IS IT WORTH SUFFERING “SUMMER OF 69” FOR A £1.93 PINT OF BRAINS ?

 

 

mde

THAT is the question.

Last post from Cardiff, on the first Friday I’ve had there in decades.  Quite quiet, I thought.  Perhaps they were all watching the egg-chasers at the Arms Park.

The City Arms is always packed though, isn’t it ?

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A Friday night in Cardiff

Actually I couldn’t remember it at all, even though it’s the only Brain’s pub in the Guide, which is remarkable.   I’d have popped in the Goat Major or Cottage normally, but you have to rely on the GBG, don’t you ?

city arms

Ooh, it’s a lovely pub, even with one room seemingly dedicated to guest beers and keg beers. What happened to the pub with just Dark/Bitter/SA on ?

Everyone seemed to be between about 22 and 36, which gives the lie to the notion that young folk don’t go to the pub anymore. Less Old Boys, but I guess they’re all in Tiny Rebel.

Some fun-chasers are wearing George Osborne masks. Has he been rehabilitated already ? Weirdly, Matt just asked if it’s Simon.

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Cardiff be weird

They know how to have fun, these youngsters. They just don’t drink cask, at all.

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Young folk.  No cask.
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Kilts are back in fashion

If you can’t attract people on to real ale at £1.93 a pint, you never will.

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Eat your heart out, Humphrey

Perhaps they need a rebrand, rename the Bitter as “Taffy’s Singing Swan” or something.

 

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Classic pump clip

In the loos, I spot some evidence of a previous BRAPA visit,

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“Punk”  Ha

and on the wall outside, a psychedelic cat for Mudgie.

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Stare at it for 27.5 minutes and you’ll see something hidden

But it’s not a pub for quiet reflection on a Friday night as two lads belt out the hits.

“Wonderwall”, “Mr Brightside” and inevitably“Summer of ’69”, which ALL the millennials sing along to in unison.  I nurse my NBSS 3 pint and wince at what Matt will say when he hears about this.

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“Ain’t no use in complaining…”

A fun evening, but then they had to go and finish it off with the local one, didn’t they ?

 

By now it was 22:49 and Matt had just texted me to say he was heading out, scuppering any thoughts of an inadvisable nightcap at the Cottage. I said I’d get him some chips and to meet me opposite the Golden Cross.

Caroline Street takeaways aren’t what they were, and I ended up paying a daft amount at Five Guys. They’d nearly all gone before Matt arrived, unable to find an ornate tiled Victorian pub with a drag act he’d already passed twice.

I ask you. He enjoyed his gig though.

 

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Published by retiredmartin

Retired NHS, doing long walks around UK and the world to record the great bits. Focused on Good Beer Guide pubs and live music.

38 thoughts on “IS IT WORTH SUFFERING “SUMMER OF 69” FOR A £1.93 PINT OF BRAINS ?”

  3. To answer your question, because all they’ve got is Brains, Brains and more Brains. You and I, and many other older chaps may delight over a pint of BBB, but younger folk don’t, sadly. Hence they drink Lager and Cider and shorts and cocktails and stuff like that.

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    1. Fred,
      The Albert was Brains’s proper brewery tap and I well remember a long evening in there early in 1978.
      But when the brewery moved into the old Hancock’s brewery it was converted into the Yard, a sort of food and hipster oriented premises that it remains to this day.
      Albert gone, Vulcan gone, Cardiff’s not the town it was. I might as well stay in England.

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      2. I’ve sadly not had time for pubs when changing trains in Newport, that’s the Welsh Newport.
        I have though known all the pubs in the Shropshire Newport and got there quite often before the Wem Brewery closed thirty years ago.

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  6. My first ever GBBF (1979) beer was Wem a very fine beer (first of the day so what else would you expect?): a brewery I’d never heard of, swiftly followed by a Penrhos porter, a beer style I’d never heard of (frankly was not impressed – I know better now).

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      2. You may have been but I was mid-twenties by then. I only graduated from soft-drinks (ie English lager) post-uni, when I went back for the w/e to visit a post-grad mate, who announced “We’re off to the beerfest tonight”. After bleating that I didn’t drink beer, I tagged along, tried some and was hooked. Admittedly, Coventry was a rather strange imitation of the road to Damascus but I was an instant convert. Amusingly, the one beer we wanted to try was Lees Moonraker (7.5% in those days) but it hadn’t settled, even though we went back on the Saturday night. It took until I was delivering my son to uni 20+ years later before I finally had a pint in the Rain Bar in Manch. Worth waiting for, though.

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      4. But what was the music Clive? To answer the heading’s question by comparison, many’s the time, that I endured “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero”, for a 52p pint of Shipstone’s Basford Bitter.

        Maybe that settles it?

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      5. Don’t recall that music was part of the BF package in those days, Etu. Possibly, though: Folk music was mysteriously popular in those days!

        Since when I first went to Warwick, Hook Norton was 12p/pint in the union bar, I strongly suspect paying substantially less than 30p/pint for ale only a few years later. In fact, I remember a work visit to Nottingham a couple of years after that and being astonished that Home Bitter was only 33p/pint, with the Mild a mere 32p! This was when I was paying over 50p in London. How times change

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    2. Clive,
      Wise choices.
      With its Mild, Pale Ale and Best Bitter Wem was one of the best few breweries in the country.
      And Penrhos, one of the first new breweries, focused on quality as well as innovation.

