London pubs

[Slothrop]

Went to the Harp for the first time today. It's one of those London pubs that I must've walked past dozens of times but never registered it - probably because on some level anywhere that near Covent Garden is held to be awful until proven otherwise. But yes, it was very nice - great beer and an upstairs room that's like someone's sitting room.

 

[baboon2004]

I went to the Harp last Friday - good pub, thanks for the recommendation.

 

[Mr. Tea]

millenium

+n

(woulda left it, but it's fair payback for picking luka up on his "its" earlier)

 

[craner]

Too right.

 

[Slothrop]

The Bree Louise - very nice beer (a lot of it on gravity) camra and student discounts, and handy for Euston. Food looked alright, too.

Smells of piss a bit where we were sitting, though - making it a kind of Wenlock Arms for the north west of the centre.

 

[scottdisco]

there's a fairly decent Shepherd Neame house somewhere in Covent Garden (which i obviously forget the name and address of).

as a northerner i have obviously not grown up w Neame tied houses being a usual thing for me (if you want cheap Joey Holts i'm your man), so i am like a lovesick fool whenever i go in one.

the Neame house on the Horseferry Road (other side of the road to what the Barley Mow is on) is OK too.

neither worth a detour but if you're in the area.

@Slothrop, have heard very good things re the Bree Louise. Euston really is a winning area, you've got a lot of good greasy spoons to the left of the station, and that cheap great Indian street, Drummond Street, to the right, and i once saw a heavily bearded Will Self having a tab on the pavement table of a caff in Bloomsbury.

 

[Slothrop]

there's a fairly decent Shepherd Neame house somewhere in Covent Garden (which i obviously forget the name and address of).

as a northerner i have obviously not grown up w Neame tied houses being a usual thing for me (if you want cheap Joey Holts i'm your man), so i am like a lovesick fool whenever i go in one.

I grew up in East Kent, which sheps have got on lockdown.

There are much, much worse big regionals (hello Greene King), but it does get a bit repetitive, especially since their beers aren't massively varied and their tied houses don't tend to run to interesting guests. Spitfire, Masterbrew, Whitstable Bay etc are fine if they're well kept, but you kind of wish they did a nice mild and a strong porter or something, or that it was actually possible to buy something else occasionally. It's really noticeable that there are bugger-all micros in Kent (only two south or east of faversham, I think), and I think this is partly because there's a total dearth of proper free houses to support them.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Seconded on the Bree Louise. Excellent beers, including oddballs like weirdly herbal (but delicious) flat, thin stouts poured, as mentioned, by gravity. Good proper cloudy cider on hand-pump too, if that's your bag. I may or may not have eaten a half-decent pie there at some point, can't quite recall - there are signs all over the place bigging them up, at any rate. Nice to sit outside when it's sunny. I've found the staff can exhibit indifferent levels of politeness and/or command of English, though it's not consistently a severe problem.

Surely a contender for one of the most oddly named pubs in London? I mean, "Bree" - is the publican called Butterbur?

Edit: on the point about big brewers, I've been spending a good deal of time in Oxford since the start of the year and while the city's obviously got loads of great pubs, it's noticeable how many of them - seems like a full half of them at times - are run by the dreaded GK (based in fucking Bury St. Edmunds, I mean hello??) and many of the others are owned by one of the two big London brewers. It's a real shame, I mean surely Oxford of all places should be able to support a good number of free houses? Or at least houses tied to one of the smaller, more local breweries - I can't think of any in or just outside the town itself off the top of my head but casting the net a bit wider in the West Country there's Arkell's in Swindon and Hop Back in Salisbury, for a start...

 

[scottdisco]

you lot need to come up to Mcr

we have four established large family brewers (the most of any city in the UK) and around a further 20 micro breweries of varying size (from ones like Phoenix who get their beer out regularly to hundreds of regional pubs and can be found further afield if you're lucky, to smaller brewpub type concerns), plus there is a good mix of cask ale circuit pubs in the town, especially in a loop around inner Salford, the northern edge of Mcr centre, and the southern artery out of the town. oh and prices can certainly be reasonable too. some handy suburb drinking too.

plus Cheshire to the south, Lancs to the north, Yorkshire to the east, Derbys to the southeast (i had an excellent imperial stout-style at 7.7 from Thornbridge brewery in northern Derbyshire yday; half i hasten to add) and the scousers to the west all boast a range of good independent breweries, normally available in the better freehouses etc.

also i hear what Slothrop says about mild, Camra do their 'Mild in May' month so i have noticed tons of the stuff round here atm.

[/pompous sales pitch over ]

 

[scottdisco]

also re T's Oxford GK concerns, i hear you on the 'a city the size of Oxford'. i mean, Norwich is in East Anglia, and yet is the best beer city in the UK. (though i'm sure you get plenty of GK houses there, been a while since i've been so i forget. granted, they are presumably offset by all the freehouses, and the other regional Anglian ties, such as Adnams houses.)

what have they got, that je ne sais quoi, that Oxford (w lots of well-off students and academics and international visitors surely all gasping for ale) hasn't?

interesting.

 

[STN]

I think the Bree Louise is named after the landlord's daughter who died at a young age, Tea, you heartless bastard.

 

[Slothrop]

Edit: on the point about big brewers, I've been spending a good deal of time in Oxford since the start of the year and while the city's obviously got loads of great pubs, it's noticeable how many of them - seems like a full half of them at times - are run by the dreaded GK (based in fucking Bury St. Edmunds, I mean hello??) and many of the others are owned by one of the two big London brewers. It's a real shame, I mean surely Oxford of all places should be able to support a good number of free houses? Or at least houses tied to one of the smaller, more local breweries - I can't think of any smaller brewers in or just outside the town itself off the top of my head but casting the net a bit wider in the West Country there's Arkell's in Swindon and Hop Back in Salisbury, for a start...

