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This is the fourth in a series of five posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild, covering Wellington Road, the Wilmslow Road and the last few town centre pubs.

One of the pleasures of these crawls is putting together pubs in unexpected combinations, generally determined by public transport routes. Most years I file the Crown under “Stockport” and tick it off on the same day as the Baker’s Vaults and the Angel, but this year I did a “Wellington Road” route. (I didn’t say it was a large pleasure.) We started at the Station Hop (surprisingly easy to get to from Chorlton), where they were between milds; I had Blackjack Drinking Beer #1. I’m not crazy about the name – what else are you going to do with it? – but I guess it’s a heritage recipe of some sort. It’s a sweetish, light-bodied, mid-brown old-school bitter; if somebody well-actually‘d you and explained that this is what mild used to taste like, you could believe it. On a sunny afternoon it made for a very pleasant quarter of an hour, let down only slightly by the aroma from the loos.

Down the road at Heaton Hops, Dunham Dark was present and correct but a bit tired. Our olfactory adventures continued as someone at the next table (which turned out to be upwind of us) lit up a fag; it says something about where we live that we were genuinely surprised by this, as well as slightly irked. In search of something interesting for a second beer, I scanned the list looking for something that didn’t say it was hazy, and came away with something not so much hazy as opaque. It’s a shame craft beer seems to be over now, as presumably that means the sub-trend clock has stopped – and cloudy IPAs will never go out of style.

Further down the road at the Magnet I could happily have drunk my way along… well, maybe a third of the cask beers on the bar, but that would still have been quite a few. We were worried about fitting in the next stop, though, so I only had the one: RedWillow Ruby Mild, which was terrific. The Magnet was as quiet as I’ve ever seen it – which is to say that we only had to do one complete circuit of the pub before we found somewhere to sit. Never let anyone tell you old man beers don’t sell.

I could save myself some time by copying the previous review for the Crown, which is really doing extraordinarily well when you think of what a sad state it was in (and for how long); everyone involved can be quietly pleased with themselves. Quite an interesting beer here: Heritage 1950s Burton Ruby Mild, apparently based on an old Bass recipe. The interesting part is that I can copy another review at this point: tasted blind, I would have said it was a sweetish, light-bodied, mid-brown old-school bitter… it looked and tasted very similar to that “Drinking Beer”. In between “mild” meaning “hasn’t been aged” and meaning “sweet, not very bitter, usually low-alcohol, usually dark”, I guess there were all sorts of points along the way, when “mild” meant something but didn’t necessarily mean what we use it to mean.

From the Crown we moved on to the Head of Steam… no, of course not. (Actually from the Crown we moved on to a chain restaurant and then to the pictures.) In their new chain-pub existence, I’ve found HoS bars a bit disappointing in terms of both variety and beer quality: I’ve only been seriously scoring beers since 2023, but in that time I’ve never given a beer at the Didsbury HoS anything above 2.5. The day I visited, there was only one beer on that I was interested in – Titanic Classic Mild. But it was a mild, and (more importantly) it was in really good nick: I gave it a 4. I’ll have to keep an eye; it’ll be nice if they’ve turned a corner on beer quality.

Speaking of turning corners, I was very pleased to see that Wallop had a mild on the bar (between the house pale and the eternal Brightside Maverick). Unfortunately the pump clip was turned round, as it had just run out. (No, really, it actually had. Don’t be horrible.)

On to the Railway, where Holt’s Mild and Mighty was good, but not great. The pub’s really had a new lease of life since Stacey took over, but the beer quality’s never quite hit the peaks of the Old Monkey or the Lower Turk’s Head – even if I don’t generally enjoy spending time in those pubs as much (depending on the soundtrack – see below).

The Victoria was a regular haunt of mine when I lived in Withington, but those days are long gone. (I mean, really long gone. I was living on the dole and trying to get a job as a programmer then, I’m a retired academic now. Living on the dole, and going to the pub with it – we’re talking long gone.) Anyway, the Vic has been refurbed once or twice in the last mumble years; the vaguely fairground-esque white-gloss-and-gilding decor that my (admittedly unreliable) memory recalls has long gone, along with the functioning bellpushes and the old guy in a white jacket who used to answer them. The main problem now is finding a spot to sit that isn’t in the sightlines for screens showing two different sports. The Hyde’s Ruby Mild was pretty good, to be fair, as was the seasonal blonde, “Sherlock Combs”. (Who goes to a Hyde’s pub and drinks a seasonal ale with a novelty name? It seems like a very unlikely combination, but I guess somebody must do.)

Another trip took me to the New Oxford in Salford (although – I think we have to conclude from the location of the other points on the Mild Magic map – not in Salford Salford). Moorhouse’s Black Cat Reserve was in good nick, didn’t at all drink its considerable strength, and went pretty well with the usual weekday-afternoon accompaniment: sunlight through a window, other people’s conversation and Indian Premier League in the corner.

I bussed it into town, and naturally started at the Lower Turk’s Head, which I pretty much had to myself, and where a bland-bordering-on-irritating pop soundtrack (Bill Withers doing “Lovely Day”, that kind of thing) segued unexpectedly into a series of massive Northern Soul bangers, from the obscure (Frankie Valli, “The Night”) to the what now? (Freddie Chavez, Joy Lovejoy). (I didn’t clock these myself, I should say; Soundhound was my friend.) It’s a thing at the Turk’s Head, apparently. The Holt’s Mild and Mighty was really good, too.

The flight of steps at the entrance to Fell Northern Quarter is high enough to put the floor of the bar pretty much at eye level from the street. I think I may not make the effort another time. I’m fond of the Fell bar in Chorlton, but I’ve found the beer quality there very variable, with few peaks and too many troughs. At Fell NQ I had a half of Three Acre Sussex Mild which was the temperature of tap water on a warm day, and very nearly as flat. A theme may be developing.

I finished this round of pubs on a bit of a ho-hum note, sadly. Less than stellar service at the Waterhouse – a bartender who spent as little time as possible interacting with me and made no attempt to top up a half that had come out with a Guinness-like head. (Unlike the issue with Fell and beer quality, I only mention this because it’s unusual.) Buxton Monsal Mild was fine, but not great, and I didn’t feel like lingering. I should have finished at the Lower Turk’s Head…

Next: farthest Macclesfield, deepest Urmston, darkest Burnage, studentiest Fallowfield.

This is the third of a few posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild, covering Droylsden, Stalybridge and yet more town centre pubs.

“At the Angel Inn in Manchester there lives the girl for me,” or so an old folk song says. But it probably wasn’t the Angel, where I went with the girl for me (viz. my wife). I had a half of Wantsum Black Prince while listening to a conversation about Vienna lager between the bartender and another punter, conducted for some reason at very high volume. It was a nice mild, though. Wantsum hail from deepest Kent, so it must be quite a rare spot.

The vibe at the Marble Arch was a lot more relaxed; the large group of retirement-age men at another table kept themselves to themselves (there’s always a group of retirement-age men at another table). The Marble Rye Coffee Mild wasn’t the best I’d had it, but it was still pretty good; I followed it with a keg IPA, as you do.

I hadn’t been to the Abel Heywood before and wasn’t wildly impressed – I’m not over-fond of the “leather upholstery / brass rails / large empty spaces / posing tables” pub/bar combo. (As distinct from e.g. the “leather upholstery / mismatched furniture / natural light / archways delimiting rooms” pub/bar combo, as seen at the Smithfield Market Tavern.) Nor was the Hyde’s Ruby Mild in particularly good nick, sadly.

On to the Piccadilly Tap, where I had an oddly-named but very pleasant mild – Wensleydale Keep On Chooglin’, an injunction I intend to respect whenever possible – and a chat with George from my CAMRA branch and his friend. I recommended the Molly House; they recommended the White House.

The White House in question is in Stalybridge; I wasn’t hugely looking forward to the visit, the quality of Hyde’s Dark Ruby tending to be at the “this’ll do” level in my experience (which also used to be true of the 1863 light mild, by and large). How wrong you can be; it was an absolutely stellar half of dark mild. (At the risk of sounding like a broken record (appropriately enough), the 1863 also had its moments; it must be a Hydes’ cellaring thing.) The White House was pleasantly busy, by weekday afternoon standards, but every other person in there had a pint of lager in front of them. Perhaps the mild drinkers come in later.

George and friend had also had good things to say about the Bank Top Dark Mild at the local Spoons’. I’d hoped to tick it off at the Ash Tree in Ashton-under-Lyne, but by the time I’d got there it had gone, replaced by… nothing I could see. I noticed that Theakston’s XB (a beer I haven’t seen on a bar in many a long year) described itself as a ‘ruby ale’, and took a punt on that qualifying as a mild; it doesn’t really, but it’s a very pleasant strong dark ale (from the days when you could call a 4.5% draught beer ‘strong’).

Back in Stalybridge, Bank Top Dark Mild was still on at the Society Rooms, so I gave it a go. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was good but not great. The ‘queue along the bar’ system I’d noticed the last time I was there was still operating, to the great inconvenience of bar staff and punters alike – why do people do this?

I got off on the wrong foot at Bridge Beers by asking the guy behind the bar how recently he’d taken over from Dave Bridge; the person I was talking to was Glenn Hall, who was co-owner of Bridge Beers (the brewery) with Dave B, and had in fact run Bridge Beers (the bar) before he and Dave had even got into brewing. That sorted out, we had a nice chat about Bridge Beers (the brewery and bar). My Green Mill Cat’s Sparge Armers was every bit as good as that name isn’t, and I stayed for the other half.

Back at the Buffet Bar, the oddly-named Colbier Minor was a bit tired; past its bedtime, maybe. I followed it with Salopian Kashmir and – a rarer sight on cask – RedWillow Restless, an 8.5% imperial coffee porter. Mmm, imperial coffee porter…

Next: Stockport, Didsbury and even more city centre pubs (if that’s possible).

This is the second of a few posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild, covering Sale, Altrincham and some more town centre pubs.

