June 2025. Ibstock.
Have a Good Beer Guide map. Yes, a fully pinked-in GBG map, you’d forgotten what they look like, hadn’t you ?
Ibstock (pop. 7,615) is very much Greater Coalville, a plain old East Mids mining town with a long and occasionally attractive high street with a bit of new housing and two (2) car parks,
presumably for visitors to the Teddy Bears picnic.
The Waggon and Horses is a classic end to Leicestershire,
a workingman’s boozer in a cul-de-sac with an echo of Whitwick,
but also Stockton’s Sun.
10 pints of Carling to 2 pints of Bass, the prescribed ratio,
and just a wonderful riot of banter.
I completely failed to do the pub justice, the visitor popping in for a 10 minute pint staring at his phone rather than engaging in chat.
The Bass was a 3, the pub is a 5. That’s the way I like it.
retiredmartin 
“10 pints of Carling to 2 pints of Bass” is the East Midlands.
I often see ten pints of Carling to my one ( at a time ) Bass.
,
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Edward Plunket Taylor, has certainly got a lot to answer for!
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Yes Paul, as does Sheffield’s Hope & Anchor Brewery who wanted to sell their Royal Jubilee Stout in Canada and struck a deal whereby they brewed Canadian Carling Black Label Lager under licence in return.
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I’ve been there!! It’s a classic pub – sounds like it hasn’t changed one iota 🔺🔺
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Is it any wonder Carling is so popular with the locals when it comes from one of Henry Moore’s lesser known modernist sculptural beer fonts. What the working classes want is more thought-provoking modern art with their pints, not dimpled pint mugs and lacings!
(The Real) Mark
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The Carling font is, indeed, a thing of beauty, Mark.
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What they want is beer that doesn’t give them them the threepenny bits when they’re up scaffolding for eight hours, maybe.
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It’s the floor.
A proper pub has to have a proper floor.
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