Five first-time pubs that stayed with me while researching A Pub For All Seasons. This is not about the best beer pubs and more about the memorable moods that I encountered on my year-long journey. I could have done more but five seemed a reasonable amount.
The Artillery Arms, Ramsgate
I met Ramsgate’s Brewery Eddie Gadd here in the summer of 2023 and then returned last September when I was doing a book event at the Montefiore Arms. A corner pub with a stunning stained glass window featuring artillery men and their horses from the 19th century, it has the feel of a small museum, a reading room for those who might have military connections. It’s also a place where the aimless chat of pub people can be listened to while you study a pint of Gadds bitter. There was a timelessness about part of the afternoon I spent there in September, where words are thrown out with random and somehow they made sense. There was a timelessness about this afternoon session, and three pints to the good I listened to the voices: ‘I was on a cruise ship, cafes and you get up early in the morning, then all the crowds start gathering, I’ve been there, the main city seems to, how do I put it, not have clean toilets.’ Then someone else starts talking about beer festivals and how ‘we never got to the beer festival because we did all the pubs’.
The Albert, Totnes
I went here because I had seen there was a beer festival on during a summer weekend in 2023, but when I got there I felt a bit deflated to see that the festival featured four beers you can get anywhere: Summer Lightning, Wye Valley HPA, Ringwood 49-er and a mild from Holsworthy Brewery. However, the stout produced at the back of the pub in its own brewery was rather moreish and I got talking with a gang of eccentric regulars, a couple of whom told me that they came into Totnes by bus from the surrounding villages and they often missed them back. The pub had a compact front bar and a cosy back one, where people went in the winter, while the garden was deep and continued past the brewery and the loos. I spent over two hours there and there was laughter, exuberance, interest in what I was writing and one well spoken, bus-missing man told me that George the brewer and server on this benign afternoon was ‘a decent chap and if I had a medal I’d give it to you’.
Castle Tavern, Inverness
I visited here during my five days exploring and visiting Scottish pubs and I loved it. Inside it was a one-bar room, with extra seating on a raised platform and an alcove with four tables. There were three cask beers including Orkney Dark, as well as draft Weihenstephaner Weiss. It was a cold winter’s night two years ago and it felt secure and cosy, a mighty fortress of warmth as I watched a beautiful black/blue/grey-flecked cocker Luna who, I was told, liked Bacon Fries. ‘In the summer it’s absolutely nuts here,’ said the barmen when I went up for another pint, ‘you can hardly move, it is so busy.’ So this was the best part of the year to visit with its laidback atmosphere as I picked up on lazy funny banter about John Wick, about how he shoots loads of folk, while another drinker said that they watched Austin Powers for the first time, the first one, he added. This is the mundanity of pub talk, the ordinary made extraordinary perhaps, in the same way James Joyce recorded the voices of Dubliners in Ulysses.
City Arms, Manchester
I was introduced to this venerable institution by my friend and colleague Matthew Curtis, after we had bumped into each other at the Cloudwater Tap. Two days later, after visiting the Peveril of the Peak and the Britons Protection for research purposes, I headed there for a final couple of pints before getting the train home. The young barman remembered me from the other night, and I asked him about the various moods of the pub. He told me that sometimes on a Sunday morning when he arrived to clean up before opening, it had the feeling of the aftermath of a house party, as if the echoes of conversations from the previous night were hanging about like motes of dust in the air (my son told me something similar about when he used to work at my local in Exeter until November, about how if he was doing a late shift and clearing up once everyone had gone there still seemed an atmosphere of the evening in the air). I sat in the back bar where there were friends at tables, a joyous chorus of voices and laughter and the clang of casks being delivered into the cellar below. The beer, a chocolate orange stout, was somewhat underwhelming but it was the air of exuberance that stayed with me, as well as a man in a suit with a hanky in his top pocket, a trilby on his head, an empty glass on his table, looking around as if he expected someone to buy him a drink.
No photo of the Scottish Stores I am afraid, but if you are at the above as often as I seem to be it’s a short stroll away if you have the time
The Scottish Stores, Kings Cross, London
Summer in a London pub with the rain hurling its drenched cloak over the city as dirty, grey, watery-eyed clouds drip as they drift past. However, it doesn’t rain in pubs and I am sitting on a stool at a high table in one of the windows of the Scottish Stores, where I feel a sense of hiding from the storm whilst watching it vent spleen on the passing vans and taxis slowing trundling by on the Caledonian Road. The pub, which I have never visited before, is elemental and venerable with its caramel-coloured wooden panelling and well-polished bar counter, to the front of which and just below the edge gleams the shine of a brass railing. The floor is a mixture of well-worn wood flooring and black-and-white chequered tiling and there are several similarly shod rooms off the main bar. It is a quiet pub, with a soundtrack of soft rock playing, emotional rock, guitars and plaintive vocals, both male and female, while a goth-like woman, mid-30s, all in black, tattoo on right arm, ring in her nose, hair in dreads, sat opposite me, writing in a book. On this dismal summer’s day, the mood of the pub was autumnal and solitude personified, a quiet lunchtime period and somehow that spoke to me with the voice of comfort and looking at my notes I cannot remember what beer I drank, such was the benign effect of the pub on my troubled soul.
Oh and while I remember my beer of the year was a bottle of Keesmann’s Herren Pils, which I bought at a store at Bamberg Station before getting the train back to Nuremberg. I have had it many times, but on this late autumnal afternoon as I looked out of the train window at the darkening fields, it was fresh and floral, noble in its hoppiness and dry and bittersweet in its finish. There have been lots of other memorable beers, but this one was a revelation.
Shameless plug: my latest book A Pub For All Seasons is now available (Headline).