Shakesbeer

Work landed me in Stratford-upon-Avon for a couple of days in July. It's a town, quite a small one, most famous for something else, but I was intrigued by how many different genres of beer outlet it has managed to support. Naturally I sought to try out as many as I could.

Of course, traditional pubs abound. The slightly twee, low-ceilinged and stone-floored, Old Thatch is a charmer, though the pint of Gales HSB they served me was less than stellar. I don't know if that's the pub or the changes at Fuller Smith & Turner down in London which is to blame. At the bottom end of town, The Bear struck me as a kind of gin-and-Jags, golf set, sort of place: sports prints and leather sofas. But it poured a perfectly-kept pint of Landlord. Somewhere in between is the rambling red-brick dining pub The Red Lion, where I settled on the usually-reliable St Austell Tribute but wasn't at all impressed by what they gave me. So, for the beer ticker already familiar with Big Cask, the traditional pubs aren't where you go in Stratford.

The One Elm is a small step sideways in ethos, presenting as a modern and urbane gastropub of the sort that's probably going out of fashion. It retains quite a few grand pub features, though the emphasis is on food and the décor clean and pale and a bit IKEA-ish. I sat out back in the courtyard beer garden and drank kegged Purity Longhorn. The ubiquitous Warwickshire brewery has been making this for a while, and they present it simply as a 5% ABV IPA. It is, specifically, a rye IPA: coloured like one, a deep amber with a fairly dense murky haze. Rye's signature bitterness is promised in an aroma of ground white pepper and fresh green bell pepper. That doesn't quite carry through to the flavour, where caramel and nuts from the darker malt and meadow flowers from the hops are predominant. There is a certain harder earthiness as an added complexity, and I'm guessing the rye is responsible, however it doesn't tip over into being sharp or severe. It's good, though. There's a lovely chewy and smooth texture, making it filling while still quite easy-drinking. I consider it a worthwhile introduction to the world of rye IPA, offering lots of character but no extremes.

Just opposite my hotel was Cox's Yard, a former timber mill that's been converted into a canalside hospitality complex. The bar in the pub building has four shiny chrome handpulls but was only pouring one beer when I dropped in: Origin by Charles Wells, another embattled English ale brand, now working from a new modern brewery in Bedfordshire which they've called Brewpoint. Origin is a down-the-line classic bitter: 3.7% ABV and having the lovely signature English floral garden flavour: elderflower, jasmine and honeysuckle on a base of strong black tea. The finish is quick after this, which dulls its edge somewhat, but no matter: it's designed for session drinking and doubtless works well for that.

There is, I'm happy to say, a micropub. Stratford Alehouse is on a row of shops and very obviously used to be one. At 4pm on the Wednesday I arrived, it was doing a roaring trade, all the beer being served on gravity from a stillage array down the back, with four options on the board to choose from.

For a number of reasons I reckoned the dark beer was the sensible choice and so picked Black Knight, a porter by Goffs brewery in Gloucestershire. It's quite a high strength one at 5.3% ABV, and that combined with relatively low condition and high serving temperature really accentuated the fruity side of the picture, giving me blueberry, blackberry and some assorted Scandinavian berries which I don't know the names of but recognise when I taste them. Cloudberries? Yeah, loads of that anyway. That's set on a slightly sticky caramel base which means my biggest criticism is the sweetness. A balancing dry roast would really have helped the drinkability. But I guess, at the strength, this one isn't intended for drinking more than one or two. I certainly wouldn't have enjoyed doing so. One was fine.

Finally, Ya Bard. That's the name of Stratford's ultra-hip, high-end, beer-shop-with-taps, specialising in all the colourful 440ml cans full of weird barely-beer concoctions. Such venues tend to be sparse and spacious; bare wood, bare lightbulbs and chicken wire. This one is on the carpeted ground floor of what appears to be an 18th century townhouse, stretching from the front room to the rear passageway where a compact bar serves five draught beers, leading out to a tiny back garden. Punters stand about awkwardly throughout, making the place feel like a poorly-planned house party.

Strawberry & Rhubarb New York Cheesecake is the sort of thing that passes for beer here. This one is from Edinburgh's Vault City and is one of those that claim to be sour but are no such thing. To its credit, the murky orange-pink offering has a very real strawberry character, not an ersatz flavouring. The cheese is represented by a softly sweet Petit Filou dairy yoghurt effect. And there's even a crunch of biscuit grain to serve as a base. So full marks for being like a cheesecake; none for being like a beer. It could have been a lot worse, though.

If it's not novelty fruit beers these days, it's double IPA. Pipeline Brewing is all the way down in Cornwall, and they had shipped up some Nectaron Star, an 8% ABV hazy job showcasing one of the current most fashionable New Zealand hop varieties. Or it's supposed to be anyway. To me, this was just another of the usual: smelling of garlic and grit, the flavour packed with vanilla and spring onion. Nectaron is meant to provide pineapple and passionfruit but there was nothing tropical about this mucky pup. It's hazeboi fan service and no more than that.

That's all I had time for in Stratford, but of course one does not simply arrive there from Dublin, or at least I didn't. My journey to and from it went via Birmingham, with a few beers on the way through which I'll cover in the next post.