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American Quadrilogy
Saturday night in Leeds, exactly one week from Christmas Day. Snow on the ground; fridge full of food. Nothing else to do but make a spicy Cajun gumbo and work through the American beers in the fridge. Again I should warn you that my palate remains at best charmingly innocent and at worst unsophisticated.
I’d bought the Green Flash Le Freak some time ago in Beer Ritz and sensibly should have had it whilst it was fresher. Nonetheless what is advertised as an American Imperial IPA meets a Belgian Trippel matches that description and is quite thick and very slightly bubblegummy with a solid bitter aftertaste. Kate’s not a fan of Belgian beers so I soon had the whole (9.2%, 1 pint 6 fluid oz) bottle to myself.
The combination of the viscosity, sweetness and bitterness was nice but I didn’t fall completely in love with it. I suspect it might have worked better for me if the hop taste was fresher than the aged bottle I had. Perfectly nice though. You can see Rob’s video review of this beer at Hopzine here.
I still had three American IPAs in the fridge that I’d brought back from New York in November, so I thought I’d better have them whilst they were good. I had specifically decided not to come back from New York with a suitcase full of beer, but we had a few left in the fridge in the hotel room on the last day, and I wasn’t about to let them go to waste.
First was the Lagunitas IPA. This turned out to be an oddly bland beer with the hoppiness almost tacked on at the end. After a while it came across like a fairly dull cooking lager but with a bitter aftertaste.
Next was the Smuttynose IPA. I’d had this on keg in New York and really quite liked it. It was slightly lighter in colour than the Lagunitas. The bitterness was more complex although not too punchy, with a good mixture of lemon and pine. Although slightly cloudy, it was a really nice, light refreshing beer, with a hint of detergent.
The Smuttynose IPA was very good match indeed to the spicy meat gumbo from Jamie Oliver’s “Jamie’s America” book. Give the recipe a go if you get the chance.
Finally we had the Bear Republic Racer 5. I’d been looking for this beer for ages in New York, having read about it beforehand on Richard Burhouse’s blog amongst others. However, perhaps because it’s Californian, it was a bastard to find until I tracked it down on the penultimate day in a supermarket in Williamsburg.
Racer 5 turned out to be the best beer of them all: big flavours of mango, citrus and pine that worked really well together. If I had to drink only one American IPA for the rest of my life, it would certainly do, although right now I think my first choice would be O’Dell IPA.
Maximum M & B
It took me a while to realise just quite how ubiquitous Mitchells & Butlers are. According to Wikipedia it has around 2,000 managed pubs and clubs in the UK. Its pubs range from relatively individual pubs like the Adelphi in Leeds; to Nicholsons pubs like The Palace and The Scarbrough Hotel (aka The Scarbrough Taps); to obvious brands like All Bar Ones, Harvesters and Toby Carveries. They also own Flares, but I understand they’ve sold many of those off.
As I understand it, the legacy Mitchells and Butlers brewery was founded in 1898 from two other breweries; later merging with Bass in the early 1960s. In 2000 Bass was split, with the brewery going to Interbrew and the pubs business becoming Six Continents. In 2002 there was another split and the pubs business was called “Mitchells and Butlers”.
As a student I used to work in Ogston’s in St Andrews (now, or at least subsequently, The Gin House), which was part of the Six Continents chain and historically a “Bass Town Pub”. Bass Town Pubs were supposed to be unique rather than obviously chain pubs, like the student-facing “Scream” pub in town which was also Bass/Six Continents/M&B and had previously been a Firkin. Are you losing the will to live yet? In any case, the point is that you might not necessarily know an M&B pub when you see one, and there’s a reasonable probability you’ve been drinking in one in the last month.
From a search on Mitchells & Butlers website, there are 32 M&B pubs within 5 miles of LS1, as follows:
The Victoria Hotel; O’Neill’s (Great George St); All Bar One (Greek St); Nation Of Shopkeepers; Brown’s (The Light); Dry Dock; The Picture House; Flares; Scarbrough Hotel; Horse & Trumpet; Queen’s Court; The Palace; The Library; The Adelphi; The Royal Park; Hyde Park; The Original Oak; Headingley Taps; The True Britton (A Sizzling Pub near mine with a terrifying BNP name but an apparently multiethnic clientele); Queens Arms (in Chapel Allerton, now an incongruous Toby Carvery in Leed’s trendiest suburb); Barley Mow; The Vesper Gate; the Deer Park; The Roundhay Fox; The White Rose (Harvester); The Woodcock; The Dexter; The Wellington Inn; The Fox and Hounds; Toby Carvery (Horsforth); Colton Mill (Harvester); Toby Carvery (Morley).
That’s a lot of very different pubs, eh? To put it in context, there are 6 JD Wetherspoons in the same area, although I don’t think anyone was ever unaware that they were in a Wetherspoons.
