Cask on the coast

Family business brought me to Bournemouth the other week. I knew nothing about the place and arrived with a single recommendation in my pocket, for what I was told is the English seaside town's one decent pub: The Goat & Tricycle.

It is indeed very decent, spacious but with cosy corners, a very friendly welcome and it certainly seems popular with the locals. It's a Butcombe house, so on the two occasions I visited, I drank beer from Butcombe and its sibling/parent, Liberation.

They're a fiercely traditional set, leaning heavily into bitter. The house beer is called The Hair of the Goat and is 3.8% ABV. It's quite dark with that: amber, stopping short of being brown. No twigginess is in evidence, I am happy to report, and instead I found lots of zesty sherbet or 1980s Refresher chews. There's also a certain amount of sweeter toffee, though the light citrus remains the predominant feature. Overall it's quite simple and has lots of classic English bitter character. The unchallenging nature makes it very well suited to its role as a house beer.

At the same strength there's Adam Henson's Rare Breed, which is still a bitter, but a slightly paler one. Sherbet features again and, perhaps unsurprisingly, there's none of the toffee character. There isn't actually a whole lot else to note. Some extra bitterness might have been appreciated, though at the same time its lack of sharp edges made it exceptionally suppable. The elaborate pumpclip had me expecting something more out-of-the-ordinary, but instead it's a very modest beauty, something that's rare enough in these days of brash and extreme flavours.

Some proper wallop would be nice next, and I thought I might get it from Brewer's Strength, the powerhouse bitter at 4.8% ABV. This one is properly brown, and yet isn't sweet, showing a foremost dry grain quality, intensifying as it goes, to become almost roast-driven by the end of the pint. While there's no crystal-malt caramel, it does deliver a hint of strawberry in the background. Just as it's getting interesting, however, it all tails off quickly, leaving a somewhat disappointing watery finish. Maybe it's just the expectation set by the name, but I had been hoping for something denser and warmer here. Once again, however, I can't criticise the beer's cleanness or drinkability.

Once the bitters are out of the way, we turn to the brewery's two nods at craft beer. Haka is branded to make it very clear what country its hops come from. It's a pale ale at 4.5% ABV, and although the precise details are scant, the brewery tells us it's centred on Nelson Sauvin. Not terribly centred, I have to say. I got very English floral flavours, rather than any of Nelson's fruit or minerality, as well as a vanilla or honeycomb sweet side from the malt. Perhaps the hops would have shone brighter had it been on keg, or if there were simply more of them. As-is, it didn't really do it for me, and I concluded it's more of an English golden ale than a Kiwi-style pale ale.

Presumably because of the time of year, there was a stout as well, called Lucky. This 4.8%-er is smooth and dense, fully black in the glass with an attractive gently roasted aroma. I should have expected that it would be no powerhouse in the flavour stakes, but what's there is good: hints of bittersweet treacle and dry charcoal. I could have done with lots more of that, and the whole thing is balanced to the point of being boring. Still, I fully appreciate that they went to the effort of brewing this workmanlike stout and put it on cask when they could probably have turned out yet another bitter instead. Given that it's flagged as a limited-edition small-batch brew, I think there was scope for it to be more daring, however.

To finish up here, Liberation IPA, which I assume came across the English Channel from Jersey. Liberation has owned Butcombe since 2014. It may be a different brewery but the ethos of making plain and drinkable beers seems to have carried across. This was the plainest of the lot, even though it's another of the stronger ones at 4.8% ABV. The flavour is very typically English, with a bucolic orange blossom sweet side rubbing up against a tang of zinc for bitterness. It was here that I concluded that this company is just not set up to provide the variety that my obsessive and nerdy palate expects. I'm sure that's more a me problem than a them problem.

My lodgings were out of town, at a large dining pub with B&B called The Inn in the Park, popular with walkers on the nearby beach. The lease-holding brewery here is Wadworth, and I availed of the opportunity to try their IPA, which is Henry's IPA. This is one of your classic low-strength English IPAs, like Greene King's or whatever Wells Eagle is called these days. The recent change in UK duty bands has seen it follow those beers down from 3.6% ABV to 3.4%. Not that it's watery or bland. There's a strong brown-sugar sweetness and lots of strong-tea tannins, working in combination to create yet another very simple and sinkable pint. I hoped there might be some interesting spices or minerals from Wadworth's yeast, but it's all very clean and uncomplex. Like the Butcombe bitters, it serves a purpose.

Wadworth also has a strong ale, properly (for England) strong at 5.8% ABV. It's called Old Timer and they claim it's a "classic winter warmer". We'll see about that. In fairness, poured from the bottle it's a deep garnet colour and smells unsurprisingly malt heavy. The texture doesn't go quite so hard, being substantially attenuated and not hugely different to that lightweight IPA. There's a little tannin, but it's mostly sweet, with a solid dose of caramel and some slightly more intense roast or muscovado sugar, leading to a dry finish. Warming? Not really. As a darkly strong bitter it does the job. I liked it, but can't deem it anything ahead of workmanlike.

Bournemouth has two JD Wetherspoons, but I confined my drinking to one of them, The Mary Shelley, taking its name from the author buried in the churchyard across the street. The promise of more dark beer is what got me through the door.

Old Smokey is a porter from Stonehenge Brewery and the name is a bit of a misnomer. It doesn't appear to be brewed with smoked malt and there's precious little of anything like that in evidence in its taste. Instead it's lightly chocolatey with hints of raisin and plum. The aroma is dry and nicely roasty and there's a certain savoury quality in with the flavour, but nothing I'd call actual smoke. Still, it's fine, and it was nice to be up in the dizzy heights of 5% ABV too.

Pouring alongside was Black Drop by Bowman Ales of Hampshire. We're down to 4.6% ABV for this stout, and it's a rather sweeter affair. The aroma is a mix of forest fruit and fudge, while the flavour goes big on caramel and milk chocolate. As such, it gets a bit cloying quite quickly. I can see how this works in a double act with the other, much drier, beer.

Also on the taps here was Glastonbury's Voodoo, being praised loudly by one of the regulars at the bar that Sunday afternoon. This is an IPA with Centennial and Simcoe, though following the Haka experience I wasn't getting my hopes up. And yet, it hit the hoppy spot rather nicely, offering a lime-like citric bitterness on a balancing malt base, featuring a dose of crystal malt which might have turned it into a twiggy brown bitter but instead gave it proper American West Coast vibes. The flavour is clean and the texture smooth, with an ABV of only 4.8%. This successfully draws on features of both American IPA and English bitter, harmonising them neatly. The guy at the bar was right.

That's a happy note on which to finish this post, but the weekend's draught wasn't fully cask-conditioned. Evil keg follows next.