Beer-aeth

I say Walton, it could be Endor. In fact, it almost certainly would have improved Return of the Jedi if there'd been an incongruous red brick pub instead of the fucking Sylvanian Families. And it would have been a shit tonne better for the party when the Death Star blows up. Downside, trickier to flog lucrative merch to impressionable demanding children. I know what the cast would have rathered, most of them were off their tits. Whilst I'm on the subject - isn't this an odd way to start a write up of an excellent pub? - how did they always manage to land on exactly the right spot on an entire Earth sized planet or moon? I know they were Earth sized because the gravity was always exactly 1g. It's a life ruining pain in the arse if you mistakenly go to Carmarthen rather than Caernarfon, imagine if you landed on Dagobar's equivalent of Lapland only to find that Yoda was busy sunning themself in Tuvalu? There were no such issues whilst navigating the forest ...

  I am so fucking massively disappointed, and I only have myself to blame. For some reason, having discovered this pub on a widely used online mapping site, and cased the joint using its street viewing tool, I didn't actually bother clicking on the accompanying link to the pub's website. Had I done so, I would have discovered that the Cricketers is a Stonegate pub. Whilst not being an immediate red flag, it is certainly a grey flag, and I would tempered my expectations accordingly. Let's discuss those expectations.  The quintessentially English pub overlooks a green. Always. This will be used for cricket, or bowls, or croquet, or dancing around maypoles, or burning heretics, or morris dancing (hopefully not), or jousting or some shit. The pub sign will not be affixed to the pub but hanging from a pylon on the green itself. Nearby will be a pond for dangling ones feet in when cooling off in the summer months. The building will be of a nonsensical layout, with various additio...

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...

Rule 96. Don't let the cat near your pork scratchings. I've lost count of the times I've been in a mediocre pub and behind the bar is a wooden sign reading something like: Rules of the Pub Rule No.1: The bartender is always right.  Rule No.2: If the bartender is wrong, see rule number one. It's the public house equivalent of a Live, Love, Laugh sign. I think we can do better. I've started the process of codifying a non-exhaustive list of what I think the rules are for a great pub. They are a mixture of aesthetic guidance, behavioural rules, and stock suggestions. They are all eminently achievable, so long as you can desist from selling spoiled beer and are capable of putting up a stud wall. The fist ten are: 1. You can't please everyone. Trying to please everyone can actually lead you to pleasing no-one. 2. Open plan is bad. A quiet, solitary, contemplative pint can take place in the next room to a riotous orgy, but not in the same room.  3. The customer is NOT ...

Progress is a comfortable disease - E E Cummings The headline is that I wish this place didn't exist, yet I really like it and will definitely visit again. I was beginning to believe that my animosity to the core concept was actually my problem. It seemed I was wrong and needed to change with the times. This it turned out was a very brief mistake on my part and i now know that my instincts were completely, absolutely 100% correct, as always. Those momentary doubts are now long behind me and I have something else to blame, which is odd really considering that I'm writing this article about a bar which is perfectly nice. We Brought Beer is in Tooting Market, which is in many ways fantastic. It's got a record stall, a traditional sweet shop (in the same unit), places to eat, a butchers... But very little else that is actually recognisable as a market that I would be familiar with. I spent a lot of time in markets as a child, growing up between several market towns that my dad ...

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....