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  7. Hi Martin, sorry I’ve been absent without leave the last few days– trying to catch up!

    Your comment about this being the last Brains pub in the GBG made me wonder how many pubs they’d have had in the guide in years past. Would they have been regarded as one of the great British brewers in earlier decades? Or as just one of many “ordinary brewers”?

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    1. I guess Brains (never sure about those apostrophes !) would have been in the middle tier as far as reputation goes 25 years ago when I first started visiting Cardiff on a regular basis, perhaps in the same bracket as Charles Wells or Shepherd Neame. Tasty beers when selling fast.

      I thought their beers; Dark, Bitter and the SA strong one, were very satisfying and distinctive in perhaps ten Guide pubs throughout the city (and well into the rest of Wales). I don’t recall many seasonal, let alone guest beers on the bar back then, so throughput of the Bitter was very fast.

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      1. I think comparisons with Charles Wells or Shepherd Neame twenty-five years ago are appropriate.
        Brains pubs accounted for most of the sixteen Cardiff entries in the 1994 Good Beer Guide – 9 Brains, 3 Brains and a guest beer and 4 others ( probably 1 Allied and 3 free ).
        Go back forty years to the 1979 GBG – before free houses and guest beers – and the 38 entries are split 28 Brains and 10 Bass Charrington’s Welsh Brewers subsidiary all but one of which ( including of course the Bass house ) sold Draught Bass alongside a beer or two from the old Hancocks Brewery.

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      2. Thanks Paul, very helpful. The 1994 GBG (red cover with handpump ?) was my first Guide, and I recalled visiting at least ten Brains pubs in the Easter of ’94; of course Cardiff suburbs stretch quite far and included some good pubs in Llandaff.

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      3. Yes, red cover with handpump 1994 lists all sixteen pubs as ‘Cardiff’.
        The 1979, with probably the same definition of Cardiff, helpfully breaks the 38 down to 7 ‘City centre’, 8 ‘North East’ ( including Cathays, Pentwyn, Blackweir, Roath, Llanishen ), 11 ‘North West’ ( including Llandaff, Fairwater, Whitchurch ), 5 ‘South East & Docks’ ( including Rumney, Adamsdown ) and 7 ‘South West’ ( including Grangetown , Canton, Riverside ).

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      5. But do “very few suburban pubs.make the Guide these days” because there’s very few suburban pubs selling good beer or because the active members don’t venture beyond the “beer range varies” free house and micropubs ? .

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      6. Good question. There’s less Guide suburban pubs in Nottingham and Wolves, where there must be plenty of real ale, though possibly a lot of Marstons and Greene King dining houses. CAMRA branches like CHOICE, and lots of it.

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      7. Recently, Brains have invested a lot of money in their Reverend James sub-brand. Personally, I think Brains Bitter and especially SA are still classic beers when you come across a well-kept one. They have also expanded into parts of Wales well beyond their original heartland – there’s a Brains pubs in Bala, for example.

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      8. I suspect Brains beers are more than capable of being classic beers, and that the best examples might lie outside the Beer Guide these days. Rev James pops up quite a bit in Greene King and the free trade, and I’m a big fan. It seems to have a bit of a following and reminds me of 6X.

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      9. Yes, and I’ve had the reverend James Gold in a couple of Welsh pubs.
        A while ago Brains got several pubs up towards the Black Country but I don’t think they had them for long.
        I’ve used their three Aberystwyth pubs in recent years which aren’t as good as some of their Cardiff ones.

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      11. I like Brain’s bitter, which is just as well, since I spend more time in Cardiff than anywhere else these days. It reminds me a little of Tetley’s, when it was the “real thing” by purists. I’m not so keen on their sweeter brews, but nor am I on those of most breweries.

        However, their pubs are often a disappointment. They have some completely characterless suburban ones, and have ruined many in the city and in nearby towns with dull, utilitarian refits, often dating back many years.

        As for whoever decided their usual food listings, well, sunshine, “It’s Brains You Want”.

        (Apostrophe duly omitted, Paul.)

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      12. You’re right, it’s the pubs that disappoint, but I suppose that’s what you get when you have to put identikit food into all your pubs. Greene King and Fullers are little different.

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    2. Maybe, but Humphrey has “identikit food into all your pubs” that do food yet his pubs with OBB from the wood don’t disappoint.
      If only other brewers learnt a thing or two from Humphrey !

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  8. > I think comparisons with Charles Wells or Shepherd Neame twenty-five years ago are appropriate.

    Of course, in the 70s and early 80s, such brewers were rarely encountered outside of their own “patch”. So there was a “kid in a sweet shop effect”, with everyone keen to try such ales and inevitably liking them, simply because they were different. Even the likes of Greene King were viewed differently then, in the days when they were a solid regional brewer that had not started swallowing-up its competitors.

    In addition to the Big Six, the big bad wolf of the day was Greenall Whitley ? Closed Wem, Shipstones and Simpkiss in fairly quick succession if I remember rightly ?

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    1. Thanks for posting this comment, Fred. Yes there is something special when a type of food or drink is available only in one particular area; that feeling seems to have become increasingly rare over time, as we head toward being able to get anything anywhere.

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      1. Yes, in the 1970s there was a sort of excitement about going to a different part of the country for the local beer.
        Sadly gone now.

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