I walked into the Ford Madox Brown around lunchtime and nearly walked straight out again. Brightside‘s stouty dark mild Sup was in good nick, but the roastiness of the mild was complemented by the uncleared-ness of the tables and the loudness of a man at the bar who was intent on expressing his opinions and letting us all know about them. (I think he’d started considerably earlier, and/or not on beer.) But I stayed, I had another half (Evan Evans Wrecker) and something to eat, and it all calmed down. Spoons’ are like that.

It was quiet in the Salutation, so much so that I surprised two different members of staff who were stealing a bit of down time. No need to look so guilty, guys, I’m not your boss! (I suppose in a sense I was, but I retired in 2022.) Bollington Bollington Nights was a bit basic and Sodastream-cola-ish, unfortunately.

“Between milds?” I asked the bartender at the Oxford Road Tap, confident that they were committed to MM. He explained that Marble Rye Coffee Mild was about to go on, and went into a long rigmarole that I didn’t entirely follow; the impression I got was that he wasn’t going to put it on right away, but he’d do me a pint as a favour, only it had to be a pint, not a half. I agreed to this, thinking I might be getting a bargain. Actually he put the clip straight on as soon as he’d served me, and charged me the full price; I think I must have misheard something. More importantly, it was really good – one of those beers where flavour additives fit seamlessly into the underlying profile of the beer, and in good nick.

I could write at some length about the meal we had at the Molly House, but I’ll just say they were probably the best tapas I’ve ever had. RedWillow Ruby Mild – a strong mild this time out – is an absolute banger, and it was in great condition. Recommended all round.

More of the RedWillow Ruby Mild at the Carlton Club. I’d arrived early that afternoon, to have a chance of getting a table, but I found I had a different problem: almost all the tables were in full sunlight. Lurking in a gazebo seemed a bit inappropriate – but it was the only way I was going to be comfortable, so lurk in a gazebo, with my LRB, is what I did. And very pleasant it was.

Titanic Classic Mild was on at the Unicorn, where we sat in the quiet bit. (I recommend the quiet bit of the Unicorn; it’s like a completely different pub, or possibly a completely different hotel lounge.) Great mild, too – big flavours for a 3.4%er.

Down the road at Costello’s they were serving Dunham Dark and playing some decidedly banging tunes (She’s a Waterfall into Going Underground, e.g.) Not the most exciting mild, but pretty good – as was the Dunham Kiwi Drift new world pale.

Then we bussed it to the Old Plough, where I’ve had a very nice drop of Hyde’s 1863 in the past. Alas, no more. The Dark Ruby was OK, but didn’t really valoir le détour.

Lastly, back to Sale and the J.P. Joule. And so I end this Mild Magic post where it began – which is also where the first one ended – viz. drinking Brightside Sup in a Spoons’. It was mid-afternoon, Saturday, and pretty lively. I got served after a young woman who had started considerably earlier, and who was whiling away the wait for her next rum and Coke by telling anyone who’d listen that her friends thought she was mad to be paying £45 a month for a portfolio of photographs – “I don’t think that’s a lot, do you?” (The bartender said he’d just paid £45 for some bits of cardboard (i.e. M:TG cards), so he couldn’t talk.) There was a St George’s Day beer on the bar, which apparently wasn’t going well – another bartender held forth at some length about how none of them did, brewers kept turning out special-day beers and they never sold. They were also having a bit of a Buxton TTO on the quiet; my companion had their Clear & Present Danger (an alarmingly-named but light and clean-tasting American Cream Ale), and for my second drink I had the WCIPA Stacked, which was fantastic. My love/hate relationship with JDW’s looks set to continue.

Next: way out East. 

(Well, my questions answered; also, answered by me. But I’m sure these questions have occurred to other people, and my attempts at answering them may be of some use.)

Q: Aren’t CAMRA about to change the scoring system, replacing numerical scores with categories like ‘Acceptable’ and ‘Excellent’? Doesn’t that make it a bit pointless to talk about the old system?

A: Yes, they are, but no, I don’t think it does. The new system will still have numerical scores at the back end – you can’t average out twenty ‘Good’s and ten ‘Acceptable’s – and it will still use the same basic scale, so the issues I’m going to be talking about here will still arise. I’ll say more about the new system in the next post.

Q: Should scorers treat a top score of 5 (‘Excellent’ under the new system) as a Holy Grail, never likely to be experienced? Or should we just take ‘Excellent’ as synonymous with ‘very, very good’?

A: Opinions differ! CAMRA’s own guidance says both that a 5 is a once-in-a-lifetime experience and that scorers shouldn’t give out a 5 more than a couple of times a year – two statements which are logically compatible, but only just. My own practice is to give 4 for ‘very good’ and 4.5 for ‘very good indeed‘, and hold off on 5s until positively, definitely, absolutely the right beer comes along.

Q: You’re not likely to give a 4 or a 4.5 to a beer in a style you don’t like, though, however good a condition it’s in. It’s all subjective, surely.

A: It is all subjective, but it’s a good-faith subjective attempt to apply collectively agreed standards – which is to say, people shouldn’t just be saying “I like this, therefore it’s brilliant”. Having said that, an honest attempt to judge whether a beer’s good or not is still going to be coloured by the tastes of the individual judge, if only because you pay more attention to beers in styles you like and are more likely to recognise their good points. With the best will in the world, someone who doesn’t like New England IPA isn’t going to give a beer points for being opaque and tasting of yeast, even if those are effects the brewer was aiming for. Which is where the subjective is balanced by the collective. You’re not the only scorer in the country; even if you detest NEIPAs and have to resist the temptation to give them a 1, other drinkers will be less enlightenedhave different tastes. If a particular NEIPA has particularly good features, by the standards of NEIPA drinkers, there will be someone out there who will score it well.

Q: If we’re scoring on condition, they should all be 5s, shouldn’t they? If the brewer and the cellarer have both done their job, what the customer gets should always be as good as it can possibly be.

A: Brewers and cellarers don’t always do their job at 100% efficiency, though. Beer’s condition can be affected by a myriad of factors, even simply that it’s gone on a bit too soon or stayed on a bit too long. Beer itself is very rarely perfect: complex beers aren’t complex enough, clean-tasting beers aren’t as clean-tasting as they should be. The top score, however rarely or frequently you actually give it, should be reserved for those times when everything comes together.

Q: One of my favourite beers was on at a pub I visited; it was in great nick, so I gave it a 4. A week later I managed to fit in a trip to the same pub and tried it again, but I was disappointed – it was tired and flabby, a 1.5 or 2 at the most. Do I really have to enter a low score – lowering that pub’s average – just because I happened to try that beer towards the end of the barrel?

A: Nobody’s making you score beers in the first place – but if you do, you should score the beer that you drink. Beer getting tired towards the end of the barrel is a fact of life; in a good pub, the bar staff will keep an eye on the condition of the beers and change them when they’re getting ‘barrelly’, meaning that there are fewer opportunities for low scores. Also, in a good pub the beer will routinely be getting high scores when it’s not at the end of the barrel, so the bad scores will be heavily outweighed by the good and excellent scores.

Q: Suppose I start on a beer that’s not in great nick, give it a 2 and switch to another. That’s no better, so I give it the same score and switch to a third – which is also only worth a 2. The next time I’m in that pub, the first beer I try is in terrific condition, so I give it a 4 and stay on it all night. The pub has now had three separate 2s from me, but only one 4; I’ve almost certainly done more to drag their average down than to raise it. Is this right?

A: It seems unfair not to reward the pub by giving each successive pint of a good beer its own score, but on balance I think that yes, it is right. In the first scenario you’re providing three separate pieces of information, inasmuch as you’re saying that three different beers are all in poor condition: by definition, that’s a much bigger negative for the pub than one beer being in bad nick. Similarly, if (in the second session) you’d switched to another beer for the hell of it and discovered that that was also a 4, that would have been new information and would have merited a separate score. Again, the collective factor kicks in: you have to assume that you’re not the only person appreciating that beer. On that evening, and perhaps in that week, it only got one 4 from you, but you have to assume that the beer (and by extension the pub) will also have got 4s from other people.

What’s been borne in on me, as I’ve thought about the scoring system and how it works, is that the collective factor is crucial: this issue and some others flagged above only really disappear if there is lots of scoring going on, so that the effects both of subjective preferences and of random circumstances get washed out in the noise. So the key question is, how can CAMRA maximise the number of people entering beer scores? Which, quite reasonably, is one of the considerations that’s fed into the new scoring system.

Q: If 1-5 are scores for the quality of the beer (ranging from Poor to Good to Excellent, via Acceptable and Very Good), how come 0 is a score for the absence of keg beer? How would that work, statistically speaking? Surely the 0 has to be treated as a logical flag rather than a numerical score – the 0 shouldn’t be fed into an overall average but should indicate that no averages should be calculated at all for that pub. If we’re using 0 scores, shouldn’t they signify that the beer’s Very Poor Indeed or Unacceptable?

A: You’re in luck; the new scoring system makes just this change. Among others, which I’ll look at in the next post.

This is the first of a few posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild.

Last year I wrote:

I visited 48 pubs during MM so I won’t comment on every single one, just note down what comes to mind as I go along.

But what if I did “comment on every single [pub]”, by “just [noting] down what comes to mind as I go along”?

Challenge accepted!

At the Smithfield Market Tavern, the Blackjack/Newbarns Six MPH Mild was just superb: a rich, enveloping dark mild with depths beyond depths; but for the a.b.v. you could have badged it as a dubbel. Lovely stuff, and well worth the NBSS 4.5 that we won’t be able to give it for much longer.

The Victoria Tap was quiet, giving me a chance to get acquainted with one of a selection of “short pub walk” books. Unfortunately the shortest one I could find still seemed rather long, and featured a pub described as a must-visit despite being closed at lunchtime and not offering food, or cask beer. Maybe I’ll stick to urban wandering. The beer here was Blackjack/Newbarns Six MPH Mild, coincidentally, and it was… fine; a solid 3.5. (Condition is so important, and often it’s a bit of a lottery.)

