beer – Steve's Blog

You Wensum, you losesum

Norwich might not sound like an obvious destination for a weekend away from Cheltenham as it’s not the easiest place to get to but it is a trip worth doing if you like Real Ale ( or “Craft” beers for that matter ).

We left Cheltenham on the Friday morning of Race Week and we decided to head out of town up the A40 towards Oxford, which at least meant we were going against the mad flow of traffic which was tailing back over a mile even at 10am.

The satnav decided that the fastest route was down to London and then back up again which seemed a little mad so with some minor tweaking we managed to persuade it otherwise and so we found ourselves in Woburn at lunch time. Woburn has decided that offering a large free car park is a sensible way to persuade people to stop and have a look round, and it obviously works as there were a lot of people wandering around.

We had lunch in the Caprioli tea rooms which was very enjoyable, before getting back in the car and continuing across country to Norwich.

We were staying in the Premier Inn right in the centre of city on Duke Street, which worked extremely well for exploring the city and its many and varied pubs, and when I say many I mean a serious number : the 2015 City of Ale celebration involves 50 pubs and that is only some of the real ale pubs in the city.

Be Er - at The Rose Inn — Be Er – at The Rose Inn

Looking at that list shows that over the weekend we barely scratched the surface of what the city has to offer in terms of pubs and beers. But what was as equally astounding was the fact that pubs selling more than 6 real ales were quite common and some had an extremely impressive range – Fat Cat (12 hand pumps plus gravity), The Duke of Wellington had over 20 beers on hand pump and on gravity and over the course of the weekend none of us had a pint of beer that wasn’t in extremely good condition. Throw in some Bar Billiards at The Kings Head and The White Lion and an excellent curry at Spice Paradise and you have the makings of a good weekend.

But there is more to Norwich than beer – it has a lot of history too and on Saturday morning we went for a long walk which involved doing a large portion of the Riverside walk which mixes the new riverside development ( the ‘Riverside Quarter’ ) near the Novi Sad Friendship bridge ¹

with the old further up river near Pulls Ferry, where a stream used to leave the river and was used to transport stone used in the construction of the cathedral, and Cow Tower which got it’s name because they used to catapult cows from it ²

There is, of course, also Mustard and the Coleman’s shop and museum in The Royal Arcade is well worth the visit and you can even try a variety of mustards before buying them.

Actually Norwich has several museums and Stranger’s Hall is a fascinating building and well worth a visit – but check the opening times as the website and the museum seemed to have different ideas on just when they were open.

The main entrance to Stranger's Hall {the door at the lower level is the tradesman's entrance) — The main entrance to Stranger’s Hall {the door at the lower level is the tradesman’s entrance)

But we couldn’t spend all the weekend in pubs drinking so on Sunday Morning we went over to Great Yarmouth and went for a walk along beach – it was extremely bracing.

I'm sure it doesn't look as bleak when the sun is shining — I’m sure it doesn’t look as bleak when the sun is shining

A pleasant weekend

Well that was a quite enjoyable and pleasant weekend. I picked Nick up just before 7pm on Friday and we loaded the new fridge into the back of the car and headed off to the boat. The roads were strangely quiet and we got to the boat at about 8:20. We plugged in the power line and I battled with the central heating but eventually got it lit and we headed off to the pub for a couple of beers and to discuss the plan of action for Saturday morning.

Saturday we got up, got the engine started and went up to the winding hole by Betton Mill and turned and pulled onto the water point. Whilst Nick got the water hose out I wandered over to the boat yard and arranged a pump out and a new gas cylinder. Then I wandered back to the car and drove it to the bridge and we unloaded the fridge. I then took the car back to the marina and walked back and we got the fridge into the boat, and yes we did measure it first to make sure it would not only fit through the front door but that it would also fit in the kitchen

We turned the boat again and got it pumped out, and being the first pump-out of the season it was a bit rank. Then we turned the boat again and headed back to the moorings where Neil turned up just as we manoeuvred the boat back into the mooring. We had a coffee and we powered the fridge up and then Jon turned up and we headed out to the pub. We had a very relaxing time and we did quite a few pubs, including two we had never done before before heading for a curry at The Jaipur. Then a few couple more beers and a couple of games of pool and back to the boat. When we got back to the boat the inverter was beeping at us and the lights were a bit dim but the fridge was still cold. We powered up the battery charger and put the fridge onto the land line. The whole idea of doing what we did was to see how long the batteries could support the fridge but we need to do some more tests to see how long it lasts when the fridge is already cold. I do have to say however that the chiller blocks from the cool box were still frozen solid on Sunday morning so it had obviously worked quite well. Nick and I now have some ideas on what we need to do for the fridge to make running it easy and we are also going to pick up an external fridge thermometer so we can see just how cold it is getting/staying when its running on batteries.