Calls Landing, Leeds
Calls Landing is a pub with one great strength: it’s one of probably only two bars in Leeds City Centre with a South-facing beer garden on the river (along with Aire Bar next door, which has a smaller one).
It’s a very nice, if sometimes slightly crowded, beer garden and it certainly beats sitting outside Restaurant Bar & Grill on City Square in summer, surrounded by roaring traffic as the long shadows fall in mid-afternoon whilst you drink a very expensive pint of Tetley’s Smoothflow.
But a riverside pub like this is going to struggle for 9 months of the year in West Yorkshire when the beer garden lies wet and empty, as seagulls pick away at soggy discarded Greggs wrappers. So it needs to have something else going for it.
Fortunately, one of Calls Landing’s strengths is a small but decent range of beers. Whilst it’s not going to compete for variety with The Palace around the corner for selection on cask, there are three handpumps, one of which is always Theakstons (which is a good enough default option and one I haven’t seen much of in Leeds).
The guest beers have included some unusual and interesting options, including Golden Angel from Doncaster’s Toad Brewery – a solid beer with a terrible pumpclip – and this week, Ossett Brewery’s Treacle Stout. It’s probably pipped at the post by Summer Wine’s Treason Treacle Stout for me; but it’s a SIBA award-winner and deservedly so. There’s also a pretty good fridge selection, with a few dumpy Belgian bottles as well as Brooklyn Lager and the like.
It’s one of those bars that, instead of having a busy kitchen and a large menu, has chosen to have a small, low-maintenance selection of food that it does well. Whereas North Bar has pie & peas or cheese & bread, Calls Landing has recently rebranded itself as a “stew & oyster bar”.
There’s a selection of three changing stews with an emphasis on beans, chorizo, chilli, prawns etc, which come in big bowls with nice bread, and I’ve always enjoyed. It’s also served quickly, which doesn’t hurt.
I’m a bit wary about oysters generally, so I’ve always shied away from that option. They also have good olives and a selection of nuts. They could do with giving you a spare glass to put your pistachio shells in, though.
The bar itself is pleasantly decked out with a modern cafe feel, with light wood, exposed bricks, a rack of newspapers and fairly interesting modern art posters. The piped music tends towards the safe and middle-aged, with a lot of Cream, Fleetwood Mac, T-Rex and the like. The windows look out on the river and the floorspace has expanded considerably into a further room in the last year or so.
Calls Landing has always been a great place to be on a summer afternoon. However it’s also a very pleasant place for a simple, warming meal and a decent pint on a dark, rainy winter evening.
Calls Landing, 36-38 The Calls, LS2 7EW; http://www.callslanding.com/
A Life In The Pub Part 2: Pounding Shilling For Pence
One of the things I intended to do with this blog was to explain how I’d got here from there in terms of beer. Specifically, how I gradually started to like interesting beers and real ales from a low base, coming from a drinking culture dominated by kegs of Tennents, Harp, Guinness, Bass and maybe the odd Smithwicks, and with no pubs that I knew of that offered cask beer.
I’ll get back to the Northern Irish beer culture of my youth later, as I want to address the next stage. In 1998, when Kate and Will was still doing their respective GCSEs, I went to St Andrews University to study Modern History, International Relations and Individual Alcohol Tolerances.
As I never really liked lager, I was drinking a lot of Guinness at this stage, but also a lot of nitro kegged/smoothflow beers such as Caffreys. However it must have been in that first year at St Andrews that I started drinking my first real ales.
I started on 70 shilling beer, which I found largely similar to the smoothflow Caffreys. In fact Tennents Velvet seemed to be a smoothflow version of 70/- (someone may correct me here), and filled the same place in the market as the nitrokegged John Smith or Tetleys. It was creamy, easy to drink and unchallenging to my admittedly unsophisticated tastes.
However, over time, Caledonian 80/- became my drink of choice during the four years I spent in the Kingdom of Fife before they reluctantly admitted I was a Master of the Arts (second class). It was available everywhere (see the Beer Monkey’s view on Caley’s ubiquity in the capital here) and just tasted that bit more interesting than the 70/-. I remember deciding that McEwans 80/- tasted horrible in comparison.
Moreover, those of my Scottish friends who liked beer (mainly as something to drink early in the night whilst you discussed whisky) seemed to consider that Caley 80/- was a respectable thing for a man to drink. Whilst I liked 80/-, I think I liked the pubs I drank it in more: Aikman’s; the Whey Pat; the Central. I’ll hopefully deal with them in a future post.
I haven’t had Caley 80/- in what must be about five years, and I don’t recall the parting being unbearable. But in the interest of historical analysis, I’m currently drinking a bottle, which for student authenticity I picked up for a quid. It’s not a fair test because (1) It’s a pasteurised bottle, not a pint from cask and (2) it was cheap because it’s slightly out of date and (3) it wasn’t bought with a quaint Scottish pound note.