I'd guess that they're mostly ex Morland tied houses. And there are one or two good free houses, aren't there?

But yeah, it is quite depressing.

 

[owengriffiths]

I have to say I'm not really clued up on all this talk of tied & free houses, or that a real ale brewery (Sheperd Neame) can have such a negative influence on the pub trade. In my part of the world the idea of non mainstream beer is Corona, or at least that's the case in pubs that cater solely to the under 30's/ students/ city centre people whose world has been rocked by the concept thart you put a lemon in a bottleneck. Elsewhere it's Fosters. Suffice to say there are next to no places that serve draught or even bottled real ales. I suspect this is partly down to the brewers. The likes of Guinness & Tennants are powerful, and given that there is only room for 4-8 taps in a bar it kind of makes sense that only the multinationals get a look in. In one sense there is probably a proven demand for the heavily advertised stuff, what chance does the obscure stuff have. Of course Guinness and the like probably have a soviet mentality when it comes to liquidating all competitors. It must be so easy force the pubs to stock less popular brands like Heineken or Smithwicks ("if you don't take these two we'll not give you the black stuff, and you'll be the only pub in the UK without Guinness"). So that would be my theory on why weird and wonderful beers never get a look in. It's how capitalism works and it makes sound business sense.

So as I've outlined my theory on how brewery monopoly edges out the microbreweries, does anyone care to explain how the likes of Shepard Neames or whoever have managed to achieve the same thing but on a smaller scale. I suspect the answer will involve talk about tied breweries...

 

[Slothrop]

Basically, it's a bit simpler than that.

A free house is owned by the tenant or by a pub company, and can stock what they like. There's normally enough bar space that they really can stock what they like, and the term is normally used when a) the place stocks real ale and b) they get ales from a range of breweries.

A tied house is one owned by a brewery. Typically they'll stock a bunch of lagers, guinness etc but the only real ales they'll sell will be ones produced by the owner plus maybe a 'guest' if the owner is charitable and more concerned with beer than with squeezing out every drop of profit. In areas with a lot of small to middling breweries and a bunch of free houses this seems to work okay - it makes it easier for the breweries and the pubs to keep their heads above water and the punters still get variety. It becomes annoying when it's essentially one brewery that owns every pub in a given town or region, and that brewery keeps landlords on a tight rein to stop them stocking any guests, and particularly when that brewery is fucking mediocre (GK). At this point it's more like the brewery abusing their monopoly on pub ownership to lock out competition on beer - especially from new breweries and micros, which don't have their own pub and rely on guest ales and local free houses to actually sell any.

 

[benjybars]

I'm reading Under the Net by Iris Murdoch at the moment.

A really good london pub crawl scene in the book. Makes you realise how much better london drinking (especially central london drinking) would have been 50 years ago.

 

[Mr. Tea]

To say nothing of cheaper...wouldn't beer be something like 50p a pint today if it had only risen in line with inflation since the mid-century? Something like that, anyway.

And this was before the words "smoothflow", "extra-cold" or "Budweiser" were common parts of saloon bar vocabulary.

 

[owengriffiths]

Ta for the info slothrop. I don't know about the rest of youse but to me it seems strange that a mere brewery can be so influential in the pub trade. I know the production of booze and the selling of it are related industries but they don't necessarily lend themselves to being so closely tied together. In the case of a brewery owning loads of pubs in one town it seems like a kind of franchise, I'm surprised the companies can afford to be so heavily involved in things.

 

[scottdisco]

i agree, it does seem strange.

GK (and i suppose a few others, like Fullers', or Thwaites in the northwest of England) are deffo a special case AFAIK.

they are so big, the biggest of the big cask ale producers (along w the likes of Wells & Young), that w all their profits they started to get into pub ownership too, and now have quite a tidy little estate.

i know they own nowhere near as many houses in their estate as the big pubcos like Punch Taverns, but because the branding is so similar - ie you are going to get the exact same GK cask beers as a rule, in a GK house, and the GK Abbot icon design will be around the place; this is true whether the pub is that GK one very near St Martins and the National Portrait Gallery in London, or whether it is somewhere in rural Norfolk or whatever (though i am sure the beer will taste far better at the hypothetical one in rural Norfolk) - as compared to the branding of pubco pubs, it definitely stands out.

i believe beer writer Roger Protz refers to the biggest of these big cask ale producers (who are still a drop in the ocean in commercial terms compared to the massive multinationals that brew most of the lager that is by volume the most popular beer in the UK still by a mile) as 'super regionals', they've broke free of their local area trade in selling beer to as many pubs (freehouses originally i suppose) as they can, and are soaring commercially speaking.

 

[owengriffiths]

And am I right in assuming they bought the existing freehouses out (or sold them a franchise) rather than opened up new pubs themselves? Is this an attractive proposition for freehouses, do they reckon that having a logo at the front door will bring in more punters. I suppose in a declining business a pub owner will take any money they can get.

And I've got another bloody question for youse, and an off topic one at that. Edinburgh city centre has a very strong smell in the air thanks to the breweries there. Has any other town or village suffer from this predicament.

 

[Lichen]

Not exactly, but on the right wind you can smell the Nestlé (neé Rowntrees) chocolate at York railway station.

I love the smell of Edinburgh. Is it yeasty?