A half of Runaway Man-Chester’s Mild was good preparation for a Cumbrian beer tasting at the Petersgate Tap (which was thoroughly enjoyable, by the way, despite Cumbria not being an obvious beer Mecca). I don’t have particularly fond memories of Chester’s Mild – or any memories to speak of – but I understand this is a re-brew, and it was pretty good.

Later on, a half of Buxton Monsal Mild at the Angel was a good (albeit less sociable) way to finish off a Cumbrian beer tasting at the Tap. I’d given this a 4.5 last year (in Buxton, but at the Spoons, bizarrely) but it didn’t quite hit that level this time.

I tend to underestimate Courier; the weird name and the amateurish pump clips give them a fly-by-night air. They’ve stuck around, though, and their dark mild Mild In The Streets at the City was quality stuff. (As were about three other beers on the bar – I would have loved to stop and reacquaint myself with Coley’s stout, to name but one. But duty, or at least stickerage, called.)

Another punchy dark mild (in terms of both flavour and strength) is Holt’s seasonal Mild and Mighty. The Old Monkey is a mystery to me – if you’re going to build a new pub, why build it as a new single-room, bare-boards, ubiquitous-TV-sport pub? And if you’re running a single-room, bare-boards, ubiquitous-TV-sport pub, why serve such bloody good beer? I guess it’s just a remnant of the World We Have Lost (not the TV sport, that postdates the Beer Orders, but the rest of it).

A rare light mild at the Briton’s Protection, in the welcome shape of Timothy Taylor’s Golden Best – in very good nick, too. Coming into the Briton’s I was casting around for petitions to sign, encouraging remarks to make, etc, before I remembered that that’s all over; the bad thing we were trying to prevent has happened, albeit not quite in the way we expected. I drank my mild sitting next to a lone bottle of Jack Daniel’s, in a glass case on the wall; flotsam from the wreck of what was once a rather fine whisky pub. But at least it’s still open, and selling decent beer.

Lastly, for now, I was slightly surprised to see the Paramount serving what their app referred to as JW Lees “Boddinton’s”; I thought the plan was to keep the free-trade distribution fairly select. It wasn’t at its best, sadly. I’m a bit of a fan of Lees’ neo-Boddies’, but it’s turning out to be very variable. Catch it at its best and it’s clean and dry with an astringently bitter finish. This, however, had the look and feel of a beer in good nick, but the flavour was wheaty and biscuity, with a weak instant coffee’s worth of bitterness on the finish – a pretty bog-standard amber bitter, in other words. Perhaps it hadn’t had long enough in the cellar – although if that is the problem, there are Lees’ pubs out there that haven’t had the memo either. More to the point, I preceded that with rather a good dark mild, Brightside Sup. Not much, sup with you?

More later, if I can come back from that pun…

1. In search of Monsters

I don’t know how I missed this, but miss it – dammit! – I did.

Readers outside Stockport and environs may be unaware of the ‘Monsters Weekends’ which have been periodically put on at the Petersgate Tap. As events go, they’re fairly unstructured: you turn up any time from opening time on Friday, and you have a choice of appropriately ‘monstrous’ beers from Torrside (with occasional contributions from other breweries). Everything is served in thirds; you may be able to persuade the bar staff to pour you a half if you really want it, but two-thirds shalt thou not order, and a pint is right out.

Even if you stick to thirds, it can get a bit messy. The lineup for last weekend is typical: if you’d gone right through the card (and with those beers, why wouldn’t you?) you’d have ended up shipping the equivalent of a third of a pint at 67.5%, a.k.a. a pint at 22.5% or five pints at 4.5%. Not quite beer-festival levels, but you wouldn’t want to stop for a drink on the way home. (I mean, in point of fact you might well want to stop for a drink on the way home – drunk logic is like that – but it would not be wise.)

Anyway, I missed last weekend, but – having beer-related business in Heaton Chapel – made a quick trip to the Petersgate Tap last Friday to see what they still had on; on the way back I reckoned I could fit in Heaton Hops, a bar I only ever seem to visit on CAMRA crawls. This post is about the beers I had there and at the Tap. (It’s also about BrewDog going into administration; I’ll get to that.)

The one keg beer on the Monsters list, Torrside‘s enigmatically-titled BA ABW21, was still on at the Tap. Torrside have an ‘English’ and an ‘American’ barley wine; the American version makes heavy use of New World hops, which gives a distinct smokey-marmalade edge to what would otherwise be a big caramel fruitgum of a beer. What we had here was a barrel-aged American barley wine brewed in 2021 – hence BA ABW21. It poured dark and murky, a slightly unprepossessing appearance which I assume it owed to the barrel ageing (the bottled barley wines I’ve had from Torrside have all been bright). It tasted beautiful, though. It was a barley wine – dark and sweet – but the American hops added bitterness and a bit of grapefruit and pineapple to the mix; charred grapefruit and pineapple, perhaps. The years in barrel had left it smooth, mellow and relatively light-bodied, with a whiff of something else – pine? tobacco? – which may have been from the wood or may have been the hopping coming through. A really fine beer.

The cask version of the barrel-aged Rauchwine had also survived from last weekend. Here, I confess, my hopes weren’t high. I’m very fond of Torrside’s smoked beers (Rauchbier = smoked beer, Rauchwine = smoked barley wine). But a full week in a tapped cask tends not to do any beer much good; I was half-expecting to get smoke and not much else. In the event, I wouldn’t have mistaken it for a fresh beer – there was very little carbonation there – but in all other respects I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was astonishingly good. A superb barley wine, deep and rich, with a flavour that just kept on developing. There was smoke there, but the time in barrel had tamed it, blending it in with the dominant flavours. The closest I can come to describing the overall effect is to say that it was a bit like alternating between a strong porter and a tawny port, with a bonfire next door. Amazing beer.

I stopped at Heaton Hops before heading home, and almost regret doing so. You can’t really complain about bars being too busy – not if you’re expecting any sympathy from their managers, anyway – but HH does seem to get full very easily; in the five minutes after I’d sat down (that weekday afternoon) it went from “full-ish but OK” to “uncomfortably crowded”. By which I mean that three more people came in, or it may have been four. Either way, the balance of the slightly unpalatable choice before me when I first checked the buses – between the one in less than ten minutes’ time and the one more than 40 minutes away – rapidly tipped in favour of drinking up.

So I probably didn’t take my third of Northern Monk Barrel Aged Heaven, a Bourbon barrel-aged maple and vanilla imperial stout (11.5%), as slowly as I would otherwise have done – and coming to it straight from the Torrside Rauchwine was probably unfortunate. And I’ve probably – well, almost certainly – had too many imperial stouts over the years to be easily impressed. It was a big, chewy, sweet stout with distinct overtones of bourbon and just a touch of alcohol heat; it did what it said on the board, and did it pretty well. If this had been the first imperial stout I’d ever tasted – or even the first one that had been aged in a Bourbon barrel – I would have been knocked out. As it was, I felt the sweetness was overdone, and I wondered – if somehow you could have filtered out that ‘maple’ element – how complex or interesting the impy stout itself would have been.

What does any of this have to do with BrewDog? Possibly nothing, but let’s see how we get on.

2. Everyone has a share!

BrewDog, as we know, are currently embarking on a search for “the next phase of investment for the business”, with a view to “strengthening the long-term future of the BrewDog brand and its operations”. The background to this innocuous-sounding announcement is that they haven’t made a profit since 2019, and (even more alarmingly) annual revenue growth is only barely positive; their main investor, TSG Partners, have already loaned them £20 million to keep them afloat. The ‘investment’ the company are now looking for really means ‘buyers’; they have appointed a restructuring specialist to run a sale process. In effect BrewDog are in administration; the company may now be broken up and parts of it liquidated, depending who bids for what and on what terms.

Ultimately, we can blame the current situation on BrewDog’s aggressive management style and their drive for expansion and revenue growth at all costs; you can go broke going for turnover. A more immediate cause of the current mess was the 2017 deal with TSG Partners, which valued the company at £1 billion but gave the private equity firm a 22.3% stake in the – extraordinary – form of shares with a guaranteed 18% return. That was never going to end well. Thanks to the wonders of compound interest, TSG Partners’ original investment of £213 million is now worth £800 million – and BrewDog’s estimated value as of 2025 was £500 million. Moreover, TSG have first call on the company’s assets as a creditor. It doesn’t seem likely that anybody else is going to get much out of the company – certainly not any Equity Punks who haven’t been able to shift their shares.

So: aggressive management, over-ambitious expansion plans, and a financing deal that was somewhere between wildly optimistic and frankly insane, perhaps with a side order of IBG, YBG. Maybe BrewDog’s impending demiserestructuring has nothing to do with beer. Or maybe it’s part of the same picture as that (for me) disappointingly bland and unsurprising 11.5% barrel-aged imperial stout. After all, when craft beer first hit the mainstream in the UK – which is very much, and not at all coincidentally, the same time that BrewDog first started making headlines – bars like Heaton Hops were thin on the ground, and >10% barrel-aged stouts were the stuff of dreams. At least, they were the stuff of transatlantic fanboying; I remember seeing Mark Dredge talking about “Dark Lord Day” and thinking “well, I do like Bateman’s, but is it that special?”.

Then, as ‘craft beer’ and its weird new styles and flavours began their assault on the mainstream, BrewDog capitalised on the moment. Their bars, in particular, did a balancing act weirdly parallelling J.D. Wetherspoons’. Spoons’ have the core appeal of inclusiveness, of not turning away anybody who’s got the price of a cup of tea; on top of that, in terms of real ale you can be pretty confident you’ll get something in decent condition, and there’s a fair chance you’ll find something interesting (I’ve had several beers I’d grade at 4 in Spoons’ and a couple of 4.5s). The fact that you’ve got a non-zero chance of seeing a beer as good as Elland 1834 or Acorn Gorlovka on the bar isn’t the most obvious part of Spoons’ appeal, but I think if it wasn’t there the chain would look very different; any idiot can run a chain of pubs with boring and mediocre beer, after all (no links, no pack drill). Similarly, BrewDog bars have the core appeal of exclusiveness – if the music’s too loud, etc. On top of that, you can be pretty confident you can get a decent pint of something identifiable as craft beer, and there’s a fair chance you’ll find something interesting.

