albans, so all the conductor could do was make us buy a ticket for the last part of the journey. This is, however, quite steep considering the cost of the other tickets. Had I thought about it I would have asked him about a day rover ticket for future reference, but at the time I was more pre-occupied with getting off the train so we could get on with drinking.

Once back at St. Albans the easiest thing to do is to cut across the park. It is not very clear on the map so; what you need to do is take the footpath through the park which is opposite the station, bear right at the fork in the footpath and then take a right and a left, so that you are walking down the side of the lake. Follow this path to the road and then take a left, The Six Bells is on your right, all of the other pubs are easy enough to find by following the roads which are shown on the map.

Things to watch out for with the final pubs are:

  1. The Bell is smack-bang in the middle of the town, it was heaving when we went, presumably it is the towns folk favourite haunt before going off to a club (it was a very young demographic). If you are going Friday/Saturday night be prepared to queue for some time.
  2. If you want a break from ales there are a nice selection of proper ciders in the Lower Red Lion.
  3. The Garibaldi gives away free prizes to anyone who buys a drink with Southern Comfort in it, I won some beads and I also got a mask because one of our number didn’t want his prize.
  4. While in the Garibaldi, keep an eye on the barmaid, when testing the pad of ink to stamp our cards, she decided to rub the pad down my hand. Great. Thanks for that.
  5. Going from the Farriers Arms to the Portland Arms is deceptively far. The map doesn’t make it look very far at all, but it is.

When you have your card completely stamped you can send off for your free t-shirt. We had written our envelopes out and got our stamps before hand, however, make sure that you are using envelopes which seal down properly. We ended up going home with them to get some selotape.

Just to let you know, we did make it back for the party, however, we were late, mostly because we missed yet another train trying to get back!

Further information can be found at:

One beer to rule them all… – The Session #66

The session. Once a month beer bloggers from around the world take five minutes to all discuss a particular topic. This month the topic is “One beer to rule them all”. It was suggested by this months host, DrinkDrank. The brief was to describe an ultimate fantasy drink, reality not an issue.

OK, so what would my beer be like? Well, to start with it would be a man’s drink. Nothing poncy or pretentious. Something which can be drunk at the pub, with friends. I want this beer to be a drink which sits on the table looking up at people with great conversation and wit. A beer that is drunk with mirth. This is a beer for the good times. I want this to be a beer which has presence. Sitting on the table it almost joins in with the evening, it is part of the conversation, it almost has a personality of its own.

A thick, dark, slightly chewy brew with definite chocolate hints, but not a beer that is about chocolate, just a hint (this isn’t a dessert). I don’t want it to remind the drinker of coffee, that’s a drink for the morning, this should be a drink for the evening. This would certainly not be a drink which is fizzy, indeed little to no carbonation at all. I want this beer to suit a winters evening, a beer that is refreshing and at the same time warming. It should be as comforting as the crackling log fire, next to which you would want to drink this beer.

Around 4%, allowing a drink which can be drunk in more than a thimbleful. Infact it should be served in an oversized glass tankard of at least a pint, preferably a quart. Glass, so that the world can see that you’re not drinking some terrible american larger, this is a beverage you should be proud to drink. To look at, the beer needs to be nearly black. Hard to see through, with a silvery head which gives the drink a mystical look about it. I want the head to settle to a perfectly flat almost as soon as the glass is put on the table, with no wobbling around. Saying this I don’t want a massive head, I want fluffy and thick, not smooth, and only about half an inch thick.

Part of me wants to take the anything goes part of the brief and then say “and on top of all that it’s completely healthy, makes you lose weight and you never get too drunk”, but I won’t say that because after all isn’t there a secret part of all of us that like the guilty pleasure part of drinking beer, knowing that it’s not good for you. After all, if they told the people to switch to beer when they joined weight-watchers then who would want to drink it?

It also said in the brief that I’d have to give my perfect pint a name. Can there be any other name for anything which is completely perfect? My beer would simply be called… “GOD.” This is a beer which is going to be well known and loved. It doesn’t need a flash ad campaign.The pump clip need only bear its name, no pictures, no comedy cartoons, not even colour and patterns, just white writing on a black background, with a full stop, this is the god of beers… end of.

The Saint George and Dragon

It was pointed out recently by DrinkDrank that everyone is talking about the beer on their travels, so I thought I’d mention my recent trip into Devonshire and the pub we stayed with.

A job in Stover, Devonshire, sent us south for a days work. We decided that we would stay at a pub we had been to before. Infact, it was the same school in Stover that we were working at before when we first found The Saint George and Dragon. Although the pub is quite a distance from Stover, we decided that it was so good that it was worth the travelling.

When we stayed here before it was a perfect summers day, the sun was shining, their was a light breeze which kept the suns heat at bay and clear views for miles around. There was three real ales available (St. Austell’s Tribute, Sharp’s Doom Bar and Brains’ Rev. James) and the food was cooked properly in house and not just microwaved, as so many pubs do these days. The rooms were clean and the beds were really comfortable. This time the weather couldn’t have been more different. It rained, and rained, and rained some more. This was unfortunate but didn’t stop The Saint George and Dragon from reminding us just why we liked it so much in the first place.

When we arrived I noticed that they had now added free wi-fi to their repertoire of amenities. We found the rooms were just as good as we remembered, with the same soft beds that provide a really good nights sleep. Later we had dinner in the pub, the beers available had changed (St Austell’s Tribute, Fuller’s Summer Ale and Butcombe Bitter as well as a board which said it had Purity’s Mad Goose which we asked about and was told “we gave it some pills and it’s better now”!) which were all fantastic (I had one of each). I remarked to myself at how poor the view was, since   last time I was sitting in the same seat at dinner I could see the view across the Exe estuary (which was amazing), today I could hardly make out the horizon, still, that’s not the pubs fault.

The only thing that I can find against this really nice country pub is the atmosphere. A lot of the other patrons were also hotel guests, it didn’t seem to have any locals and there was a bit more of a restaurant feel to it than a pub at times. Some would argue that this is the most important aspect of a pub and I would usually agree with you. However, after a long days work you don’t seem to care about that so much and finding a decent pint seems like finding the holy grail, and find it we did.

Really all I can say about this pub; good views (in good weather), good food, good beds and good beer. What more could you want? This is fast becoming our “go to” hotel when we are in the Exeter area. I hope if we come back in winter they have the fire going.