October 2024. Cambridge.
With daily trips to visit Mum and Dad over the last week in care homes and hospitals this last week, the need for a post-visit pint has been high on our minds.
Not many pubs around Addenbrookes, as I’ve just found out on the half hour slog from Cambridge Station.
But the closest one is also a GBG pub, the newbuild Queen Edith a bit of a Milton Brewery flagship as well as a saviour for the sizeable community south of Cherry Hinton Road.
A community who obviously don’t need a pub on Sunday night, not that that’s a surprise in Cambridge.
One couple at the bar, a chap quietly reading the paper, Mark Knopfler on the stereo.
Yep, the “intelligent” Dire Straits, and a shelf full of Private Eyes to while away the time over a pint of classically themed Milton beers.
At the bar the Guvnor admires my five pound note with the King’s head on it and makes a joke about “Doing Charlie with a Charlie” that I can’t repeat.
Since you ask, I’d normally say eight (8) casks in a community pub was a few too many, but since that Nero was a rich, chewy NBSS 4, the evidence doesn’t support my theory.
Not today, anyway.
NB Here’s Richard, Milton Brewery’s founder. Top bloke often found drinking in his own pubs.
retiredmartin 
For sexual innuendo and buttock photos we read BRAPA. Keep this site wholesome. Communique is the one Dire Straights album I still listen to.
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“Lady Writer” contains innuendo ? Wow.
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Just want to say that I love your blog. My only gripe is that I can’t taste anything.
This is such a thorough adventure that I’m guessing it will be a docuseries streaming on the BBC. Cheers 🍻
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I am very pleased you read my blog. If you want to taste the beer you need to subscribe to my “Scratch, sniff and suck” edition of the blog (not currently available to UK readers).
If it was going to be a BBC series I suspect it would have been filmed 2 years ago as Mrs RM and I drove a campervan around the Scottish Highlands as the lifelong completion of the Beer Guide hove into view. They could do a series on BRAPA but I suspect there’s litigation issues.
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It could be a YouTube series, simply random 5 minute recordings of conversations in pubs, without commentary, you’d make millions. There’s an irregular feature in the Guardian Travel section called ‘Where tourists seldom tread’ about “off the beaten track” town across the UK, and I can’t believe they never asked RM to write it (maybe they did). Anyway, in the latest one, one of the places is Wolverhampton and there’s a funny* beer reference:
“My first stop is the Posada, a proper city pub. I’ve been told the Black Country still drinks mild but the man behind the bar tells me he bought a keg for some Camra chaps, but they had two halves and never came back, and he was left with a drink no one wanted.”
* Probably not funny for the landlord, but if he’s gonna buy keg …
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2024/oct/02/where-tourists-seldom-tread-part-12-towns-harwich-wolverhampton-wokingham-gateshead-armagh
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A weekly piece berating half pint drinking, taster seeking, variety chasing, CAMRAs would work for me.
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Seven weeks ago I changed buses at Addenbrookes bus station and you kindly gave me a lift to Milton but I didn’t see any Milton beers.
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Milton Brewery is actually in Waterbeach but there’s no Milton beers there either even though one of our pubs is called the Brewery Taps.
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I could conclude that they don’t want to sell their beers.
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I’ve no strong feelings, one way or the other, regarding Milton Beers, but looking at their website, the company appears to be doing alright.
Sending positive thoughts to your parents. Although I’ve never met them, I feel as if I know them through the pages of your blog. Look after yourselves. too. Hospital visiting can be quite draining, something I know only too well.
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Many thanks, Paul. I always thought of you doing that long trek to a care home in Norfolk, never an easy visit.
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Yes challenging times, but of course a priority.
My ageing parents were 122 miles away.
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Martin, I was normally able to combine those care home visits, with a stopover at a pub, or B&B. This enabled me to experience parts of Norfolk that I’d never visited before.
A quick check through past blogs, reveals 14 different locations, mainly to the south or west of Norwich, but all with their own unique character and charm.
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Milton Brewery has lasted 25 years focusing on quality rather than price so you don’t see its beers in Spoons or the value end of the free trade.
They run 3 excellent pubs in Cambridge, used to have a couple in North London and one in Peterborough but consolidated.
I guess Goachers might be a good comparison.
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As a concerned American tourist not from West Wyoming who recently visited your mum, I hope she is doing well.
Dick
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Is there even a West Wyoming ?
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Only to those who live there.
Dick
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I hadn’t heard that Milton Brewery had left the Coalheavers in Peterborough. But they are planning to open the Rose and Crown in Histon before long
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Are they?
That’s great news. Could have been a Project William pub under Everard’s.
They left Coalheavers nearly a decade ago if memory serves me.
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Last Sunday at Oakengates I used a Project William pub under Everard’s
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Just added a pic of Richard the founder to the post.
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