retiredmartin

November 2023. Norwich.

Less than 2.5 hours to tick four pubs, get lost, find a tasty tea and rush for the train back to Ely.

Right, let’s walk.

Norwich is a Fine City, and a Great Walking Town (just stay clear of the unexpected red light district just west of the station across the river Wensum). I’ll do a series on Great Walking Towns; this can be No. 23.

I left Sir Toby at the market, where our Hi-Vis heroes were putting up the Christmas decorations. They eat canaries here on 25/12, you know.

10 minutes later you take the flyover across the inner ring road to admire the ill-placed Catholic Cathedral,

and then enter the weird and wonderful west of the Western suburbs, which alone account for some 11% of the ENTIRE Good Beer Guide entries.

A chap in a bowler hat on Earlham Road is practising his golf swing because, well, why not ?

I think he’s stayed too long in the Fat Cat, and that’s the problem with a Pub Man visiting Norwich; too many temptations to revisit.

The Earlham pub isn’t necessarily one of them, but it now has dinosaurs and that may be enough for a GBG25 entry, who knows ?

Because, in GBG24, anything goes. A crazy, marvellous edition of the Guide where EVEN a Craft Union pub like the Garden House can rub noses with the Fat Cat and the King’s Head.

Look ! They’re building a moat to keep BRAPA out !

Craft Union pubs are oftn wonderful. Blokey, irreverent and selling Tim Taylor Landlord for £2.50 in pubs without airs and graces. Read Discourse and see lots of phrases like “lowest common denominator clientele” from the middle-class CAMRAs*.

Or that’s the perception, anyway. But the Garden House is as CAMRA-friendly as you get.

Look, beers on gravity, lots of them;

And those flavoured ciders that CAMRA spend years debating whether it’s “real” or not. As Nietzsche wrote “If it makes your feet wet it’s real“.

How cool will those beers on gravity be ? Should I play safe and go handpump ? If the Sharp’s had been Doom Bar it would have been easy.

I almost feel guilty about getting the incredibly cheery barmaid to walk from behind the bar to get a pint of of Mr Winters Vanilla Stout and am really glad that now I’ve completed I need never annoy bar staff by asking for a half again.

Well, it’s wonderful, cool and rich and tasty (3.5+).

And I’m a little surprised how good it is, because the beers aren’t in a cool cellar and the sight of Peerless often says, well you know what it says,

and to be honest I seem to be the only ale drinker on a Sunday afternoon.

But I don’t care, I just see a great community pub where a whole Norwich family has come out to the pub so the parents can talk to their children and their children can ignore them and stare at the phones. Bit like I was doing.

Beers on gravity, a family atmosphere, Sky TV. Is this really a Craft Union pub ?

*Joking. Sort of.