Greetings from Weaste, the less posh bit of Eccles, where the WiFi is good and the Chinese takeaway makes an excellent job of recycling the local cat and dog population.
Post 2 from Buxton, as Charles and I try to catch up with “Ye Olde Official Itinerary” and fail miserably. Again.
This was the timetable, lovingly curated by Stafford Paul.
They’re very shy, these Beer & Pubs Forum folk.
Not very diverse either, are they ? Apart from me, all rabid Northerners. And my Man City Citizens card confers honorary northern status.
Jeff (sp. ?) from Sheffield, ever-present Paul from Stafford, Will the Hatter (congrats on the title) also from Sheff and Ian “Bass Legend” from the heart of the Peaks (he’d walked, he cares about the planet).
Coincidences abounded. Jeff and Charles were both from Inverness, Will and I detest Watford, and Paul has drunk exactly the same number of pints of Bass as Ian. I’ve seen their spreadsheets.
There was no Bass on at the Swan, one of several recent GBG entries. I was glad to see they were keen to remind you of their history.
Tremendous beer range, with nice clear price labelling.
You may be wondering why Storm’s Silk of Magnesia comes in two shapes. Cask breather or not ?, flat or frothy ?, delivered direct from the brewery or via Workington ? I shall never know.
It was a good beer, one of the best of the day, cool and chewy (NBSS 3+).
But the real surprise was the popularity of the Tetley.
No, not the little one that Leeds little brewery do, the big one that’s now made consistently and with love and care in Wolves*.
Noises of approval from the group for the improved Tets, and for an unchanging pub attracting Old Boys playing doms and with space to hide in the corner with a paper.
And the landlord called me “duck”.
*That should alienate my Yorkshire readership, anyway.
retiredmartin 
Or Paul with the rolled-up sleeves ready for supping action as he’s known over here.
Doms,racing on the telly,no women AND a decent pint.
Does it get any better than this ?
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Just noticed the 1.40pm arrival time at the Swan perfectly matching the clock.
This is how we ruled the Indian sub-continent with just a few civil servants at the Foreign Office – planning and preparation executed with military precision.
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Aye, the Empire were easy…until the downtrodden got guns too, and learned how to shoot back!
The French, Belgians, Spanish, Portuguese, and the Dutch found a similar thing.
You’ve still got IPA though.
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Always good to be the first to comment……!
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Or not, if someone has got in four minutes beforehand !
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Martin,
I am no more a rabid Northerner than a rabid Southerner but you sum up what was undoubtedly my ‘highlight of the day’ very well.
P P-T,
“no women” – but there was, unaccompanied and drinking a pint, five days later.
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An honorary bloke !
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Sorry Paul, forgetting Stoke is the start of the North not Stafford.
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But many Stokies would say that the North starts at Crewe.
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Mmm 🤔
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That’s probably fair, although I think the demarcation is actually quite gradual – Crewe has many similarities to Stafford, and Congleton to Leek.
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It’s pretty easy – the Trent catchment is in the Midlands, the Mersey catchment is in the Northwest – so the boundary is roughly the Cheshire/Staffs border. Certainly in beer terms, Stoke drinks far too much dark beer to be properly in the NW, whereas eg Congleton is definitely in the golden ale zone influenced by Boddies.
And Congleton has never had a Waitrose, whereas Leek has (albeit no longer).
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Northernism is about far more than beer, young qq.
And Stoke can be Northern while Sandbach isn’t 😉
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QQ,
Yes, and some 240 years later the Trent and Mersey Canal has done little to unite the two.
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It gets weirder still.
As a Nottinghamian by birth, I’d say that the East and West Midlands perhaps have less to do with each other, than either does with the North, or with the South.
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Good to see the Swan still has its distinctive tartan decor – and that they’re still using the old-school Tetley’s pumpclip.
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Yes, Tartan in its rightful place on the walls, and proper Tetleys on the bar.
I have dreadful memories of Tartan on the bar long ago.
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Yes, “at least one of these timings was wrong” because I was daft enough to think that “13.00-Late” on the Hydes website and “1.00 pm – Midnight” on the WhatPub site might mean that the Eagle opened about an hour before 2pm.
