Pub Crawl: An Early one in The Kent

Pub Crawl

The idea of this blog is quite simple - I am no beer aficionado and there are plenty of people out there who can write about beer much better than I could so .....

..... the idea of this blog is to write a bit about beer but, more than that, to have pages dedicated to good pubs, selling good beer, in locations across the world. How is that going to happen? Well, I live in Bedford and will write a page about the pubs I like in the town on page called 'Bedford Pub Crawl'. People will be invited to similarly write about pubs where they live under a similar heading eg Burton Pub Crawl, Sheffield Pub Crawl etc. What do you think? It will take a while to get going, I think, but if you would like to contribute why not message me?

Friday, 18 December 2015

An Early one in The Kent

I got to the pub and we were talking about the unseasonably warm weather and D starts rabbiting on about how he was trying to play football in the winter of '63 and the snow was so thick on the ground that when he kicked the ball it only went 3 yards and stopped dead and I told him that was fuck all to do with the snow that was because he was just shit at football and then the topic gets round to the pork pie hat and D says you know why they're called pork pie hats it's cause the happy residents of North London would see the Jewish gentlemen out and about and say look there they go in their pork pie hats and it takes a little while for everybody to get that and then I say well you know it's weird but when I put it on I feel a little bit Jewish and I won't tell you what he said cause it was a bit non-pc but him being an Arsenal supporter and all it might have gone something like this cause I say well I never paid for a round before I bought the fucking hat anyway .....

For the real history of the pork pie hat see Wikipedia or something ......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_pie_hat

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About Me

I was born in Somerset but spent my formative years in Burton on Trent - as such it would be almost criminal not to have had an interest in beer and my credentials extend to having drunk as much as I could as often as I could over the years - a lot less now than once might have been.
My step-father worked for Truman's on Derby Street (when it was still there) for many years and would often take me to work with him for the evening shift which comprised pulling a plough through the barley that had been spread out to dry across the vast floors of the maltings. I would sit on the back of the plough while he did his impression of a cart horse - plough horse? - and occasionally assist by pushing an extended paddle around the numerous pillars that stopped the numerous floors from cascading down on top of each other. Sometimes I would walk into the middle of a floor and wait in the dark until he turned on the lights and than scramble through the barley trying to catch the mice that were, until that point, enjoying an innocent feast.
It was what happened after he finished his labours that things got interesting. Having sweated his bollocks off turning the malt on up to 6 or 7 floors - I can't remember how many there actually were - it would be time for him to slake his thirst in the tap house.
Now, being of a young age, say 8 or 9, this place reeked of cigarette smoke, beer and stale farts. Not the most pleasant of places to go into, for sure, but it was an opportunity for me to try a taste for myself - a carefully measured quantity of the amber nectar - no irresponsible drinking here, not for the young at least. The employees, though, took full advantage of their daily allowance of, I don't know, four pints? Eight pints? before going home to beat their wives or whatever it was they did .....
Beer tasted different in those days, I think .... full of hoppy flavour it used to hit me like a smack in the mouth and make me contort my face in a mixture of pleasure and simultaneous disgust and wonder at how people could drink the stuff. The men hanging round would piss themselves laughing at the faces I pulled but that was it really. A love affair had started.