But that only works for as long as craft beer is interesting, and I’m increasingly unsure that it still is. What have you got? An IPA. Another IPA. A golden ale. An amber ale – oh, come on, that’s just a bitter! A New England IPA – yeah, yeah. What else? A West Coast IPA… OK, bit different, bit old-school. Couple of strong ones… 7%, that’s barely a double IPA, but OK. And… yeah, an impy stout. Barrel-aged. Yeah, OK… Increasingly it feels as if breweries in the ‘craft’ space are just ticking the same few boxes. (Not to pick on Northern Monk especially, but the sense of familiarity – of playing the same game that BrewDog excel(led) at – intensifies when I read on Untappd that that imperial stout had a “divine depth of Bourbon and maple flavour” and was “decadent enough to make an angel blush” (it’s called ‘Heaven’, you see). By contrast, the Untappd entries for the two Torrside beers I had read as follows: “a 10th birthday special release” and “”. Which, to be fair, is probably going a bit too far the other way.)

I’m a grumpy old git, admittedly, and the customer base for decent beer isn’t entirely made up of grumpy old gits (whatever you may have heard about CAMRA). There is a market for those craft beer styles – if there’s an IPA on every bar you see, that’s not because people aren’t buying them – and lots of brewers do them perfectly well. But I do think familiarity is taking over from excitement these days – and a company like BrewDog, geared (rather too heavily geared) for continual expansion, needs a continuing supply of excitement if it isn’t going to run out of road.

3. Damn few

OK, so what does any of that have to do with Torrside and their Monsters?

I don’t want to misrepresent Torrside; a lot of the beers they produce are session-strength, and many of them aren’t all that different stylistically from beers produced by any other brewery. But they do have, at the very least, a well-established sideline in unusual beers, often unusually strong. Those beers are generally a bit off the ‘craft’ beaten track – think barley wine rather than double IPA – and sometimes they’re off the map completely: I don’t think I’ve had a smoked barley wine from any other brewer, let alone a barley wine brewed with blackberries. They don’t always work, but even the misfires are never less than interesting; I tasted a strong white stout a few years ago which I described at the time as “like De Garre‘s tripel, in bad as well as good ways”. And when they do work – as my tasting notes above suggest – they’re more than interesting; they go places you weren’t expecting (and can’t always describe). Battle Pug 2021 is officially described as a “Chinook barley wine from an ex-Moscatel, ex-smoked-wheat-wine barrel”; my personal tasting note read “Fruity golden ale with something bigger and weirder concealed about its person; deceptively massive”. The last bit probably refers to the strength (which was 9%), but in its way it’s a good summary of a lot of Torrside beers. You may think you know what you’re getting, but don’t be too sure; they’re deceptively massive.

You can see where this post is going, or could be going: the fading of the buzz around ‘craft’ may mean casualties among those who thought it would go on for ever, but it clears the field for those who march to the beat of their own drummer. Doing ‘craft’ isn’t the route to guaranteed success any more; perhaps those who survive will be those who are willing to – in the words of noted business analyst Seal – get a little crazy.

I’d love that to be true. Not the part about the casualties – I don’t like seeing anyone in the world of beer losing their job (with the possible exception of James Watt, who won’t) – but the bit about the originals and enthusiasts being the ones who will clean up. Sadly, it’s not the way to bet. Rather than imploding dramatically, it seems far more likely that the ‘craft’ scene will fade out with a whimper, gradually subsiding into the mainstream. Brewing New England IPAs and strong stouts will be no more noteworthy – no more of a branding opportunity – than brewing golden ales and lagers; there’ll be no buzz around what was once ‘craft beer’ and no premium attached to ‘craft’ styles, financial or reputational. And those who survive will just be those who keep their costs under control, give the public what they want and manage to avoid runs of bad luck, same as always.

But that does at least mean that, after the ‘craft’ wave just as much as during and even before it, those who make the good, interesting and different stuff will be… those who make the good, interesting and different stuff. Same as it ever was.

It’s been a bit quiet on here lately; blogging is a habit you can get out of, sadly, particularly when external validation is running short (i.e. not many people are actually reading what you write). Part of the trouble is that there’s less of a buzz around beer blogging than there used to be – and considerably less excitement about beer and brewing generally. A year ago there was some inter-blog discussion of “what’s new” in beer – specifically, what was new in beer since 2018 – and I couldn’t come up with much: milkshake IPAs and equally sweet pastry stouts were the last new ‘craft beer’ styles to go anything like mainstream, and in both cases we’re going back nine or ten years. (Although I do miss the Bretted ‘sour stouts’ that I mentioned in that post; that was a post-2018 innovation, albeit one that didn’t take.)

Something that was new last summer was the return of Boddingtons bitter – more specifically, the launch of J.W. Lees’ cask Boddingtons Bitter. I drank it at the Founders Hall, one of Lees’ two town-centre flagship pubs, shortly after its launch. (On reflection I can’t think of many Lees’ pubs that aren’t flagships. Over the last few years they seem to have invested quite a lot in their estate, but specifically in a particular type of pub: large, open-plan but multi-area, with old-school pub fitments, a substantial range of Lees’ beers (kept well) and a standard food offer; very much an answer to the question “how does a family brewer find a niche upmarket from Wetherspoons?”, and frankly a pretty good one. Whether Lees have balanced this out by closing a lot of smaller pubs I don’t know.)

Anyway, the Boddies’ was flying out in the Founder’s Hall that day, and I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. On the most cynical level it was a heavily-promoted novelty, complete with a striking bar presence and its own glassware. Then there was the general local goodwill/curiosity towards Boddies’ as a brand; nobody below their mid-50s will have drunk Boddington’s while the brewery was still independent, but as a brand it still had a presence through the 90s and into the early 00s. Besides which, quite a lot of cask beer drinkers are in their mid-50s or over; a lot of older drinkers can actually remember what Boddies’ used to be like – and some of them can even remember what it was like when it was good (although there is some debate as to when this was). Last but not least, Lees’ neo-Boddies’, when I got to taste it last September, was a really nice beer: a lightly-hopped, sweetish best bitter, but with a massive bitter finish.

So that was September. What happened next? Lees’ didn’t put Boddingtons into their estate generally – presumably thinking it would cannibalise sales of MPA – but kept it for the Founder’s Hall; more widely, the plan was to sell through the free trade. On launch Heaton Hops took a nine or two, I remember reading, and the Crown took three; it also went on the bar at the Micro Bar in the Arndale, and a few less ticker-oriented places such as Corbieres. But, if I’m honest, I didn’t expect it to last. The novelty element and the “by ‘eck it’s gorgeous” curiosity factor would fade pretty quickly, I thought; even older drinkers who remembered the original would surely not want to keep going back to Boddies’ once they’d reacquainted themselves with it.

The other day – which is to say, four months later – I paused for a drink before going home after an afternoon’s shopping. ‘Pause’ was the operative word, as I was stuck for a while between two options. According to Untappd,  Café Beermoth had De Ranke XXX on – a rare sighting in any form, least of all on tap in a Manchester bar. (I’ve had the X and XX – and rather fine they were, especially the latter – but never XXX.) But that wasn’t the only interesting beer they had on – and, as a CAMRA man, I do like to have (and score) something on cask when I’m out – so I’d have been looking at two drinks (at least) rather than one, which didn’t seem ideal that weekday afternoon. Besides, I’ve never found Café Beermoth a particularly pleasant or relaxing place to drink. (Horses for courses; I’m sure they’ll struggle on without having much appeal to the over-60s.)

The second option was the Micro Bar, which had… Boddingtons Bitter. And so it was that I had a pint of that. I was glad I did; in fact I was surprised by quite how good it was. The body (as always) was that of a standard English best bitter, fruity without being obtrusively sweet or sharp, and the finish was (as usual) throat-dryingly bitter. What was different about this pint was the foretaste, which was dry and gently smoky, with a distinct whiff of old books. It was unexpected – mostly before then I’d found that neo-Boddingtons had no aroma to speak of and opened with sweetness – but it worked extraordinarily well. I scored it (drum roll please)… 4.5. (Still haven’t had a beer I’d rate at 5. Maybe next time.)

It turns out that, as of January 2025, the new Boddies is a regular at the Micro Bar. As far as the revival being a flash in the pan is concerned, I was completely wrong. It’s on at Heaton Hops as I write, it’s been a frequent visitor to the Crown and it’s been spotted recently at Corbieres. And, if it’s anywhere near as good as the pint I had the other day, that’s hardly surprising. Perhaps “people have just gone back to drinking it like they used to,” as the bartender at the Micro Bar told me.

Well, perhaps. Maybe retirement’s making me morbid, but I’ve been thinking about all the ways in which I’m not drinking Boddies’ “like I used to”. (In actual fact I only ever drank it once in the 1980s – strictly speaking I should be writing about “all the ways in which I’m not drinking Boddies’ like I used to drink Greenall Whitley Bitter”, but that would just be confusing. Also, one of the relevant factors would be that Greenalls’ bitter was swill. But I digress.)

In 1989, to start with, I wouldn’t have been deterred by the prospect of having two beers rather than one, even on a weekday afternoon. (Fast metabolisms are wasted on the young!) But then, in 1989 I wouldn’t have been in the market for a drink at mid-afternoon on a weekday. It would have been legally possible – all-day opening in England had come in the previous year – but difficult to square with a full-time job. So I wouldn’t have been in the Arndale in the first place – although I wouldn’t have been able to get a drink there if I had been. In 1989 the Arndale was a big beige box, with no natural light anywhere except within six feet of the doors (this isn’t relevant to beer, it’s just weird remembering what it was like back then). The fish market was in the basement, along with a food market selling fruit and veg and some very unattractive-looking meat – and, while you might have been able to get a meat pie or a barm, there certainly wasn’t anywhere selling burgers or pizza, let alone (getting back to the subject) draught beer. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anywhere in the city centre with Belgian beers on tap in 1989; certainly there was no Untappd, not least because there were no mobile phones and (brace yourself) no Internet.

