This blog might turn into an ongoing ad for the British pub, Pipers and Trivelles hotels, a small chain of clean, cheap and enterprisingly located boltholes.
Such as this one opposite Salford University.
£30 a night, decent WiFI and a McDonalds over the road for my double espresso. My car was still there in the morning, too.
In the Friday drizzle it was still possible to get a sense of some of Salford’s glories.
With only an hour till closing I had no chance of a new tick, so it was revisit time.
Someone on Twit called the New Oxford, Salford’s beerhouse “dull” last week.
It’s not Beermoth or Blackjack, but anyone from Cambridge or Camberley would struggle with “dull”.
I have no idea who Yeoil are, unless that’s the town who played United in a warm-up match last night.
My photos aren’t great, I was having a beer or two. But this is a proper pub, full of comings and goings as well as groups of students camped out for the evening.
Beers from Valor and Mallinsons were tasty, if a degree or two above my ideal, but the bench seating, jukebox and cheery students compensated.
A fair few folk who would have been in the Crescent in years past have clearly decamped to the Oxford.
And for Chinese Takeaway fans, here’s an atmospheric shot of my evening choice. The crispy beef was B-.
retiredmartin 
You went all that way and didn’t go to Manchester Beer and Cider Festival???
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I’m sure we’ll get comments on evil Dutch bottled beer at some point.
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I’m wearing my “I went to Manc Beer Fest and avoided beers over 10%” T-shirt.
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In my local Bacon Fries are known as Irish tapas.
And there is some debate over whether the red linings on them are made from beetroot.
I have consulted the interweb but to no avail.
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Are there any other Irish pub delicacies we should know about, Prof.
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No,but breaking news on this side of the Irish Sea is that pubs will now be able to open on Good Friday for the first time in the history of the state.
Still closed on Christmas Day mind you.
Meanwhile most of my chums down the boozer ( you’ll notice I have forsaken Dryanuary ) remain bereft at missing out on the Presidents Club party.
All agreed it sounded exactly the sort of drink-sodden,sordid affair most would have enjoyed.
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First time in Ireland, Good Friday 1995 in Rosslare. NOTHING open apart from the fried chicken shop. Welcome to Ireland. Made up for it the next day in Wexford, mind.
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Just on way back from that via Sheff. Was great, apart from evil keg filth.
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Shudder said, we went yesterday.
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If you’d read every word of my 6 million posts you’d have known ! Only there for lunchtime, met Mudgie and Duncan in Levenshulme for proper pub fun.
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Yeoil is what is found in Ye Olde Northe Sea. Probably wise to avoid it as a drink.
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That hotel you stayed in used to be a cracking Boddingtons pub called The Paddock.
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Thanks Jimmy. Hard to imagine it as a pub now. A catalogue of closures along that road.
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I did The Paddock at the start of a strange pub crawl that took in Salford,Eccles,Swinton,Stretford,Sale and Stockport on 29th December 1990,i used a GM day Ranger ticket that included buses and trains.
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Hard to imagine a crawl around Salford could be anything other than strange, Alan. I’m sure you did a post about some of those pubs, perhaps from a different crawl.
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Presumably this wasn’t last night in Salford – or was it?
It would help our understanding of the chronology of your travels if you could give a date for the experiences described.
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Good idea – I’ll do that. That was Friday 19th. I’m generally a week behind on posts. If I have a week off I might catch up though !
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“Yeoil ?”
Someone who can’t spell. It should be Yeovil. 😉
http://www.yeovilales.com
And what is it with Chinese (and Japanese for that matter) and their preoccupation with cats?
Cheers
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Good grief. You don’t say. Well I never etc etc
Spot on with the second one though 😉
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You mentioned how the beer was served “a degree or two above my ideal”; when cask is served at the wrong temperature, do you find that it is more often too warm, or too cold? (I feel like I’ve never read the latter complaint in any of these pub blogs, come to think of it.)
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I prefer beer on the cooler side, Mrs RM even more so, which is why she always goes for the KeyKeg or Keg beers that all taste like BrewDog.
I think you can get naturally cellar cool beer by storing it right, the beer at Manchester’s Beer Fest was pretty much spot on yesterday.
I’d say half the beer I drink in GBG is served warmer than I’d like; I can’t remember a single beer I’ve thought was too cool !
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The official line from Cask Marque is that “The recommended dispense temperature of the majority of brewers is between 11 – 13°C. Cask Marque audits to a required range of 10-14°C”, whilst the official CAMRA advice is “12-14°C (54-57°F)”. So you can already see there’s going to be some variation, and that degree or two is noticeable. So you get some pubs that become known for keeping “warm” or “cold” cellars, and some drinkers will get very upset about the “wrong” temperature one way or the other. It does get a bit big-endian-vs-little-endian (in the Gulliver’s Travels sense rather than the computer sense).
Personally I’m with Martin, I like my cask on the cool side of the official range. It gives you that initial refreshing hit, and then it warms up through the optimum tasting temperature as you go down the glass, evolving as it does so. Plus it holds on to its CO2 better and ages more slowly in the cellar. The only real argument for having it on the warm side is if you only drink tasters or you’re guzzling pints so quickly that it doesn’t have time to warm up too much.
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