retiredmartin

There’s some great pubs called The Sun. For a start, there’s my old local in Waterbeach, and the banked Bass stronghold in Stockton-on-Tees, and the fake boozer in Beamish wasn’t bad, either.

Titanic’s foray into Stafford isn’t quite a great pub, but it starred last Thursday.

Titanic, Joules, and Black Country brought some freshness to central Stafford’s pub scene in the 2010s, though Paul will tell you the two quid 6X in the Craft Union Coach & Horses is the pint to beat.

Titanic run a bod bar for the cafe society in the suburbs, but the Sun is the smart casual allrounder, and the busiest pub last Thursday afternoon. As always when I say it was busy, the photo suggests the opposite.

Still unsure about SO many handpumps though.

What ? There’s more !

Quite how local drinkers differentiate between those five is hard to tell, and I pick the Plum Porter anyway. Someone decided to go for the Tiger, and while it’s a free country, why not ?

Yes, just a half. Rare discipline. A cool, rich NBSS 3.5, which sums up a lot of beer these last few months but let’s never take good beer for granted.

Will entertained us with a story from Yorkshire about the “special bacteria” in Timothy Taylor’s Landlord; he’ll come to your pub and repeat it if you buy him a Doom Bar.

By 14:30 any dining trade (I didn’t actually see any) had long gone and there was just the sort of social drinking you tend to get a lot closer to Christmas. Lovely to see.

I’m sure we’d have seen fun and frolics in the Picture House, for a change not flooded, but both Paul and Will are boycotting Spoons for reasons I’ll not bore you with here.

I’m sure there’ll be a section on Spoons boycotts in the museum when it eventually opens.