Life was different in 1989, which inevitably means that my drinking life was different (a lot less varied, for a start; less mixing and matching or fitting in a swift half, more settling in for the session). A beer from the 1980s can’t bring back the drinking practices that went with it – even if you remembered the way you used to drink Boddies it would be perverse to try and recreate it, not least because you’d be far too old.

But what that tells us is that the Boddies drinkers of 2026, while they may trend old, aren’t some kind of 1980s re-enactment society; the new Boddies is just that, a new beer, and it’s finding a niche in the post-craft contemporary beer landscape. And that may tell us something interesting about that landscape, and the position of cask beer within it. If you were devising a new beer from scratch, you wouldn’t launch an English bitter, exclusively dispensed on cask, with heavy use of bittering hops and light aroma hopping – but that’s the beer that Lees launched last summer, and (despite my & doubtless others’ scepticism) it’s doing rather well.

Going right back to the point I started with, about the seeming lack of innovation in beer: perhaps this is a partial answer. When you walk into one of those flagship Lees pubs – the Founders’ Hall, the Pointy Dog – you’re not actually entering a traditional English pub, marinated in the near-200-year history of a family brewer. But it is a family brewer and the pubs do look pubbish (in a way that Spoons’ almost never do); more importantly, in my experience they do deliver what you want from a pub. Similarly, at the end of the day there’s nothing traditional about Lees’ Boddingtons, no real continuity with the past – no one can possibly know whether it actually tastes like it did (and ‘tastes like it did’ when?). But it evokes an older style of beer – before haze, before fruit-salad New World hops – and it delivers what you want from that kind of beer.

So maybe that’s the new frontier in beer innovation: doing more or less what we used to do, and doing it quite well. Maybe, for now, we’ll be going forward by going back.

Since the first Druid hung a hop bush out of his upstairs window – a telltale sign for the medieval cognoscenti that human sacrifice was no longer practiced on the premises, only the ritual slaughter of John Barleycorn – pub-going in Britain has undergone many changes. Who can forget the great Porter Flood of 1815, when the closure of mainline railway stations after the Battle of Waterloo led to the pubs of Covent Garden being literally flooded with thirsty porters? Or the historic landing in Britain by Danish brewery mogul Carl Inger Blåk-Läbøl, which transformed the British beer landscape so dramatically – and would have transformed it so much sooner if only he hadn’t landed in Wrexham? More recently, British pub-goers still shudder at the memory of the Beer Orders – Lord George’s hugely unpopular decree ordering pubs to serve water instead of beer for the duration of the Great War (asking for tap-water in a pub is frowned upon to this day). And who could forget the 2007 ban on working-class drinkers setting foot inside any pub except those run by Samuel Wetherspoon? Many have cited this as incontrovertible evidence of government hostility to the pub trade: the so-called “smoking ban”.

But gradual trends have also changed the pub landscape. Women, widely believed to make up as much as half of the adult population, are now a regular sight in many licensed hostelries, and have increasingly been seen drinking beer – although the oft-repeated insistence that they’ll only have beer “if there’s something decent on” suggests that equal participation in pub life is still some way off! Meat pies, sausage rollups and porky pasties, once a familiar sight on the brass rails of many a bar, are now rarely to be seen – although the public’s stubborn attachment to foodstuffs like these can be gauged from the growing popularity of a novel liquid alternative, the “pastie stout”. Strengths have crept up, too. In a far cry from the stoical water-drinkers of the Blitz, many of today’s pub-goers have a preferred tipple with an alcohol content of 30 or even 40%; indeed, some of these choices are so strong that they are generally served only in measures of a half-gill, quarter-gill, nipperkin or brown bowl, often diluted with lemonade or tonic water.

In this ever-changing landscape, a guide to pub etiquette is essential. But which guide? No one has time to read all the pub etiquette guides out there, but how do you select? How do you know if a pub etiquette guide is really aimed at you – other than the impact it has on you, or the sound it makes as it goes over your head?

Here, then, are six* key points to look out for in pub etiquette guides, assembled by a number** of beer writers*** for your further edification****.

*Probably. We’ll see how we get on.
**Possibly the number 1.
***Not necessarily published beer writers.
****Pubgoers are assumed to have completed primary and secondary edification.

(This post is a response to Pellicle’s Essential Guide to Pub Etiquette from the other day week month. Thanks and apologies to Matthew Curtis and to the authors. Any errors in the introduction are my own – let me know if you spot anything!)

1. PUBMANSHIP

Pubmanship isn’t as much fun as it looks.

Probably nobody under the age of 50 remembers Stephen Potter (he died in 1969, apart from anything else). Potter was a writer, for print and radio, who had one big hit and – like many people in that situation – grew to resent it. In his case, The Hit was a book called Gamesmanship (1947), which he followed up (increasingly reluctantly) with books either narrowing the first book’s focus (Golfmanship) or broadening it (Lifemanship). The central conceit in these books – and other spinoffs like Anti-Woo, purportedly a guide to successfully avoiding romantic relationships – was that the reader could learn how to be “one up” on everyone else in social situations, and that working the unwritten rules in this way could be an enjoyable pursuit in itself. You could see it as gamifying social relations (decades before Untappd).

It’s a fertile idea, and you can see how Potter was able to keep coming back to it. (Even after his death the spinoffs and repackaged collections continued to appear; I remember a TV series based on the books going out in the 1970s.) It wears thin quite quickly, though; the books are more for dipping than for sustained reading. It’s fundamentally a joke, after all, and after a while you feel like you’ve heard it already. It’s certainly not an approach you should ever take seriously. In reality many areas of social life just are complicated and awkward to navigate, and you get through them as best you can; there are no social ninjas, expertly manipulating this and circumventing that, and trying to be one is not likely to make you look cool.

As far as I know Stephen Potter never wrote about ‘pubmanship’; this appears to have left the field open for Ronnie Corbett, of all people, to write the book on the subject. (Actually this seems to have been more of a trivia compendium, put out as a promotional item by a cigar company (different times eh).)

But if Potter had addressed pubmanship, he would almost certainly have zeroed in on minor irritations of pub-going and suggested that they should be treated as a series of challenges to be surmounted through skill and dedication. Challenges like finding a table in a busy pub, for instance:

us[e] your peripheral vision to scout for a leaving group with the precision of a sniper. Swoop in with bags and coats, using the correct balance of confidence and manners

Sounds like fun! Actually it just sounds exhausting – and anyone likely to pride him- or herself on their forceful but urbane table-sniping abilities sounds like a bit of a bore. In that situation I think I’d stand, or else give it up and go to the Spoons down the road. Pub[wo]manship isn’t as much fun as it looks.

2. BEING RIGHT

A queue in a pub is like a conga line at a… actually, a queue in a pub is like a conga line, full stop. It’s no fun, it takes up too much space, it annoys everyone else and it basically shouldn’t be there. And you will, eventually, join it.

I don’t know when queuing in pubs got started. It’s largely (predominantly?) a Spoons’ thing, and I suspect it reached its current level under the combined influence of Covid and the cost of living crisis. The first of these discouraged people from joining anything that looked like a crowd or a scrum; the second brought more people into pubs by making lunch in the local Spoons’ a more attractive option (or even the only option).

I agree with everyone who says that queuing in pubs is awkward, inconvenient, out of line with pub tradition and even pub architecture (the bar’s right there!); in short it’s wrong. But if there is a queue – and if it isn’t a temporary bottleneck that the bar staff are in the process of clearing (“Is anybody waiting?”) – then that’s how I’m going to approach the bar, by joining the queue.

All you need to do is ignore it, walk to the bar, order your drink, and get on with pub life as intended.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe that’s the ‘right’ thing to do on some level, but nobody else cares whether you’re right or not. What people do care about is fairness, and that means not acting as if the rules they’re following don’t apply to you. So grin and bear it, and join the conga line when it comes past – and don’t jump the queue.

Which brings us to a broader point:

3. DON’T BE KING CANUTE

Little did King Canute imagine, as the incoming tide inexorably rose to his neck, that in years to come the “King’s Head” would be (Don’t start that again – Ed.)

Moving along… Etiquette is a curious thing, as it’s both descriptive and normative. To anyone approaching an area from the outside – the novice pubgoer, in this case – it’s all normative: what you want to know is how you ought to act. For people who are already participants, though, etiquette is mostly descriptive (how we generally act): you do take part in rounds, you don’t try and give your order to a glass-collector, etc, because that’s how we do it.

But times change, and the ways people act change, and sometimes you can see a change for the worse setting in and push back against it – if only by refusing to take part. So etiquette guidance can include a bit on how people ought to act – as long as it’s qualified with (as we mostly still do). Usually, though, the effect is a bit Canute-like, and the etiquette advisor just ends up looking like a grumpy old sod (even if they’re neither old nor grumpy). For instance, should pubs offer cocktails – or anything else as time-consuming as that to serve? Probably not, unless they’ve staffed up specially. A lot of them do, though – and you can’t really call it a breach of pub etiquette to order what’s available. Should people order cocktails when the pub’s busy? Again, probably not – but would the pub be that busy if it didn’t offer cocktails? As with queues, sometimes you just need to go with the flow.

Which brings us to an even broader point:

4. PEOPLE ARE ANNOYING

As I worked my way through the Pellicle etiquette guide I began to feel as if I’d been buttonholed by a bartender who’d just come off a particularly rough shift. The awful truth is that there are lots of things that people can do in pubs that are annoying, some of which are particularly annoying to the bar staff. Sometimes people enjoy themselves without showing any respect for other people; sometimes they annoyingly show lack of respect for other people enjoying themselves. People do harmless but annoying things, people make well-intentioned but annoying comments; people assume the bartender knows all about the beers on the bar, people assume the bartender knows nothing about the beers on the bar… It’s a minefield out there, and the bar staff spend their working hours walking back and forth across it. Tough job. You should probably tip more.

The thing is, a lot of etiquette advice in that guide is offered from a bartender’s viewpoint, and much of it boils down to “please don’t annoy me like that again”. With the greatest respect for anyone doing bar work (which is a really tough job), finding the Goldilocks spot where I can be sure I won’t annoy anyone in any way at all is probably impossible; in any case, it would go way beyond etiquette.