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How’d you work that out?
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I’ve forgotten now, three weeks later.
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Good job I write down every word you say.
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Oh, and you’re nearly three weeks behind, so you have some serious catching-up to do 😛
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Don’t complain about the flood of posts then 😉
Grief. Nine pubs in Rugby 😧
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But I will already have done the groundwork for Rugby 😀
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A very good first post today. It’s a different art writing about pubs when you’re with a group, chatting, to being on your own, observing. As Si knows.
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My kind of pub, and they have table-toppers for the Doms. This will be our local when we visit. If you put those three dom-shuffling gentlemen in the transponder in Cronenberg’s The Fly, you’ll get me out the other side. With a bit to spare obviously…
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Am I wrong or is Tetley’s not often on the bar in most of these GBG pubs? I imagined them as a “big player” when we saw Tetley’s over here in the States 10 or 15 years back, but now I’m thinking they’re only a mid-sized brewery these days in the UK– much smaller than Sharp’s, Greene King, Fullers etc?
Must say I always liked the Tetley’s I had, though in cans and even on tap (which I found, just once, in San Francisco), it was probably a shadow of what it can be served properly over there.
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Very rarely, even in GBG village pubs in Yorkshire (Black Sheep is more common).
Tetley itself was bought and closed by Carlsberg many years ago, so no longer a brewery and very much a fallen brand. Very much like Boddingtons.
Like Boddies and Bass, still has a recognisable name in the US
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Thanks for the information on all this. I gather Bass can still be viewed as in some sort of a continuity with its past, unlike Boddies and Tetley’s?
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Bass (or at least the cask version) is still brewed in its original home town with considerably greater respect for its heritage than Tetley’s. I wouldn’t say the Wolverhampton-brewed Tetley’s is a bad beer, but it’s not the same as the Leeds version. Boddingtons of course no longer exists as a cask beer and in the UK its residual brand value has largely disappeared.
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In the 1970s Boddingtons, ‘straw’ coloured and so and unusually pale, and Tetleys, brewed in vast volumes, were two well respected cask conditioned Bitters.
Now the four main nitrokegs, of which most pubs have one, are Boddingtons ( no longer in cask ), Tetleys ( cask brewing moved from Leeds to Wolverhampton ), John Smiths ( from Tadcaster to Edinburgh ) and Worthingtons ( from burton to Cardiff ). All four in the 1980s were from one of the Big Six National Brewers.
Now most of the biggest selling cask beers, such as Marstons Pedigree and Greene King IPA, are from the ‘New Nationals’ that thirty or forty years ago were regional ‘independent’ brewers. .
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Beautifully summed up Paul.
I still see Boddies in a few hotel bars, notably Premier Inns, but very rarely in pubs.
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Martin,
You must get to the wrong Premier Inns.
I’ve only stayed in two but Bangor has Brains SA on and Dundee Central has the Doom Bar we all know and love.
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The difference is the Premier Inns with a residents-only bar and restaurant actually within the hotel, and those with a Brewer Fayre or Beefeater next door. Boddies turns up in the residents-only places, cask ales in the next door type places.
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Beat me to it, there’s a difference.
I’ve seen Boddies in the integrated Cafe VAR in Cambridge North (actually open to all but you wouldn’t want to).
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Yes, but I don’t stay the night if there’s only a residents-only bar.
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I think the fact your readers feel as though we know all of these characters is terrific. Gentle prodding/mickey taking in their direction is done affectionately and adds to the posts. A rare sighting of the boy Thurman is good. There is some detail in that itinerary by the way…did anyone break rank and have a pint in the half pint designated boozers???
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Affectionate?
Ian is suing me for breach of image rights.
You’re probably wise not to join us in Uttoxeter on 14 June 😉
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LAF,
As for “the half pint designated boozers” some of us got in the Sun and I used the New Inn, but not London Road, five days later.
An itinerary like that is like pumpclips in a Wetherspoons, it looks good even if only two-thirds of them are possible.
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