April 2024. Waterbeach.
Back “home” on Sunday to check-in on the parents, keep Chung Hwa in business, and avoid seeing the Forest v City match; I can’t be anywhere near the telly or BBC coverage when I’m not at the match.
That’s my excuse for swerving the Sun in favour of the White Horse.
Look at the state of our roads;
makes Bulgarian roads look immaculate.
Waterbeach doesn’t get many famous visitors, though the Southworths and BRAPA have both been here in recent years, and Joe Bugner was in the Sun 50 years ago. So I was amazed to see top man Quinno had been, uninvited, and scored a 4 in the White Horse.
“More earthy than the Sun” isn’t a description I’d have guessed for the second pub on the village green, a place split equally between Italian restaurant and public bar.
I’d been in the public a few months back during the Golden Hour,
when it was packed with the Hi-Vis crowd fresh off building extensions or repairing boilers, and I mean that as the highest compliment as someone who can do neither.
But on Sunday afternoon it was a bit quiet, the White Horse one of many pubs not paying the absurd fees for TV football (often to disinterested punters), so despite Quinno’s optimism I feared a bit for the weird foreign cask from Twickers and went local.
In fairness, the IPA tasted as if it might once have been quite chewy and enjoyable, but had had too much of a rest in the barrel. Not bad. Not one you take back. But just not an enjoyable advert for Greene King, and that’s sadly something I say more and more these days.
IPA is plummeting down the cask best-sellers list at a rate of knots as Landlord rises, and it seemed somehow appropriate to be drinking in a Tim Taylor glass.
By good/bad fortune, I would get the chance to reassess the Greene King flagship again not once, but twice, the next day.
retiredmartin 
“the IPA tasted as if it might once have been quite chewy and enjoyable, but had had too much of a rest in the barrel”.
A rest in the cask should be BEFORE it’s on sale.
Nick Boley recently reminded us on Discourse that “And therein lies the problem with Greene King cask beers. They are not conditioned at the brewery but licensees are told to store for 7-10 days before tapping. Sadly, many can’t or don’t do this (cellar size, costs of stock, etc.). IPA in particular suffers from being served green. When stored for the stipulated time, or longer, a far better tasting beer emerges, The Nutshell and the Rose & Crown in Bury St Edmunds and the Greyhound in Ixworth spring to mind”.
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Agreed Paul, and this ties in 100% with everything Des de Moor is saying in his epic book on “Cask” – only 40 more pages to go!
Btw, don’t breweries have cellar inspectors, like they use to in the old days? These lazy, or indifferent landlords would have been torn off a strip by the brewery, for such sloppy practices. I suspect that sadly, GK have grown too large to care, and are more concerned with demolishing the past in favour of a shiny new brewing plant, that will probably be sourced from Germany.
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“don’t breweries have cellar inspectors, like they use to in the old days?”
Breweries don’t have most of Britain’s pubs anymore. Big pub companies don’t have cellar inspectors. I blame the 1989 Beer Orders.
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Some pubs, many in fact, just shouldn’t bother with cask beer. That increasingly includes some of the famous names like Greene King.
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I could argue that some pubs, many in fact, just don’t deserve to survive, but I don’t intend naming names.
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But we can guess ?
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Cask is definitely better off concentrated into a few pubs that can sell it in volume. Such “destination” pubs make far better adverts for cask than the lonely pump in a pub that can’t sell it quickly enough.
Too many pubs with a forest of handpumps and no demand too!
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You make excellent points as always, Andy.
I’d be the last person to moan about quality, I reckon cask has been better since Covid than I remember and a rationalisation of the number of pumps has helped (though not helped smaller breweries).
I think some non-destination pubs are more capable than other to sustain a couple of pumps selling Pedigree and Wainwright or other Top 10. As an example, the Marston dining pubs aimed at gentlefolk will always sell enough cask to justify real ale.
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Very true
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