On the other hand, some things aren’t so much beyond etiquette as prior to etiquette:

5. COMMON DECENCY

I was a bit shocked to see sections in the Pellicle guide on misgendering and on filming bar staff without consent – not because I don’t think those are bad things, but because not doing them (to anyone) strikes me as too fundamental to be called ‘etiquette’. As a wise man once said, be excellent to one another – everywhere, not just in pubs. And if you can’t manage that, at least be decent (“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind”).

6. KEEP IT BRIEF

When it comes to etiquette guides, finally, it’s always good to let the reader know what they’re letting themselves in for at the outset: promise X sections, deliver X sections. Six is plenty – and if you can keep them brief, all the better. Two sentences is probably all you need; maybe three.

Boddington’s Bitter: a story in three parts

Greetings, visitors from Boak and Bailey! Feel free to skip to part 3, where I actually review the beer. Now back to, well, me.

1. That Was Then

I came to Manchester in 1982. You very rarely saw Boddington’s in south and central Manchester back then; I remember thinking I’d spotted their “barrel with bees” logo from a bus once, then looking again the next day and realising it was actually J.W. Lees’ “barrel with five-bar gate”. (You rarely saw Lees’ in south Manchester either, but that’s another story.) Boddies’ was well thought of, but it never sounded special enough to justify a special trip up North (Manchester).

So it wasn’t till 1986 that I tasted Boddington’s Bitter. I remember the occasion vividly; I wrote about it in this lockdown-era post. A friend at work had been banging on about proper working men’s pubs and took me to the Old Garratt after work to prove his point. A proper working men’s pub I guess it was: I remember the place being full of blokes, and the two of us being the only people there in a suit and tie; I also remember being unable to see the ceiling for a blanket of cigarette smoke. And I remember they were serving Boddington’s Bitter. I wasn’t struck by how bitter it was, or how drinkable it was; I wasn’t struck by it at all (it wasn’t even unusually ordinary). So it can be told: I have drunk Boddies’ bitter, made by Boddington’s, brewed at Strangeways. I just have no idea what it was like.

Then came the sellout (1989), and the transformation of the beer into a Whitbread brand, and – from 1991 – the nationwide marketing campaign, handled by the none-more-90s agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. There’s an interesting and detailed account of the “cream of Manchester”/”by ‘eck it’s gorgeous” campaign here; it shows how the campaign we remember developed over time, with the modification of the original form of the slogan (“By ‘eck, you smell gorgeous tonight, petal”) and the successive casting of Anna Chancellor, Sarah Parish and finally Melanie Sykes.

Effective and memorable though the campaign was, it had very little to do with the reputation Boddington’s already had in Manchester. To the extent that it said anything about the beer, it suggested that Boddies’ was mainly known for a thick, creamy head, which clearly wasn’t the case (the Bartle Bogle Hegarty campaign for Cameron’s Strongarm is one of beer history’s great might-have-beens). A corporate brewer had acquired a beer and turned it into a brand, as they do. Whitbread’s investment did wonders for the profile of Boddington’s the brand, nationwide and even internationally:

(From 1998. It’s probably not possible to check out “that British pub at the Trade Center”, unfortunately.)

Neither Whitbread nor AB InBev (who acquired Whitbread’s brewing interests in 2001) did anything for the beer, though. The cask version, in particular, is a distant memory – although one that several local brewers appear to treasure.

2. Think I’m Going Back

There have been numerous attempts to recreate or emulate Boddington’s Bitter. Marble‘s blurb for Manchester Bitter says, somewhat elliptically, “Our most traditional core beer is inspired by a Manchester stalwart; a fondly-remembered original.” This Good Beer Hunting profile of Marble removes any lingering mystery, quoting former head brewer Colin Stronge describing Manchester Bitter as “originally an attempt to recreate Boddingtons, or to brew an assertively bitter, relatively highly hopped Pale Ale” (‘originally’ here refers to 2003, incidentally).

What’s it like? It’s pale and hoppy, although (in both cases) perhaps more strikingly so by 2003 standards than by those of 2025. It’s quite a traditional ‘bitter’ flavour profile in some ways; it’s not especially aromatic, and biscuity malt is a small but definite presence. What it is, more than anything else, is bitter: what you get is basically an uncompromising bitter attack followed by a bit of bread and biscuit, followed in turn by a big bitter finish. Drinking my first cask pint in over three months (you know why), I said it was as if Marble had

taken a best bitter, stripped out most – but not all – of the malt and the body, and filled in all the gaps with aroma hops and (especially) bittering hops … it drinks with the soft cereal complexity of a BB, up to the moment when the bitter finish grabs you by the throat and squeezes

(That particular pint will have tasted particularly good, admittedly.)

So that’s one way to do it. Another is J.W. Lees‘ MPA, whose launch I was lucky enough to attend in 2013. William Lees-Jones announced, unsubtly, that he thought they’d succeeded in putting the cream back into Manchester, adding “and by ‘eck, it’s gorgeous” in case anyone was still in the dark. I’m rather fond of MPA, although I may have been unduly influenced by the brewery pouring five pints down my neck free of charge back in 2013. When I’d recovered, I described the beer as

a light, sessionable golden ale, but with enough hop character and aroma to earn the ‘pale ale’ tag; it’s got that ‘refreshingly bitter’ quality, particularly on the finish. It doesn’t have the aggressive hopping of a Marble or Titanic … but it has got enough hopping to keep it interesting, and avoid the blandness of so many golden and blonde ales

I think I’d say now that its main quality is dryness, throughout – there’s certainly no biscuity heaviness mid-mouth. It opens with a bit of herby aroma hopping and finishes refreshingly bitter; in between, there’s not much else to get in the way. It’s very pintable, very much a session beer (on draught it’s 3.7%), but the flavour profile’s surprisingly plain, even austere.

I should also say a couple of words about Jack of All Taps, Thornbridge‘s short-run collaborative brew with the Manchester station-based ‘Tap’ chain, whose pump clip proclaimed its goal of being a Boddies-alike.. I drank it twice while it was on at the Oxford Road Tap. Last summer, Thornbridge did a seasonal collab with J.W. Lees which was basically MPA x Jaipur, and the second time I had Jack of All Taps it was in very much that area: restrained aroma hopping, dry body, grapefruit and cough mixture finish. The first time I had it, though, it had a drily bitter finish – it was dry all the way through, basically, and supremely drinkable with it. A more stable re-brew of Jack of All Taps probably isn’t on anyone’s to-do list, but I wish it was.

In the mean time, though, there’s always the original. Well, an original. A revival of the original. The official revival of an original. You can drink something on handpump called Boddington’s Bitter, is what I’m saying.

3. And Now All This

But what’s it like? How do those three son-of-Boddington’s compare to J.W. Lees Boddington’s Bitter, to give it its full name?

The first thing that struck me was its colour: it’s gold rather than blonde, and not a particularly pale gold at that. The second was the foretaste, in which I couldn’t detect any aroma hopping at all (although this is probably partly down to my undiscriminating nose). What there was instead, rather to my surprise, was sweetness. It’s not the dense sweetness of a malty beer or the muted biscuity sweetness of a beer like Marble Manchester Bitter; it’s the overt and uncomplicated sweet foretaste of a light mild, of an entry-level tripel, of Black Country bitters like Bathams’. Mid-mouth there’s a bit more body and complexity, but not much. But then you hit the finish and the aftertaste, which are of an absolutely huge bitterness; I drank this beer back to back with MPA, and I’d scientifically assess the finish of the Boddies’ as twice as bitter as MPA’s. What I wrote in 2020 about my first taste of Manchester Bitter in several months – “it drinks with the soft cereal complexity of a [best bitter], up to the moment when the bitter finish grabs you by the throat and squeezes” – basically applies (although ‘complexity’ would be a bit generous). It’s throat-dryingly bitter, and because of this – and perhaps also because of the contrast with the opening sweetness – I found it very more-ish.

Whether that sweet, Batham’s-ish quality is more true to early-80s Boddies than the bitter-all-the-way style of the earlier three emulations – or to late-70s Boddies, or early-70s Boddies, or… – I’ll leave to those better qualified to judge. It’s a distinctive flavour profile, though; unusual – particularly in our post-2010 aroma-hop-heavy world – and, I think, successful.

It’s not “gorgeous”, though; I doubt it ever was. (As I mentioned above, that word got into the ad campaign through a version of the ad that leaned much more heavily into comic caricature; it wasn’t being seriously proposed that putting beer foam on your face would make you smell gorgeous.) I had a pint of RedWillow Wreckless a couple of weeks ago that I still remember fondly; it was a beer to linger over, the elements of the flavour fitting together like a 3D jigsaw. Now, that was gorgeous. Lees’ Boddington’s is much more streamlined than that and less ambitious – but what it is, is drinkable. It’s very, very drinkable. By ‘eck, it’s… you get the idea!

4. Sorry, Part Four?

I just wanted to clarify that review by saying that, like all cask ales, Boddington’s tastes different on different occasions. It turns out that the flavour profile of the new Boddingtons can cover quite a wide range. The other day at Sam’s Chop House I had a pint of Lees’ Boddington’s which wasn’t too far from Marble Manchester Bitter: the foretaste was bitter and the aftertaste was very bitter indeed. It was a very satisfying pint, all but for the fact that it was heavily chilled. On the other hand, at Founder’s Hall today I had a pint of Boddies’ which I’d describe as unremarkable. It was good – I mean, Good Beer Guide levels of good – but it was definitely not worth running up the flags for. The foretaste was neither sweet nor bitter but a mélange of the two – an effect very familiar from traditional English bitters – while the aftertaste was at best… quite bitter. It’s worth noting that the bartender had to wait quite a long time for it to clear: I wonder if this is a problem of success – in other words, if the Founder’s Hall is just pushing too much Boddies’ too quickly. Whatever the underlying cause, this was an unremarkable pint. It was still highly drinkable – “have a drink when you catch the glass in the corner of your eye” levels of drinkable. But it wasn’t great. And, on that basis, I can understand people tasting the new Boddingtons and being unimpressed. Go back, is my advice; seek it out somewhere else (e.g.).

