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.

London's brewing

No visit to London would have been complete without at least a cursory look at its growing brewing renaissance. I had expected to see more from the likes of Brodie's, London Fields, Redemption, Sambrooks and so on, but I don't think I encountered any. Maybe I was just in the wrong sorts of pubs. Camden Town I saw plenty of, and most of the beer specialists had Kernel bottles.

It was to the latter that we headed on the morning of Day 3. Kernel, in a railway arch near Bermondsey Tube station, is normally only open to the public on Saturday mornings but Evin very kindly allowed us to drop in on them during the week. Forklift training was in progress when we arrived, and the guys took it in turns to show us the shiny new kit and taste a couple of beers with us. It's an impressive set-up, and even though only two beers had made it into the new fermenters so far the potential is enormous. Hopefully we'll be seeing more taps, and bottles further afield, in due course.

Having imposed long enough we headed for the day's second brewery, to the north east in Stratford. The gargantuan Westfield Stratford City shopping centre was heaving with Easter Tuesday shoppers, though only a handful had made it as far as the distant end of the ground floor, opposite the international railway station, where Tap East nestles in its alcove.

Though the brewkit was puffing away merrily, only one house beer was available: John Edwin Bitter. It's a clear orange-amber colour with a sharp and waxy bitterness at the front plus some of the grainy flavour I've come to associate with brewpub lager on the tail. It's decent as it goes, but not a great example of small-scale brewing. Not to someone who's just come from The Kernel, anyway.

The keg selection included Brewster's Chocolate Cyn and I just had a wary taste of this. I didn't order a full pint, however. Just not enough going on in it. Instead I opted for Thornbridge's Chiron, a Lucozade-coloured pale ale of 5% ABV, simple yet very drinkable, with some lovely chewy fruit candy flavours. Last tick of the session was Brooklyn Brewery's Dry Irish Stout, a title which manages one out of three. It's very sweet, giving off rich toffee aromas and with a flavour packed full of molasses plus a matching unctuous texture. There's atin' and drinkin' in it, it's lovely, but it's pretty far from tasting like an Irish stout.

We stayed in the east for the third and final brewery of the day, taking the Docklands Light Railway down to Greenwich to visit Meantime's new facility The Old Brewery. This place really acts as the cafeteria of the Naval College Museum, with all the atmosphere and charm of modern museum catering facilities everywhere. It's brightly lit, brightly decorated and has a continuous flow of patrons in and out between the adjoining museum. I sat opposite the gleaming three-tier brewkit, and even that began to annoy. Why would you put the mashtun and kettle at the bottom and then have to force wort up into the fermenters above? I understand from James's article here that the fermenters feed serving tanks in the basement, but it still makes no sense to me.

The room next door housed a slightly more atmospheric bar, though one totally lacking in customers. From here I procured a Bohemian Amber and a Yakima Red. As usual, Meantime get full marks for their gorgeous glassware.

The Amber was made on-site and was a very hazy red-brown lager. It tastes... wholesome: lots of sweet and porridgey grain, plus some almost Belgian dark candy sugar and more than a hint of butterscotch. All seeming a bit thrown-together for something produced on such a slick and shiny brewkit.

The Yakima Red was a much better proposition: clear as a bell, crisp, light and thirst-quenching. The hops add some gentle orange overtones, the bitterness building gradually to a slightly catty peak.

The early version of our schedule had us eating here, but we weren't inspired by the menu. With some time still left to play with, we had the opportunity for a bonus round.

The Parcel Yard is a brand-new Fuller's bar in King's Cross station, just above platform 9¾ (no, really). Not so much a yard, it's more a winding series of dimly-lit rooms laid out with sparse antiqueish furniture and railway bric-a-brac. Somewhere on the twittersphere I'd been promised the full range of Fuller's beer so marched excitedly to the bar to order a Black Cab Stout and a Past Masters XX, the former being new; the latter around for a while but not sold at home. And neither were sold here, either, unfortunately. No Mighty Atom either. I could have had my pick of the Vintages, or some Past Masters Double Stout, but that's not what I wanted. I glumly opted for a protest pint of Gales HSB. It's a fairly dry brown bitter, with some raisins and a kind of salty toffee flavour. Or maybe that was just the tang of disappointment.

What wasn't a disappointment was the food -- classic English pub fare done incredibly well. It's very unusual for us to order a two-course meal in the pub, but from this menu it had to be done. One scotch duck egg with pork crackling, warm beef salad, steak and ale pie and rump steak cheese burger later we were pleasantly replete and ready to roll back to Gatwick.

I broke my new-pubs-only rule with a pint of Rooster's Cogburn (geddit?) in the airside Wetherspoon: a bitingly refreshing blonde bitter. And then the plane home.

I had really hoped to delve into the heart of London's beer scene, new and old. Yet I feel I've barely skimmed the surface. There's so much more to explore.