No, not BRAPA’s consumption last week.
That’s the claimed sale of cask ale at We*herspoon’s Weepinh *sh in St. Neots last week.
I used to pop in this classic gentlefolk Spoons quite regularly for flat whites, Thursday curry and the occasional pint of Saffron (why ?).
On Thursday afternoon it was very quiet, the gentlefolk notably absent, the pub running at 60% of 2016 levels.
Perhaps the OAPs have been in Monday to Wednesday for Rishi’s Reductions, and will come back on Monday. Perhaps they’re staying at home till the vaccine arrives, if it ever does.
I’m a bit reticent about staying inside pubs, if honest, but here again I felt safe on a high table about 0.2km from the next punter.
In a contrast to Cambridge, here you can still wander up to the bar, survey the wondrous range of cask, and order your beer.
Abbot, Ruddles, Broadside and Doom Bar. The holy quartet of Spoons ales these days.
Have they given up on guest beers completely ? Wouldn’t blame them; I didn’t see a single pint of cask pulled in 27.5 minutes, and I had (unusually excellent) black coffee with my mini portion of fudge brownie.
The blackboard declared “473 pints of ale sold last week !“.
That’s a lot, I thought. Until you spread it over 4 pumps, and 7 days, and (say) 13 hours and it works out at about 1 pint an hour.
retiredmartin 
I’m old enough to remember Paine’s beer. I can say without a scintilla of doubt that it was absolutely dreadful.
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All beer was rubbish before CAMRA.
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Paine’s ales had a really bad reputation. Their head brewer was allegedly known as “Mr Pastry” owing to the amount of adjuncts (non-barley sources of starch), he threw into the mash tun.
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I remember Devenish and Greenall Whitley (Warrington) as worse but it’s a long time ago and I didn’t drink enough from distant breweries for my recollections to count for anything.
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How old do you think I am??
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Younger than you look.
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I think that was my average weekly consumption when I worked in the Bass Charrington brewery 🍺🍺🍺
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I don’t think any pub now will ever match the consumption of the Tyneside working men’s clubs which, according to the history of the Northern Clubs Federation Brewery, were at one point each turning over thirty to seventy 36-gallon casks a week. That’s between eight and twenty thousand pints!
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That’s impressive.
I remember visiting the Sun in Stockton before the smoking ban and they must have been serving 50 + pints of banked Bass an hour (there were several dozen bankers in the fridge waiting for top up). A fraction of that now; it’s mostly Carling.
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If you had Greenalls in the early 90s it will have been brewed by us at Tetley Walker in Warrington, following Greenalls’ brewery closure.
Couple more statistics from the past;
Fforde Greene in Headingley, Leeds was a 100 brewers’ barrels per week pub.
Owton Manor Social in Hartlepool, when I was at Cameron’s in the mid 80s was 80/90 barrels of tank beer per week, of which the vast majority was the much lamented (?) Whitbread Trophy Special.
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We haven’t found much real ale apart from a couple of micros doing takeaways -Mr S had been reduced to drinking lager -sad times ! The Halfway House at Brenchley was an exception though
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#PrayForPaulineAndHubbie
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Two things. Pint an hour is shocking. And Greenalls was not rubbish at all. In cask form of was a decent fruity, bitter beer. Not challenging but easy drinking. Most people who moan about it didn’t drink it regularly.
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I can only remember a few pints of Greenalls in and around Warrington in the early 90s which tasted pleasantly different to my usual Greene King beers. By the mid 90s when I really got into the GBG it had disappeared.
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I agree. It was the beer I grew up on and, while it wans’t in the top rank of beers, it was pretty good when well-kept, as it was in plenty of pubs in North Cheshire.
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Tandleman,
I didn’t mean ‘worse than Paines’ to be interpreted as “rubbish”.
Maybe I made the mistake of comparing Warrington Greenalls to the Wem beers I thought to be superb.
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473 pints a week is 6½ firkins, or only really enough to sustain a maximum of three cask lines. As I said on Twitter, some of the Bass pubs in and around Burton said they were doing much more than that each week of Bass alone, 80 or 100 gallons.
While, as you know, I am a big fan of BBB, those in the standard Spoons selection don’t really excite my tastebuds, with the exception of Abbot, which on many occasions is a bit on the strong side.
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Abbot has been the best bet in Spoons, but it’s a beer to drink in pints and you can’t drink much.
Mrs RM would be happy with Broadside. Funny how Adnams can sell it to Spoons at a profit, and Spoons retail it at half the price it is in Southwold.
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T’other Mudgie,
473 pints is what the Bull and Bladder sells in 2½ days and that’s just the Best Bitter.
Tim knows he’s had to cut down typically from six to four cask beers but has he kept the “holy quartet” of familiar beers because they sell better than the scarcely known guest beers ?
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Surely that’s standard for an Alan pub crawl?
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No more than 28, or his wife got cross (though he had homebrew afterwards).
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It was only 24 in his latter days. But his wife was worried if he had less too.
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You’re right it was only 24.
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Ha! Absolutely!!😀🍺
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