May is Mild month, at least according to CAMRA. As a loyal member, I feel it's time for me to write something about Mild.
Newark
The very first Mild I drank was Hole's, well Courage (Newark) as it was then romantically called. 1973, it must have been. It was in the Castle and Falcon, a pub virtually in the yard of the Castle Brewery where the beer was brewed. It wasn't cask. Hole's was all bright. The beer was filtered (but not pasteurised, I think) and served through electric pumps. The glass cylinder type with a diaphragm that moved from side to side. Most beer, including cask, was served this way in the East Midlands at the time.
For the life of me, I can't remember what Hole's Mild was called. Definitely not Hole's Mild. (If anyone can remember, please let me know.) Even though not real, it wasn't so bad. Bright beer was a reasonable second-best to cask. It wasn't fizzy like top-pressure keg, though it was never as good as well-handled cask. At least you always got a full pint through electric pumps, as the cylinder was a measured half pint.
My first pint of cask Mild was a little later. Home Mild. In the early 1970's, of the 35 to 40 pubs in Newark, all but 6 were owned by Courage. This was the result of both Newark's breweries - Hole's and Warwick & Richardson - ending up in Courage's hands. Only one of their Newark pubs sold cask beer when I started drinking: Barnsley Bitter in the Wing Tavern. The town's only other source of real ale was the four Home Ale's pubs.
Home only brewed two draught beers: the prosaically-named Home Bitter and Home Mild. Both were slightly stronger than usual. Home Mild had an OG of 1036º, which made it one of the strongest in the country.
I won't claim Home Mild was the greatest beer on earth. But it did have two things going for it: it was cheap and reliable. Nottingham still had three decent-sized independents - Home, Shipstone and Hardy & Hanson (all now sadly closed) - that owned the majority of pubs in the city. Any coincidence that it also had some of the lowest beer prices in the country? I thinkl not. The Nottingham brewers helped drag down prices in the whole of the East Midlands. Home beers were always in good condition. I never had a duff pint until they built the new brewhouse (the cause of their demise).
I'm pretty sure I first tried Home Mild in the Newcastle Arms, close to Newark North Gate train station. It was a typical Home Ales pub. It had a public bar and a lounge, was fairly modern in style, but pretty down-to-earth. God knows what it's like or what it sells now. I lost interest when S & N took them over.
Leeds
One cask Mild. That was the choice I had. Until I started university at Leeds in 1975. My very first evening there I made two lasting friendships. The first was with Matt. The other with Tetley's Mild. Me and Matt were off down the pub shortly after meeting in our shared student flat. If I remember correctly, we hit the Pack Horse, Eldon and Fenton. All Tetley's pubs. Weren't all the pubs in Leeds? All three had pretty decent electric-pumped Tetley's Mild and Bitter. Already committed to Mild, my choice was easy.
Matt was along, too, the first time I tasted handpumped Teley's Mild. We went on a drinking expedition to Sheepscar. There wasn't a great deal in Sheepscar at the time. The back to backs had all been demolished and just the occasional lonely pub remained. The Sheepscar was one, surrounded by nothing but roads and waste ground. But it did have handpulled Tetley's. So did the magnificent Roscoe and Victoria. This was where Tetley's grand plan to replace beer engines with electric pumps ground to a halt. I can't remember the exact story, but I know they backed down in the face of opposition from one corner or another.
When I took my first sip, I understood why customers had wanted the handpulls retained. It tasted like a completely different beer - and a much better one - than the electric-pumped version. Not surprising really, as this was how Tetley's was made to be served - through a handpump with an economiser. The texture, head and flavour were all so much better. I was sold.
From that point on, I hunted down the remaining Tetley's pumps with beer engines. Most were in districts in the throes of demolition or that had just been rebuilt: Hunslet, Sheepscar, Cross Green. Early in 1977 I moved into a back to back in Cross Green. There were some great pubs and lots of great Tetley's Mild. The Cross Green Tavern, the Black Dog. It was like heaven.
But I was still doing a fair bit of my drinking on the other side of the city. With Simon, a friend from school in Newark also at Leeds University, I used to spend evenings in the Rising Sun and Cardigan Arms on Kirkstall Road. Both had electric pumps, but the beer was still pretty good. Then one day we entered the taproom of the Cardigan and saw a row of handpumps on the bar. The beer wasn't a disappointment. It's still the best Tetley's I've ever had. The Cardigan was one of the first pubs to go back to handpumps. A couple of years later, there were almost no electric pumps left.
London
After returning from Bordeaux in May 1979, me and Matt lived in London for a while. A whole bunch of us did. Simon, Tym, Piers. In the same house. It was incredibly cheap for London. Free, in fact, because we were squatting. An old terraced house on Swaton Road in Bromley-by-Bow. (That's the East End, if you're not acquainted with London.) In a row of houses overshadowed by tower blocks. A lovely area.
The only pub locally that sold Mild was a Whitbread pub in Chrisp street market. It was keg but I occasionally drank it, just because it was there. I never saw anyone else under 70 buy it. There wasn't a great deal of cask beer about. The Tenterden had the cask Bitter that Truman's had just introduced. It wasn't great, so I usually mixed it with bottled Guinness. Perhaps I was subconsciously trying to construct something like Mild.
Me and Matt had a job in a factory close to Old Street tube. It was a funny place. They made the boxes for anti-aircraft missiles and doors for warships. I spent most of my time sanding down missile boxes. Thirsty work. Not far away was a pretty decent real ale pub, The Bricklayers Arms. Me and Matt often us
Dear viewers. This isn’t a beer review, nor is it really beer news to most of you. Rather, it’s just me bragging, because today I scored a bottle of one of the most sought-after beers around - the Sam Adams Utopias 2007. Normally, I wouldn’t even try to find a bottle of this because a) it’s too high in abv(27%) to be legally sold in NC and b) it’s rare enough that finding a bottle in a store is nearly impossible. However, it seems that folks in North Dakota aren’t that interested in this brew, as I waltzed into Harry’s Bottle Shop and managed to score the last bottle in the company straight off the shelf. I won’t tell you what I paid, because some of you will think I’m stupid (probably correct), but suffice it to say that it was significantly cheaper than you’ll find it on eBay right now.