The next job is to get on the boat and remove the gas fridge and its piping and ft the new fridge into the old place. The new fridge is quite a lot bigger than the old one which is not a bad thing because we did sometimes find that things got a little tight in there at times.

It’s that time of year again

A few years ago now four of us decided that we’d get to together for a weekend of chatting and drinking. Now as all of us are married its awkward but Nick and I had an idea. We have a boat so why not go to the boat and do it there.

For a couple of years we did it at Upton upon Severn when the boat was moored at the marina there. However we got a bit bored with the River Severn, the scenery is not particularily exciting and really apart from Worcester or Gloucester or Tewkesbury there isn’t really anywhere to go for a weekend. Add to that the lack of moorings on the river and its habit of flooding and you can understand why we moved it. We headed north a couple of years ago, and boy are we glad we did because we got out of Upton before it flooded. Although I think we will all miss the really good pubs and Pundit’s Indian Restaurant.

So the boat is now moored at Market Drayton and this coming weekend we’re going there for our second Market Drayton Pub Crawl. Nick and I are heading up on Friday night and on Saturday morning we’re taking the boat out for a quick run and a pumpout and a new gas bottle and refilling its water tank. We’ve also got a new fridge which we want to check will work with the Batteries and inverter set up we currently have. Then round about opening time Neil and Jon will be joining us and we’ll probably head off to The Talbot for a couple of beers and lunch (they did very good pies last year) and then’ll we’ll wander off into town, probably spending some time at the Red Lion which does a very good pint of Salopian Shropshire Gold.

We’ll fit a curry into the evening somewhere and wander back to the boat for coffee and more chat before collapsing into bed.

Sunday morning will be lazy before a breakfasty brunchy thing and then we’ll all head off home.

Worcester

We had a good day in Worcester yesterday. As it was quite some time since the Gloucester pub Crawl we’d decided that we needed to do another pub crawl because they’re such good fun. We were supposed to be going to Bristol but the train service was a complete mess and so we went to Worcester instead.

Worcester proved to be quite a good choice for a pub crawl. Paul has picked a set of pubs but we threw him off the rails from the start by finding a pub that he didn’t have on his list. But we got back onto his plan after that pub and he’d managed to find a good set. We made a couple of adjustments and found another pub that he didn’t have on his list which did 4 very good beers including a “custom” brew from Mavern Hills.

We decided to head back to Cheltenham and have a curry and when we got to Shrub Hill we found that the train we wanted didn’t actually exist on the printed timetable and it had been cancelled anyway. But they did put us in a minbus which dropped us as the top end of the Gloucester Road back in Cheltenham. We headed off to Maheks for a curry but it was closed so we went to the Everest where we had to wait for a while but the food was good. It says something about the state of the world when the waitress in the Indian Restaurant is Polish!

After that Nick and I headed home and stuck our heads in at The Sudeley Arms where we had problems getting a beer because they were “closed” at 10:50. It seems the Landlord and the Brewery are not seeing eye to eye on something. So it may be that this pub closes again only a few weeks after re-opening which would be a great shame

A good time was had by all

Despite the weather (which actually was remarkably good) we had an excellent time at the 3rd Annual Cheltenham Beer Festival which was raising money for the Cheltenham Branch of The Samaritans.

Last years event raised £6000 which is pretty impressive and helps keep The Samaritans running providing a service that really does help save peoples lives.

Jon, Neil, Nick and I walked from Prestbury/Oakley and we got there just about at Noon.

I had a good chat with Sara (who I knew from my days in Parasoc) who does work for the Samaritans and she recommended a couple of beers that she said were well worth trying.

We grabbed a small gazebo and some chairs and headed to the bar. The range was pretty impressive and I even tried the Battledown Brewery’s “4 Kings” – which has an ABV of a mere 7.1%. Oddly enough even though it smelt very much like a barley wine it was remarkably thin.

The food was, as ever, good: good solid beef burgers, a pig roast and of course sausages in a bun (“Get em whilst their hot, inna bun with Onions!”)

Michael, Simon, Paul and Richard joined us a bit later – Richard had just flown back from Turkey that morning and was looking forward to drinking some proper beer.

