Beer-aeth

Since my first visit to The Hope I have now visited in the region of roughly a million times. I’ve struggled to pick up a pen and add to my missive because I do bore of writing something so wholly positive. It’s a great strain. Such is the lot of the beer writer. I now feel restored enough to write some more complimentary paragraphs and have even had time to think up a handful of negatives which can be firmly labelled and placed within a category marked ‘pedantic nitpicking by a tedious arsehole with too much time on her hands.’ I will suffer for my art. Volume One left off around the back of the L-shaped bar. Continuing around we arrive at the newer half of the pub, which is sadly open plan and therefore fills up as a last resort, once the older front half is at capacity. What’s missing up here is some banquettes, and instead we find tables with individual chairs which gives it a f eeling more like a gastropub. Yes, The Hope does hearty well-priced food, but the gastropub aestheti...

    I’ll never forget the first time I saw The Hope, but there were no external indications that the place might become one of my favourite pubs of all time. It’s found on quite a busy road on the outskirts of the delightful Carshalton village, with a narrow strip of pavement in front, meaning you never see the building from the frontal aspect. It’s mostly red brick, and perhaps even a little bit nondescript. There was one clue as to its general excellentness outside though: an enormous number of empty casks, stacked and ready for collection. It’s not a smoking gun of course. It could be that the clientele just really fucking like D**mb*r. Once inside I warmed to the hostelry, based purely at this stage on the ale selection. There were four keg taps for the more exotic pale ales (usually Verdant, Drop Project, DEYA etc.), four further keg taps that contained some very decent imported lager and some atrocious cider ( de rigueur ), followed by two more keg taps for sours. I ...

I have always looked favourably upon pubs with glazed tiles affixed to the frontage. I assume that there was a time in the mid twentieth century that they were all ripped off and replaced with pebble-dash, and those few pubs that retained them were completely stubborn and wanted to retain a bit of their history and their culture and their truth.  In a lot of ways, I was wrong. The tiles were just popular with some breweries as a way of signifying their ownership. Not being remotely familiar with London I didn't realise that a pub plastered with beautiful glossy forest green tiles was not a signifier that the establishment was the last bastion against either gentrification and seven percent NEIPAs or soulless corporate PubCo hell holes serving microwave CTM. I've been informed subsequently that green tiles are a signifier of a Young's pub, though this may be incorrect. The gentleman informing me of this also maintained that a metal band around his wrist had cured his chronic...

I knew there was a pub around here somewhere. Bit of a maze these backstreets, well off the main roads. Should have been the first seeds of doubt perhaps, who's sustaining this place when it's so well hidden? I'd looked on Streetview so I knew it was there. It looked perfectly pleasant. Few wooden benches scattered out the front. No clear brewery/Pubco signs, no Sky Sports banners. Couldn't tell much else about it except what it wasn't; a Spoons or Greene King sticky tabled shithole, a Hungry Horse. So all positives. We approached from the side, so it only dawned on me slowly. The St George's flag was enormous. It was pretty much the same size as the entire fucking pub. It's true that my our visit coincided with England playing football in the women's Euros, but something told me that the two were unrelated.  Each corner of the cross contained an extra message, as if the ten by five metre England flag wasn't conveying it's meaning clearly enough....