By Phil Mellows
I’m now in my 40th year of writing about beer and pubs and people think I must know every drinking hole in the country. Sometimes I feel guilty that I don’t. But I can delight in the knowledge that I still have lots to discover, and so it’s proved over the past few months as I’ve travelled the UK seeking out the best places for beer.
In case you missed the news, travel expert Kate Simon and I have been commissioned by Bloomsbury to write a book of British beer breaks featuring 30 urban and rural destinations.
My research visits have already thrown up plenty of surprises, so I thought I’d list a few of them to give you taste of how our guide might set you off on a journey of your own.
One we’ve already mentioned in this newsletter – is Sam’s Chop House in Manchester, where I bumped into L S Lowry. Another find in the North West was Tweedie’s Bar & Lodge in the heart of the Lake District. It’s vanishingly rare that a country house hotel offering luxury accommodation at the same time serves a terrific range of beer, but looks can deceive and Tweedie’s quickly erased any doubts I had about including it in the book.
Edinburgh’s docklands in Leith brought plenty of surprises, but if there’s one pub I’d love to go back to it’s the Dreadnought, a welcoming local tucked away in the side streets with an imaginative selection of cask and craft beers poured from even more imaginative fonts – you’ll have to go there to see what I mean.
More often than not, you have to venture a little out of the way to find these places. I reached the Cumberland Arms by climbing a woodland track – in the middle of Newcastle. The pub is well known as a live music venue, but it’s just a serious about its beers.
Thornsett Brewery (pictured), though, is properly rural. The taproom is a shack in the corner of a field in the High Peak and if you’re lucky, or unlucky in my case, you can quaff your pint just inches from the nose of a cow.
The south also has its surprises. I found the Rashleigh Inn at Polkerris (not to be confused with the Rashleigh Arms in nearby Charlestown) only thanks to a tip-off from a brewer. It’s right on the beach in a classical Cornish cove at the end of a narrow road that’s going nowhere else, and with a location like that it doesn’t really need to worry too much about the beer. But the owner, from London, is a true enthusiast, and that’s reflected in his choice of local brews on cask and keg.
Cheltenham was big surprise in its variety of great places to drink beer and if I pick just one it’ll be Planet Caravan. Named after the Black Sabbath song (presumably), it’s a tiny, colourful bar with a lot of taps that puts the fun back into beer – which we can get too serious about at times.
In Margate, a seaside town in Kent that’s firmly put itself on the beer map in recent years, it’s the same at Fez, a micropub where a riotous dazzle of bric-a-brac might almost distract you from the fine pint you’re drinking.
I could mention many more and we’re not done researching yet. You might have to buy the book for the rest of them.
Have you ever looked at the beer available at gigs? I go to lots of gigs and the beer is generally appalling - the chain brands who bid to run venue bars. Some now have the horrible, fizzy, over-hopped IPAs that come under the misnomer of "craft beer". As if that's enough for the beer drinkers. The odd one will have a Guinness. Luckily my local venue, which has great bands, is a pub - the New Cross Inn. They sell local beer from the Brockley Brewery plus real cider. At the four-day punk rock festival in Blackpool, many of us congregate between gigs at Albert's Ale Micropub as the beer in the Winter Gardens is so poor.