Peevishness

The first beer I ever bought was a pint of McEwan’s Best Scotch in The Beeswing at the bottom of Felling High Street, at some point in the late autumn or early winter of 1979 going towards 1980. I was 15. It cost 30p and was horrible. Ostensibly a dark mild, Scotch, as it was universally known, was freezing, fizzy dishwater. From that point onwards, I developed a taste for our local bitter; the garish, orange tinged, chemical soup that was Newcastle Exhibition, or Ex for short, meaning that I generally opted to drink in S&N pubs out of brand loyalty, though I did enjoy the, on reflection, far superior Stones whenever it was available.

My final visit to The Beeswing was probably in the late 80s, during my final period of residence in Felling, when on Sunday nights we’d do a 14-bar pub crawl, with a half in every establishment until we got to The Wheatsheaf for the compulsory lock-in.  Of those 14 pubs (The Bay Horse, The Greyhound, The Portland, The Victoria Jubilee, The Blue Bell, The Halfway House, The Royal Turf, The Mallard, The Mulberry, The British Queen, The Malting house, The Fox and The Wheatsheaf), only half a dozen survive. The Beeswing is the British HQ of a sinister Christian cult which makes the Sea Organisation seem like Songs of Praise.

Times change. The last beer I bought was a pint of Bass in the Tynemouth Lodge on Tuesday 14^th August. I am now 54. It cost £3.40 and was worth every penny; a dark, complex amalgam of floral notes and fragrant hints of the hydrogen sulphide Burton snatch. Delicious; undoubtedly it’s my favourite pint in my favourite bar. One social aspect of my drinking habits has remained constant; the need to have a local where I feel at home.

Undoubtedly, I have drunk far too much beer during the past 40 years. I have risked my physical and mental health, spent money I couldn’t really afford and got myself into situations that I ought to have avoided, not to mention suffering from innumerable debilitating hangovers and inflicting tornadoes of rancorous flatulence on my loved ones. However, I don’t really regret my hophead hedonism all that much, as the positive aspects of beer, pubs and general gregarious affability seem to have counterbalanced that. Despite hangovers, when they strike, ruining the next day to the extent I unable to function as a sentient human being, I still enjoy getting half cut, though no more than twice a week and never on consecutive evenings.  One of the reasons for my continuing enjoyment of beer is that I can’t recall a time when the variety of brews, standard of breweries and choice of pubs has been anywhere near as good as it is now, with the gaping chasm between great bars and crap ones growing by the week. To avoid wasting money, I simply don’t do chain pubs, other than a very occasional trip to my old local The Newton, where I drink San Miquel, as the wretched ale they suffer is invariably the kind of sweet, lifeless, malty slop that for too long has masqueraded as hand-pulled “Real Ale” in estate bars across the country. Times change, but times also stay the same.

Just after my 19^th birthday, I left Tyneside and moved to County Derry for university. Fairly predictably, Guinness became my tipple of choice. Most of the time it was of a uniform standard; balanced, creamy and satisfying, it knocked spots off the competing brews, though it was helped by being the only porter available until Murphy’s began selling in the north in my final year. Obviously this being the height of The Troubles, alcohol was segregated on sectarian lines like everything else in the Six Counties; Catholics drank fizzy Harp and the unspeakable Smithwicks, while Protestants had Bass, though a much different brew to the one I now partake of in The Lodge, or deeply unpalatable Tennents. Without doubt, the formative years of toilet training on Ex had prepared me for the catastrophic digestive side-effects of Guinness, though not for the change to my palette.  Three years in a BT postcode meant I lost much of my appetite for bitter beers, especially the burnt coffee maltiness of English Guinness. Moving to London after graduation, I found myself investigating the range of strong, continental lagers available on draft; Lowenbrau became a particular favourite.  When I began my post graduate studies in Leeds in 1987, I was happily able to change between Tetley Bitter, ubiquitous and on hand pull, and its stablemate Lowenbrau in The Fenton, Hyde Park, Original Oak or Sky Rack. It was a happy year.

Returning to Newcastle in 1988, the complexity of a pub-based social life in an evolving city would have been best mapped by a Venn diagram. Effectively there were 4 distinct types of pub; in the demotic corner, dull, functional S&N locals and brash, deafening, quasi-hysterical Bigg Market style disco bars, while in the aesthetic corner there were the more alternative establishments that tended to sell Real Ale and imported strong lagers to a soundtrack more akin to John Peel than MTV. The interesting curve ball in the Newcastle pub scene, then as now, were the range of Sir John Fitzgerald houses (Bridge Hotel, Crown Posada, Café Royal, Fitzgerald’s itself and my favourite city centre bar, The Bodega) that served outstanding pints in comfortable surroundings in the centre of town. Safe havens in a jungle of excess.