Nevertheless, I can report that it’s a pleasant but unexciting drink. It smells and tastes malty and sweetly sour, like raspberries. It might just be the age of this bottle, but as I get towards the bottom (without the benefit of a deep-fried pizza/crunchie/haggis/Englishman to match the taste) it’s beginning to get into the thinner, milder end of fruit beer territory.
I can see why I liked it. I think I preferred it over the 70/- mainly for the maltiness – it took me a while to really like pale ales. It’s not bad at all and a hell of an improvement on Caffreys, but it’s not exciting enough to want to drink it for another four year stretch. My tastes have definitely moved on.
New York Beer: Brooklyn Brewery
One of the things I was really looking forward to on our trip to New York in November was a visit to the Brooklyn Brewery. Brooklyn Lager was a beer that really took me by surprise when I tried it for the first time a few years ago.
Along with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, it’s one of the first US craft beers I became aware of, and is increasingly available in the UK, sometimes finding its way into the fridges of bars which are otherwise completely uninteresting. Since then, I’ve also become a big fan of the EIPA and especially the Black Chocolate Stout. Before we visited the Brewery, we’d already tried the Winter Ale and the Brewmaster’s Reserve Cuvee Noire in bars in Manhattan.
Happy Hour at the Brewery starts at 6pm and runs to 11pm every Friday, when they put out long tables and set up a bar offering an exciting range of familiar and unfamiliar Brooklyn beers. Unfortunately I was an idiot and thought it started at 4pm, so we turned up in Williamsburg two hours early. It didn’t escape my notice that I had failed to adequately organise an actual piss-up in a brewery.
Funny place, Williamsburg: it’s full of hipsters with their tight check shirts, skinny trousers and thick-rimmed specs, but at the same time has parts that appear quite poor and/or post-industrial. It seems a bit like North-East London, in that way.
After initially being a bit wary about spending two hours there, we found the Brooklyn Ale House (a quiet, friendly, dark little pub) and sat at the bar for a while with a Blue Point Toasted Lager and an Anchor Humming Ale (both keg). We then went on to Mug’s Ale House for some sticky BBQ chicken wings, an Anchor Stout (cask) and Liberty Ale (keg).
When me made it to the brewery and negotiated our way past the firm but fair bouncer (Kate didn’t have ID with her), we bought our beer tokens and headed to the bar. It was cold in the big room, but it was starting to fill up. There were pizza menus out on the table for people to order in from outside and large groups of principally young, trendy people started to fill the tables. We started on the East India Pale Ale on keg, before trying two Brewmaster’s Reserve beers: Detonation and Crash, both of which were strong, hoppy Imperial IPAs.
Having enjoyed everything we tried, we weren’t up for a very heavy night in Brooklyn, so headed back to the L station at Bedford Avenue and under the East River to midtown Manhattan. However, I was glad we came to Brooklyn and I’d like to visit the brewery again on a weekend for a tour, possibly combined with a return visit to Mug’s and dinner in the Peter Luger Steakhouse.
New York Beer: McSorley’s “Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies”
I’ve been very busy since I got back from New York but I did have a fantastic time. Apart from getting engaged (!) we went to quite a few different beer bars, some with a massive selection. One notable exception to the (sometimes baffling) amount of choice was McSorleys.
McSorley’s, the guide book informed me, usually sells only two alcoholic drinks, its own brand of “light” beer and its own brand of “dark” beer. However when we went in on a weekday lunchtime they only had the light option.
As usual in New York, they poured a glass of beer to an undisclosed size of their own choosing (just over half a pint, accounting for the size of the head) from keg. There was a fascinating old beer engine behind the bar, along with the busts of JFK, pictures of the old Pope that everyone liked etc, but it wasn’t in use.
The beer itself was a nice refreshing amber-coloured ale, which I think the Americans would class as an “Irish red ale”, like Smithwicks. I don’t know what the ABV was (they rarely seem to disclose it in America), but it didn’t seem that strong. Apparently the beer used to be brewed on the premises but is now brewed by Pabst.
Along with the beer we got a solid ham sandwich with lots of raw onion on white bread, and a really good corned beef hash. The other customers stood silently at the bar on the sawdust covered floor or sat imperiously on the ancient dark wooden chairs having loud banterful conversations. It didn’t seem as if any of the other customers were tourists.
I liked McSorleys more than I thought I was going to. I thought it might be one of the worst examples of an American “Irish pub”. In fact it’s completely unlike an O’Neill’s, which is what I was dreading, or the “McSorley’s” Irish theme pub in St Andrews (which used to be a pub that Pete Brown worked in and may have become something else since).
McSorley’s is similarly covered in tat (but real, dusty tat – old NYPD badges etc) but is a law unto itself with a long history of its own, including Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas and a lost legal battle to be allowed to continue to exclude women. It doesn’t even do Guinness. I enjoyed spending an hour there and would be happy to go back for much longer.