retiredmartin

Two more to finish the night in Chester-le-Street for you.

It’s a hard place to describe. But pictures often help.

A lovely/lively scruffy town of 24,227 souls that looks to Durham City for shopping and high culture in the Station House ,but always returns for the cheap beer and county cricket and Clems.

Duncan and I contemplated our options.

“Butcher’s  ?”

“Butcher’s”.

Always go for the one with the correct use of the apostrophe.

In the Beer Guide since BRAPA was conceived (immaculately, no doubt), the Butcher’s is the equivalent of the Waters Green in Macclesfield or the Bull’s Head in Manchester; the busy, unfussy town pub selling beers you’ve heard of.

Nice easy choice for me at the top of the list; Duncan wanted to know the life history of the Brakspear Gravity.

To be honest, it was a bit too quiet and the pub layout struggles a bit to balance distancing and cosiness, but the Pedigree was as superb as ever (NBSS 3.5).

My notes are gone, but I recall a maze round the pub punctuated with Beatles memorabilia and ladies knitting, like in “A Tale of Two Cities“.

Duncan is known for his professionalism in GBG ticking in halves, but at the end of a night has been known to suddenly switch to pints and flavoured gin.

As his guard fell, I tempted him into the den of craft union iniquity that is the Market Tavern.

 

“Pump and rub” it said at the door, giving me my blog title ahead of any unexpected excitement instead.

It’s the newest convert to cask, to be honest the ONLY other cask outlet that doesn’t have “cricket” in the title.

And what cask !

I think we were told off here, too, for not moving on quickly enough to the beer collection point.

But I’d rather pubs were enforcing the Covid rules a bit too rigorously.

There were a dozen in as the clock struck eleven, all of them gripped by news of Brentford’s play-off win.

Doom Bar was decent enough to grace the GBG in Carluke or Caersws, if only CAMRA discount was available to take the price of a pint down from an extravagant £1.80.

For the first time ever, I contemplated a taxi back up the hill to my bijou accommodation. But I couldn’t find one.  Or a Chinese takeaway.