Basically, I sought to disentangle myself from the noisier, crappier bars, on account that the only safe things to drink were the various kinds of painfully unhelpful cooking lager, because there was so little taste and body associated with them, it was remarkably difficult to serve stuff that fizzed like Andrew’s Liver Salts badly. However, being a fanatical Newcastle United fan at the time, I was still forced to drink dross in Haymarket area pubs pre match on occasion, though I preferred the decent brews in The Hotspur or the safe cans of Red Stripe in The Trent House. My weekend habits became a routine; one night in The Old Fox and The Wheatsheaf, Big Lamp’s flagship south side bar, in Felling and the other in The Egypt Cottage and The Barley Mow at the top of the Quayside. Occasionally, we’d wander elsewhere in town; The Hotspur, The Trent or The Strawberry at the top end of town, or the Bridge and the Crown Posada at the bottom. There really weren’t many other good pubs to choose from, and so rather than the CAMRA guide, an awareness of ambience or proximity to gig venues became important. I always hated The Broken Doll mind you; every time I went in, I thought the place was about to fall down. And Slalom D was unspeakable.

When we moved to Spital Tongues, I said farewell to The Fox and The Wheatsheaf, embracing the gloriously down at heel Spital House, where Ex and Scotch retained a hold over the constituency and The Belle Grove, which was more of a student pub and concentrated on the dreary, generic Youngers hand-pulled stuff and Becks on draft . I had no real affection for either pub or these beers and, finding myself in Slovakia a few years later, I was able to embrace the full range of glorious Czech and underrated Slovak beers on offer. Rather surprisingly, exposure to such beer for 2 years did not finally force a breach between me and darker beers; instead I began to appreciate the importance of the Rheinheitsgebot laws. Now I’m not saying everything I drink these days is brewed in the prescribed purity style, but you’d not find me willingly guzzling Diageo or Anhauser Busch’s basic 4% liquor syrup, adorned with whatever malty and sulphite flavourings are required to show the difference between Hop House 13 and Guinness.

Despite a few years of unadventurous, local boozing on Stella or San Miguel in The Newton, I have found over the past decade and a half that I prefer my gigs to be intimate, my sporting events to be local and my pubs to be quiet, orderly, able to dispense high quality beers and full of middle class smartarses like me. I am a Real Ale but not so much a Craft Ale person. I don’t necessarily mind keg rather than cask beer, but I do draw the line at third rate Brown Ale style syrup served with lashings of fruit peel, like a gelatinous, melting Christmas cake. Give me a hoppy, floral bitter, in the old Kentish rather than Yorkshire style, where you’re drinking for taste and refreshment rather than simply to get battered. That said, I do admire those breweries, such as Loka Polly or Cloudwater, who can produce 8.5% DIPA’s that taste no stronger than a 3.8% session bitter, but still make your legs collapse and brain cave in after half a gallon.

One of the things I truly do love about beers and breweries these days are the sheer numbers of them you can come across. Of course economic Darwinism comes into play and many microbreweries fall by the wayside or get subsumed by other companies, but that’s part of the fun and the learning curve I guess. I am incredibly proud of my 23 year old son Ben for many different reasons, but his love, knowledge and support of the local beer scene in Newcastle and Leeds is truly captivating. He knows what, where, when and why to drink. At his age, I was more interested in collecting pubs rather than quality testing them.

Having just moved back to Newcastle after his MA, he is able to enjoy bars like The Bodega, Tilleys, Forth, Head of Steam, Split Chimp, Box Social, Bridge Hotel, Bridge Tavern and Crown Posada in the centre of town, then the Cluny, Ship, Cumberland, Tyne and Free Trade in the Ouseburn and the rapidly expanding brewery tap premises such as those for Brinkburn Brewery and Tyne Bank in Byker, Flash House in North Shields and soon-come Anarchy Brew in Walkergate, not to mention a disparate array of brilliant pubs such as: The Tynemouth Lodge, Left Luggage Room, Low Lights Tavern, Northumberland Hussar, Brandling Villa and many more. Here’s to all the local microbreweries producing magnificent beers: Almasty, Two By Two and Northern Alchemy to name but 3. If you don’t know any of these bars or brews, and this is by no means an extensive list, do some research and we’ll raise a glass at the Tynemouth Cricket Club Beer Festival between September 6^th and 8^th.

Cheers!