Like other CAMRA members, I regularly score the cask beer I drink using the National Beer Scoring System (NBSS). This isn’t just for my own convenience: venues generally need to score an average of at least 3.0 on the NBSS to be eligible for inclusion in the Good Beer Guide, while CAMRA’s online pub guide includes filters on NBSS scores (>3.0 and >3.5). So my & other people’s scores are actually contributing to a crowd-sourced measure of quality – of the beer itself, that is, not the range or any other characteristics of the venue. It’s not nothing; once when on holiday I noticed a new appearance in the online list of NBSS 3.0+ pubs, specifically a pub whose beer I’d recently given a 3.5. It had gone again by the time I got home; perhaps I’d been over-generous.

As that example suggests, one scorer’s ratings can vary from another’s (particularly when one scorer’s in a holiday mood and hasn’t had draught Tribute in a while). And, as it also suggests, this doesn’t really matter, as there are generally enough scores for the aggregate not to be affected by individual variations. It won’t even matter if one scorer consistently tends to go high, just as long as there are lower-than-usual scores to balance them out – and if there aren’t any lower-than-usual scores, maybe that just shows a higher rating is deserved. You could even say that it’s good to have a few people who are liberal with their high scores – or with their low scores, for that matter – just to give the averages a nudge, and make sure that beers stand out when they deserve to.

I don’t think the NBSS is entirely fit for purpose, though. To see why not, here are the scoring categories as they’re described on CAMRA’s beer scoring Web page. These descriptions have been reproduced on local and regional CAMRA pages all around the country, although a few branches have taken a different approach – notably Heart of Staffordshire (HoS) CAMRA, whose slightly tongue-in-cheek version of the scoring guidelines I’ll also be quoting.

5. CAMRA say: “Perfect – Probably the best you are ever likely to find. A seasoned drinker will award this score very rarely”. The HoS CAMRA version is similar: “Perfect: I’ve died and gone to heaven. Should rarely be awarded!”.

I’ve never yet awarded a 5; I feel it would signify “the best beer I’ve ever tasted”, and I’m still waiting for that to happen. That word ‘probably’ is interesting, though; I wonder if it’s there to counteract this way of thinking, and to encourage more people to give a 5 when they drink something that could be the best beer ever. CAMRA muddy the waters further when they say, further down the same page, that “a 5 is something given once or twice a year”. I suppose ‘at most’ is implicit; even so, that seems like an awful lot of Best Beers Ever.

4.5. CAMRA say: they don’t say anything, other than that if you can’t decide on a whole-number score you can enter a .5. I don’t really think being undecided is the best way to think of mid-points between scores, particularly not in this case – “this is definitely excellent, but I can’t decide if it’s the best beer ever”? I have given a few 4.5s – five, to be precise; perhaps 1% of my total scores – for beers that I was quite confident were very good indeed; even better than what I think of as a 4. Maybe I should have gone all the way to 5, but surely that would have been too many Best Beers Ever. (Two of the five were in Spoons’, incidentally.)

4. CAMRA say: “4: Very Good – Good Excellent beer in excellent condition” [sic] The HoS CAMRA version reads: “4-4.5: Very good / excellent. Cancel plans for the rest of the day”.

Apart from that “Good Excellent” typo (which really should have been fixed before the page was published), I’m not keen on how the ‘official’ version specifies ‘excellent beer’ as well as ‘excellent condition’. I had a pint of Marston’s Pedigree (brewed by Carlsberg) the other day, which was strikingly good. I was quite happy to score it at 3.5; a pub serving nothing but that beer, in that condition, would be an ornament to the GBG, Carlsberg or no Carlsberg. Yes, even soulless corporate macro shadow-of-its-former-self cask-ale-product swill can score a 3.5. Could it have gone as high as 4 on anothe day? I honestly can’t see why not – but that phrase ‘excellent beer’ would seem to suggest not. I much prefer the HoS version, which captures that “I took a punt on this beer and now I’ve got a new favourite beer” experience that we’ve all probably had (and if we haven’t, we should get out more).

3.5. I’ll come back to that.

3. CAMRA say: “3: Good – Good beer in good form. You may cancel plans to move to the next pub. You want to stay for another pint and may seek out the beer again.” HoS CAMRA are singing from the same hymn sheet: “3-3.5: Above average / Good. I’ll come here again, may cancel plans to move on.”

This, the central point of the scale, is probably the least controversial: 3 means the beer is good enough that you want to drink it again, possibly straight away. And – unless you count the words ‘good beer’ – there’s no requirement that the beer should generally be particularly good; it’s all about the beer you’re drinking at the moment. CAMRA also add that “Most worthy Good Beer Guide pubs tend to score either a 3 or 4 for their beers”, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and hence doesn’t really clarify things.

As for 3.5, I guess that would be “I’m very impressed by this beer and definitely want to drink it again (although I wouldn’t necessarily go all the way to ‘excellent’)”.

2.5. Instead of lumping in the .5 mark with 2, as they did for 3 and 4, HoS CAMRA offer: “2.5 Average. It’s OK but doesn’t tickle your beer-buds”. I’ve got some issues with this, but I’ll deal with them under

2. CAMRA say: “2: Average – Competently kept, drinkable pint but doesn’t inspire in anyway [sic], not worth moving to another pub but you drink the beer without really noticing.” As we’ve just seen, this is more or less exactly how HoS CAMRA defined 2.5; their definition of 2 is, more tersely, “2: Below average. Just drinkable”.

The fact that HoS CAMRA are 0.5 out from the official CAMRA definition isn’t very significant – although personally, for what it’s worth, I lean towards the ‘official’ definition: 2 for ‘mediocre’, 2.5 for ‘better than mediocre but still not actually good’. My issues with these definitions are different. Firstly, CAMRA’s definition raises, once again, the confusion between the quality of the beer in general and the quality of this beer (much of which is down to condition). If anything, the specification of a ‘competently kept’ beer which ‘doesn’t inspire’ suggests that the low mark is coming more from the quality of the beer generally than from the state of this specific example. Along the same lines, further down the page we read, “Bland, uninspiring beers score a 2”. I think this is the wrong way round. I’m not sure what’s meant by ‘competently kept’ – is it a lower bar than ‘well kept’? – but in my experience a beer that’s in good nick is very rarely totally bland and uninspiring. I find it hard to imagine a well-kept pint which I’d want to push down as low as a 2 – even if it was a Pedigree; even if it was a Doom Bar. A beer in mediocre condition will get a 2.5 or a 2 from me all day long, though, even if it’s Bathams Bitter.

Secondly, I hate that word ‘average’: we know that colloquially it means ‘not good’ (‘bang average’), but literally it means ‘the statistical mid-point in a range’, which would imply that there’s just as big a range of beer quality below 2 as above it. Which may be why HoS CAMRA moved the ‘Average’ descriptor to 2.5 – midway between 0 and 5. It’s not really a numerical issue, though, because it’s not just a range of numbers on a scale: it’s a range of pubs, ultimately, ranked in order of beer quality. Are we really saying that half of all pubs serving real ale serve beer that’s ‘average’ – NBSS 2.0 – or worse? If so, what on earth has CAMRA been doing all this time? If we’re not saying that – and I know for a fact that my average beer score is more like 3.5 than 2 or 2.5 – can we stop using the word ‘average’ when what we mean is ‘not very good, of low quality, mediocre’? It’s a great word, ‘mediocre”; I can recommend it. You’ll find lots of uses for it, I promise.

1. CAMRA say: “1: Poor – Beer that is anything from barely drinkable to drinkable with considerable resentment.” Again, HoS CAMRA are thinking along similar lines: “1-1.5. You can only finish it if someone’s holding a gun to your head.” I’m surprised they’ve kept in that old ‘considerable resentment’ line, which to me conjures a slightly ludicrous image of Real Ale TwCognoscenti gritting their teeth and doggedly working their way through borderline-drinkable pints, to do their duty to CAMRA. If it’s not right, take it back, for goodness’ sake. I have to say, I don’t really recognise this category of beer that’s too bad to drink with any enjoyment but not bad enough to take back; I don’t think I’ve ever used a 1. in scoring. (Honesty compels me to admit that I have used 1.5 a few times, most recently for a beer which I decided was on the turn about halfway down the glass – and which, as my suspicions grew, I did in fact drink with considerable (and growing) resentment.)

0.5. HoS CAMRA are at it again with their .5s: “0.5. Vinegar. Send it back or buy some chips to sprinkle it on.” I see what you did there – and I think we probably do need a category for “it’s cask ale but it isn’t drinkable” – but I’m not convinced we need this category and categories 0, 1 and 1.5 as well. In fact there’s a definite case that “I ordered this beer but had to take it back” should be 0. But thereby hangs a tale.

0. CAMRA say: “0: No cask ale available – This can be because the pub never has it or it’s run out.” HoS CAMRA simply say, “0. No cask beer!”. There are several issues here, starting with the fact that 0 is a negative answer to the Yes/No question “Does this pub have any cask ale?”, while everything from 0.5 to 5 is a numerical answer to the quantitative question “how good was this specific beer?”. If 0 is used to refer to the venue as a whole, it becomes meaningless and uninformative when applied to beer quality (as the Curmudgeon pointed out some time ago). If there isn’t any cask beer, what you do with the ‘how good is this cask beer’ question is not ask it at all: you don’t answer it with the lowest possible score.

To see what I’m getting at, imagine an area where pet cats have fallen victim to predatory, leg-biting foxes. But is it actually a widespread problem, or have a few three-legged cats got disproportionate attention? The local vet carries out a survey (possibly written by the Saturday boy) asking one simple question: “How many legs has your cat got?”. What happens to the area’s cat-leg average if households that don’t have a cat answer ‘Zero’? Using ‘0’ to mean ‘no cask ale available’ has just the same problem: a venue that consistently serves cask beer in poor but drinkable condition is very different from one that was serving NBSS 3.5 beer on twelve of the 21 occasions it’s been rated, and no cask beer on any of the other times – but they’ll both get an NBSS average score of 2. (You may want to swerve both of them, admittedly.)