We left mid evening – the beer was running out and we were all feeling a bit hungry. So we walked back into town, grabbed a pint at The Bell and then headed to Maheks for a curry. Maheks is usually very good but the service on Saturday night was extremely slow. The place wasn’t busy but it took nearly 2 hours for 7 of us to have starters and a main course (and even when the main course arrived it took over 5 minutes for them to get the last of our naan breads onto the table).

So we’re all looking forward to next summers event and they may even be planning one for the middle of winter!!

Life, and stuff

Well this weekend is the Friends of Cheltenham Samaritans beer festival. This is their third annual beer festival and if the other two were anything to go by then this too will be a great day out and with a very worthy cause. I’ve never needed the Samaritans myself because I’ve had people I’ve been able to talk to but its got close a couple of times.

So we will be there just after noon on Saturday and we will, what ever the weather throws at us, have a great time drinking good beer in good company.

I’ve still not uploaded any photos from Maine to my Flickr account. I guess I need to upgrade to pro as I’m still on the free account and I need to do some serious re-organisation and categorisation of my photos.

Kathy got a phone call on Monday night saying that Jen had been in a car accident. The news made the Kennebec Journal They flew her to Bangor as Augusta doesn’t have facilities to land a helecopter. In the UK the Air ambulance doesn’t care about landing pads – they’ll use car parks and playing fields as temporary landing pads. She had exploratory surgery on Tuesday as she said she had pelvic pain and her pelvis is cracked in two places. She is in a lot a pain and we’re waiting to hear if they will be able to move her nearer to home as Bangor is quite a way from Waterville (where she lives) and Augusta where her grandmother lives.

Here are some photos of her car. We all think that two cracks in her pelvis is a very lucky escape. The maroon car is the car that hit hers.

So its been rather a stressful week for Kathy who has spent most of her evenings on the phone talking to people and keeping people up to date with what is going on.

Typical!

I said I’d write more about Maine when i got home.

That was a month ago. I’ve not even gone through the 600+ photos I took and worked out which ones to upload to Flickr so I can include them in here.

So what have I been up to?

Well I’ve upgraded WPMU that this site uses and debugged someones WPMU plugin to get it to work with subdirectories.

I’ve also been recoding the Canalplan tagging code so that it works properly as a plug in without having to edit core WPMU files. Also I had to recode some of it to cope with the Global Tags plugin because it lost track of the blog it should have been pulling the information from. This means that Global Tags that pull back mapped / logged entries actually work and display the summary information and / or the map rather than blank spaces.

It was my birthday yesterday… 42! Good God. It hardly feels like yesterday when we were doing the Gloucester Road Pub crawl for my 30th birthday and I remember half the people wanting to watch England crash out of the Euro competition… which they did!

Beer and Boats and the BSS, Part Two

Well yesterday was a most excellent and enjoyable day. Met Nick at the bottom of the road and we headed off to the Cheltenham Friends of the Samaritans beer festival at the Old Patesians Rugby Club. They had about 26 beers, mainly from local breweries, and a pig roast for when you got hungry. We got there at about 12:15 and left at about 9:30pm and had worked our way through a significant majority of the beers (half pints only of course).

We stopped for a curry on the way home at the Indus (where NONE of us had the Prawn on Puri ((Many, Many moons ago a group of us went to the Indus for a meal and when we were placing the order for our starters the waiter kept trying to persuade each of us to change our decision and order the Prawn on Puri.. “The Prawn on Puri is very good”, “May I recommend the Prawn on Puri, Sir” and so on. None of us took his suggestion up and its now become a matter of rote that someone has to suggest ordering the Prawn on Puri, knowing that no-one actually will)) ) and it was just after midnight when I got home.

This morning I left the house just after 8:30am and picked up Nick and we headed off to the boat to fix the gas pipe and a couple of other things for the BSS.

Getting to Norbury wharf is quite easy but the last mile or so is down a single track road with only a few passing places. When we got there the car park was full so we ended up parking in the rather large, pub car park.

Mintball was moored right up by Norbury Wharf’s dry dock, which is actually the first lock on the Newport branch of the Shropshire Union which meant it was a bit of a walk with power tools and other bits and bobs.

The original idea we had for fixing down the gas pipe was to slip clips over it and then bolt them down through the wooden trunking that the gas pipe lies in. This turned out to be totally impossible to do for various reasons – so we ended up lifting the pipe out of the tray and fixing it using some 3/8 inch saddle clips (which we found in the Norbury Wharf Chandelery) on the wall right under the tray/lining overhang. So you can’t actually see the pipe unless you are lying in the bunks but at the same time it is not “hidden” and its properly supported. It also allowed us to tidy up the feed line to the fridge so its now neater than its ever been.

