retiredmartin

August 2024. Canterbury.

CAMRA’s national beer scoring system, the one that determines which pubs make the Beer Guide (admit it, you thought it was about discounts and stocking beers whose pump clips you can’t read), has a very useful prompt to marking your pint (0 is Doom Bar, I believe.

Mrs RM and I were enjoying our Canterbury pints with local legend Dave aka @asthouart and, as the beer in the Monument was close enough to a 3, we ought to have stayed put in our window seat looking out on St. Dunstans.

But the beer wasn’t that great, the pub not that comfortable, and the pub we’d passed on the way west had looked unmissable.

Two minutes later Mrs RM was installing herself in the best table of a rapidly filling Unicorn, a GBG perennial I hadn’t been in for a decade (or two).

But had it changed in the last decade (or two) ?

Didn’t look like it.

A classic town pub with diverse custom, the sort of place you get off Cambridge’s Mill Road or in Sheffield’s suburbs. “A cultural melting pot”, they call it in the GBG (see – White Lion, Walsall).

Dave (that’s him in blue) looked to me for inspiration at the bar getting his photo taken by that young lady.

“You’re the beer expert !” said Dave, before just ordering one of each after Mrs RM had suggested ordering the last one pulled.

Worryingly sensible beer range; a Jarl, Butcombe and Black Sheep (I think), all 3/3.5.

But the beer was a bit secondary, as frankly I basked in a glorious pub atmosphere with back against the bench seats and a continued conversation about Canterbury’s own Oysterband,

and I always think it’s more important you remember what music you discussed than what beer you have.

Don’t you ?