What would I do instead? I’d have some text at the top saying “Please ignore this questionnaire if you don’t own a cat”, for a start. As for the CAMRA categories, I think it ought to be made clear that what we’re judging is that particular beer on that particular occasion – which in practice will mean a lot of the time what we’re judging on is condition. Other than that, the official versions of categories 3-5 are OK, apart from the typo and the ‘excellent beer’ reference in the rubric for category 4. Below 3 the categories get a bit more contentious. Personally I think I’d go for ‘Poor’ for 2 and ‘Undrinkable’ for 1, and just leave everything below 1 alone; I certainly don’t think there’s room for more than one meaningful category below 2. Ideally we’d probably use a 0-4 scale and shunt the whole thing down –

0. Undrinkable, took it back
1. Poor condition but drinkable
2. GBG quality
3. Excellent
4. Best. Beer. Evs.

– but a change of that scale isn’t going to happen until CAMRA’s taken over by a clique of statisticians and pedants, and that could take weeks to organise.

So we’re probably stuck with NBSS 0 (meaning ‘no cask ale’, sadly), NBSS 0.5 (meaning ‘this beer was undrinkable, I took it back’), and a continuous scale from NBSS 2.0 (‘poor quality but drinkable’) up to NBSS 5.0 (either ‘the best beer I ever hope to taste on this Earth’ or ‘one of the best beers I’ve had this year’, depending who you ask). It would be nice to get a bit of clarity on that last one; also, on whether we’re scoring the beer as a beer (wrong) or the particular beer in this glass at this moment (right). The latter isn’t a deal-breaker, though; those of us who are doing it right can just carry on. And if you really want to drink a pint with ‘considerable resentment’ so that you can score it as a 1.0, be my guest.

For the July 2025 edition of The Session David Jesudason has asked us to think about pub food.

I’ll start by reproducing part of a post from 2018 on the decline of weekday lunchtime pubgoing, for reasons that will become apparent.

1987, Manchester

“I think it’s time for a ROD,” Jill announced one Friday morning, with the self-consciously ostentatious air of somebody who’s using a code of their own devising and challenging everyone else to notice. “We haven’t had a ROD in ages. You’d be up for a ROD, wouldn’t you, Nik? What do you reckon, Chris – time for a ROD?”

Chris took the bait and asked what a ROD might be. Jill was delighted: “A ROD, of course – a Royal Oak Day!” It turned out that going to the Royal Oak for lunch was something they’d done in the past, before I’d started working there, possibly even more than once. It was a bit of an undertaking, as the Royal Oak was five miles out of the city centre; even with somebody driving, it would take a minimum of half an hour just to get there and back. We didn’t clock in and out at this place, but you couldn’t have many two-hour lunches before somebody noticed.

So RODs weren’t for every week – in fact I’m not sure we ever did it again – but that day there was a general agreement to go for it. At 12.00 we left and the five of us got into Chris’s car. (Chris was our designated driver, in the sense that Jill nominated him to do the driving – I don’t think he drank any less than the rest of us.) After rather longer than 15 minutes (blame it on the traffic) we reached Didsbury… and the Royal Oak.

The Royal Oak was famous at this time for its lunches, and justly so. They didn’t do hot food; they did cheese and crusty bread, and plenty of it. Once you’d paid your money you’d be carved a slab from one – or more – of the mountains of cheese that stood on a small table at the back. To be (very slightly) more technical about it, these were cheeses – whole cheeses, or what remained of them after several days of lunchtime trade. If I remember rightly, there were three or possibly even four cheeses on offer – Stilton, Lancashire, Sage Derby, possibly even Cheddar (although it’s not very popular in this… yes we know). You could have a slab of each one of them if you were so inclined, with all the crusty bread and butter you needed (and a doggy bag for leftovers). Everything was open to the air, of course. I do remember noticing tiny black flies buzzing around a dish of chutney, but it didn’t bother me; they didn’t take any interest in the cheese as far as I could see, and I wasn’t planning on having chutney anyway.

The cheese was wonderful – or rather the cheeses were wonderful. My mother used to tell a joke, which she said she’d got from her (deeply religious) father: a young woman on a train is accosted by a stranger, who asks her out of the blue: “Do you love Jesus?”. She’s nonplussed and doesn’t say anything, so the stranger continues: “Not your English Jesus. Round, red, Dutch Jesus!” I defy anyone to go to the Royal Oak, in 1987 or thereabouts, and not love English Jesus. The beer was good as well – the Royal Oak was a Marston’s pub. The cask selection was distinctly limited – the mild had gone keg since the last time I’d been in, much to my disappointment – but what there was was good. To be precise, what there was was Pedigree, and it was in good form – no doubt partly because they sold so much of it.

The place was buzzing, the beer went down very easily and the cheese was never-ending (my doggy bag lasted me most of the next week). We must have been there for the best part of an hour, and the trip back to town took even longer than the journey out. Still, it was a Friday.

2025, Manchester

I don’t go to the pub from work on Friday lunchtimes these days, partly because it’s not really a thing these days but mainly because I retired a few years ago (from the job after the job after the… hold on, I’ve lost count… not the job I was doing in 1987, anyway). But one day last week, the other half and I found ourselves in Didsbury at lunchtime, and decided it was once again time for a ROD.

And yes, they do still do those lunches. Well, kind of – you don’t see slabs of cheese open to the air these days, for good reasons. (The system they were running in 1987 looks like a health inspector’s nightmare in retrospect – especially when you think that the pub will have been full of cigarette smoke.) But there was a well-stocked chiller cabinet containing individual shrinkwrapped portions of several different cheeses and a couple of different patés, as well as small (well, medium-sized) pork pies; you could choose any three for £9, which would also get you about six small slices of bread (also shrinkwrapped), plus butter and chutneys.

We both had a pork pie, which was verging on being enough for a light lunch on its own. In addition I had Stilton and brie, the OH a fruited Wensleydale and duck paté. The pork pies were the star of the show – a good pork pie, particularly in a pub, is something I’ve got a lot of time for. The Wensleydale didn’t really come off, and the brie wasn’t very special; another time I think we’d both have the cheddar. It was still a very satisfactory lunch, and not at all dear. The portions didn’t have the medieval-banquet quality I remembered from 1987, but they were too big for either of us to finish, and you can’t really ask for more than that!

The pub didn’t have the medieval-banquet quality I remembered from 1987, either. Admittedly it was a Tuesday rather than a Friday, so even back in the day it would have been quieter, but that Tuesday lunchtime it was very quiet indeed. We didn’t quite have the place to ourselves, but the only other punter was an old man looking even older than me, who alternated between nursing his pint in a corner and chatting with the bartender about the latter’s social life. I’m guessing they didn’t sell a shedload of cheese that day.

As for the beer, the Royal Oak was a Marston’s pub in 1987 and still is, although this has meant different things over the years. In 1987 the pub was simply one of the pubs in the estate of Marston’s the brewery, but it’s got more complicated since then – since 1999, specifically. Since that year, the pub itself has been “Marston’s as in Wolverhampton and Dudley as was”, which was also the ownership of the brewery from 1999 to 2020. From 2020 to 2024 the brewery was “Marston’s as in Carlsberg Marston’s”, and right now it’s “Marston’s as in Carlsberg Britvic”.

I hadn’t had any Marston’s beers since 2024, quite possibly not since 2020. I had drunk Pedigree a few times during the 1999-2020 period, as well as a few other beers from the broader “M. as in W. and D. as was” stable, and I’d never been impressed. This comment from 2015 is representative:

When I lived in Withington the Red Lion was a bit of a cut above – it served Marston’s! On this visit they had quite the range: beers from Jennings, Wychwood and Ringwood as well as the Marston’s mothership. I had a half of Ringwood Boondoggle – Jennings’ Mild had just gone off – which was… fine. No, it wasn’t fine: it was mediocre. … It struck me then that this is what Marston’s do, these days – they make bland brown bitter (Pedigree), alternating with bland malty brown bitter (Cumberland), bland dark brown bitter (Hobgoblin) and bland yellowish bitter (Boondoggle).

All of which is leading up to saying that I wasn’t expecting much from the pint of Pedigree I had with my lunch. And how wrong you can be: it was terrific. I mean, it was what it is, a medium-strength amber bitter, but bland it wasn’t – nor did it have the heaviness or the assertive cough-syrup finish I remember Pedigree having in the past. It was in really good nick, too. Marston’s the brewery are, in principle, dead to me – not because I have a particularly strong objection to breweries selling out, but simply because any change of ownership creates the probability that the beers won’t be what they were, a probability which can only grow over time (remember Meantime?). But on the basis of that pint, the lads at Carlsberg Britvic are still turning out some decent stuff – more than decent, in fact. Grr, Harbucks…

So what have we learned today, apart from that last bit which I’m going to ignore? Something I always notice, when I go on Mild Magic crawls and the like, is how hard it is to get lunch in a pub these days (unless it’s a Spoons’). There are some honourable exceptions – around here Holt’s and more recently Lees have put a lot of work into the food menus, at least in their larger pubs. But a distinctive lunch offering is something that could really help a pub or bar stand out – and something not a million miles away from what the Royal Oak does could be a relatively cheap and easy way to do it.

The 1980s Royal Oak lunches, outstanding and memorable as they were, were necessarily very unusual: most pubs were never going to stock up on entire wheels of cheese, and wouldn’t have been able to shift that much cheese if they had done – or to look after it well enough to keep it from going dry/soft/mouldy/walkies. The 2020s iteration of the Royal Oak lunch is still pretty unusual – offhand I can’t name another pub that does it – but it doesn’t have to be. Obviously food hygiene standards need to be met, but there’s very little prep, minimal service and no cooking (just refrigeration). Good cheese costs money, but it’s not going to be £3 for 100 grams, which I guesstimate is how big those portions were – at least, if it is you’re looking at the wrong cheese.

In short, it seems like it ought to be doable, much more widely than it’s currently being done. One, two, many Royal Oaks! (Maybe just the one in Didsbury, though.)