We also cleaned the burner in the oven – after 21 years its getting a bit ropey but hopefully it will get us through this BSS and we can then plan replacing it, and the rest of the kitchen, in the next couple of years.

Beer and Boats and the BSS

Well its going to be a bit of a mad weekend.

On Saturday Nick, myself and a few friends are off to the ‘Second’ Cheltenham Beer Festival’ which is run by the Friends of the Samaritans as a way of raising funds. Running from 12 noon on Saturday till 11pm they are promising to have 26 beers, all from local breweries, some perry and cider, and a pig roast. Last year it was a great event – perfect weather and two rugby games to watch too (that’s what happens when you hold your event at a rugby ground) along with a giant Jenga set, Chess and activities like face painting for the kids.

Then on Sunday (assuming we are capable) we are off back to the boat to fix up a few problems that meant it failed it’s BSS check.

For those who don’t know about the BSS (Boat Safety Scheme) it is a set of safety checks invented by a bunch of safety-fascists which if your boat doesn’t pass then its not going to get a certificate and thus can’t get a licence. Unlike the MOT, which has lots of local garages involved, BSS examiners are like hens teeth and have a matching price tag.

I could go on here about the fact that the BSS is a shifting target which retrospectively applies changes, that it is inconsistent, and sometimes flies in the face of logic..a few years ago they decided that rigid push fit plastic spill rails on diesel engines were not safe and they had to be replaced with metal pipes. Bit award as the return fittings on some new Ford engines were for push fit pipes and that there were a lot of cars driving around, apparently perfectly safely, at 70mph with push fit hoses… but NO.. that’s not safe in a boat at 3-4mph

They did eventually back down on that one.. but it’s just one example of how disconnected the BSS can be from reality. In the past couple of years they have slackened off on a lot of things and there is a much more “common sense” style approach to it than there used to be but there are still places that give off that “We are saying you have to do this, not because it sensible, but because we can” and in places you get the feeling that the requirement has been pushed by people who have a vested interest in boats failing.

To be fair the people in the BSS office are excellent and have been really helpful in helping us resolve a couple of problems we have had.

The Day after the

Well it has to be said that yesterday was a good day… Due to a slight miscalculation on timings Nick and I nearly missed the train but after a mad dash we made it to the station… just to find that the train was late. Richard turned up as did Mike and Paul and, after some problems with tickets, got on the train to Gloucester.

We had planned to start at “The Fountain” but we actually decided that as we were walking past the “New Inn” we might as well start there. They had 8 Real Ales on and the Theakstons Mild was extremely quaffable and enjoyable. The “New Inn” of course is a complete misnomer in that it dates from the 15th Century. Unlike a lot of buildings in Gloucester a lot of the structure of the New Inn retains, if not its original form, a close approximation to it.

After that we took a gentle walk down to “The Linden Tree” – a Wadworth Pub that has 4 Wadworth’s Ales and 4 guest Ales. We decided to have lunch here and it was extremely good value. Its a bit of a hike from town but more than worth it.

After lunch we were going to head back into town via “The Nelson”, but it was closed, so we stuck our head in at “The Whitesmiths” which is an Arkells pub and has some very impressive 17th Century wood work visible inside their “new” extension.

After a refreshing pint of Moonlight we continued the walk back into town and called in at Cafe Rene. Sitting outside in the shade in the Marleone the name “Cafe Rene” almost seems to fit as there was a distinctly European feel to the setting, as the following photo hopefully shows:

Outside Cafe Rene

From Cafe Rene it was an easy walk back to the Cross where the four “Gate” streets meet and down Westgate street to “The Pig In The City“. Obviously the PITC was refurbished a few years ago to make it “trendy”. Its now aged and slightly worn which makes it actually feel more pub like and less “showroom”. After a quick pint there it was a short dash across the road to the Dick Whittington,

The Front of The Dick Whittington

which despite its rather Georgian front is, like so many other buildings, a Georgian front on an older Tudor Building. We sat in the beer garden which is tucked away down the side of the pub behind the church. As the sign indicates the pub was serving Hook Norton Ales.

The final call of the day was The Fountain where we had a couple before heading back to the railway station and Cheltenham.

All of these pubs (but especially The Whitesmiths) are within easy reach of Gloucester Docks