Innominate - EasterCon Monday

We started the morning doing our bit to help take down the art displays. Fangorn was there packing his paintings away - he did covers for the Redwall series, and had the one with the badger and hawk on display over the weekend.

The final day of panels at the Con began with the intersection of two very different interests - SF and pub signs. There was quite a bit of trouble on the technical front to start with - horrendous howls from the electronics, and difficulties with the slide show - but eventually we could see the pub signs that Arthur Chappell was talking about, starting with one from a pub called the Vulcan, showing the god Vulcan, a Vulcan bomber and Mr Spock (positioned so it looked as if the god Vulcan was hitting him with his blacksmith's hammer). The talk also covered famous pubs connected with SF writers, like the Eagle and Child which was CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein's local watering hole, and fictional pub signs like the Slaughtered Lamb from American Werewolf in London and some of the pub signs from the Simon Pegg World's End pub crawl.
We went on from there to the Travelling in SFF panel - space ships, portals, quests, and so on.
And finally it was the Closing Ceremony, where the guests of honour said what a wonderful time they'd had, and Pat Cadigan thanked the Con goers for a wonderful and uplifting weekend.
And the Committee handed over the reins to the FollyCon committee. Next year in Harrowgate!

We didn't have to hurry away, as we decided to stay for an extra night. Our plan was to beat the post-Con blues by doing something completely different for the last afternoon and evening, so we took the train into Birmingham New Street. Back in the 1980s, I went to Star Trek Cons at the Metropole and the Grand. The Grand is no longer a hotel, though I think it may be re-opening soon, but part of the space is now taken up with a new wine bar called The Alchemist. I'd looked it up online, and it seemed to be Steampunk themed, so we started out by going to have a look. The directions I got from Google map took us out of the wrong side of the station, so we had to climb the hill to the main square, so we basically ignored them after that and headed for the cathedral, which I knew was close by. The Alchemist was busy, and the cocktails looked interesting - but there was no Steampunk theming that we could see, so we moved on to a pub called The Wellington which the Young Man had discovered while doing training in Birmingham.
This was more like it - a Victorian style pub with about a dozen hand pumps on the bar, each of them serving an interesting, and often local, beer. The Thoughtless stout was very strong, but very tasty.
Then we headed back down the hill to the BrewDog pub, where we had dinner, with more excellent beer. It was the perfect way to wind down, and we were enjoying the music there, too.
So we missed the Dead Dog Party in the hotel in favour of an early night.

We had a fantastic weekend, and the scrambled eggs at breakfast every morning were delicious, and the girl who cleaned our room was lovely - she'd never seen anything quite like the Convention before - and we met lots of interesting and lovely people, and just had a great time!

What I did on my Holidays

I spent the Easter weekend at Dysprosium, the 66th EasterCon, which this year was held at the Park Inn, Heathrow.

I went down the day before the Con, to stay with my Young Man, who lives in the Great Metropolis. I was very lucky - the train ticket cost £10.50 when I booked it, including a reserved seat from Birmingham New Street to London Euston. And everything went smoothly.
The railway line passes lots of canals, and a lovely little motte and bailey castle at Berkhampstead.

This is more or less the view from the train, taken from English Heritage.

Euston was a lot more packed than I remembered it - I used to go through there about twenty years ago - but when we got outside the sun was shining, and it was a short bus ride to Forbidden Planet. I was very pleased to get the next installment of the Green Arrow story I first read in the 1980s, and the new Ms Marvel - but no Captain Marvel figure, which was disappointing.
The Young Man took me to a Craft Beer pub nearby - on the way we passed the oldest pub in London, the White Hart, and a little later we met another friend at the Angel, a wonderful Victorian pub covered in green tiles, with an open fire. The beer was Samuel Smiths. She was on her way to an evening Vampire Group meeting, and had come into the centre of the city early to meet us.
So then it was round the corner to Patisserie Valerie. They have a very nice savoury menu - the Young Man had eggs Benedict and Becky had Croque Monsieur - but I was there for cake! Which made me very happy. The Peter Grant table (as mentioned in Ben Aaronovitch's novel Moon Over Soho) was taken, so we sat upstairs.
And then it was back to the Young Man's flat for the most gorgeous venison, which had been slowly cooking all day, and a documentary about the making of the new Thunderbirds series. Weta, in New Zealand, are doing the model work, and the head of Weta is a big Thunderbirds fan, so it was looking pretty good - and they have the original Parker back! I watched all the Gerry Anderson puppet shows back in the 60s, just at the right age for them to imprint themselves on my brain, and I was so hoping that the reboot would be done right. The first episode was broadcast on Saturday at 5pm, when we were at the Con....

Enjoying Witch Prime Beer

I've been supporting the makers of The Minister of Chance audio play (available on iTunes) in their efforts to make the series into a film. One of the ways they are raising money is to ask for sponsorship from local firms in Cheshire, where they will be doing the filming - there is already a 10 minute Prologue, filmed at the beautiful Little Moreton Hall. One of the firms sponsoring the film is Woodlands Brewery, and they have brewed a special beer in honour of one of the characters in the Minister of Chance - the wicked Witch Prime, ruler of the technologically advanced but superstitious country of Sezuan, which invades scientific but less technological Tanto, where most of the action takes place. In the audio play, the Witch Prime is played with gusto by Sylvester McCoy.
So I sent off for some of the beer.
I had hoped it would come before I went to London for LonCon, so I could share a bottle with my Young Man, but it didn't arrive. It hadn't arrived by the time I came back, either, so I sent a slightly concerned email to the brewery. When they got back to me, they told me that the beer had got broken in transit, and the courier hadn't told them - so a new case was on the way, along with an extra case to make up for any inconvenience!
I am now awash with beer!
Fortunately, it is very nice beer, light and hoppy, and made with pure Cheshire spring water and magic, as the label says.
Believe! As the Witch Prime himself says (or maybe "Keep Calm and Drink More Woodlands Beer").

Shakespeare's Local by Pete Brown

I love Southwark. It's got the Borough Market under the railway viaducts, and Southwark Cathedral, and the Globe (I once went with my Young Man, to be a groundling when As You Like It was on, which was brilliant fun, but my back needed a day to recover from all the standing!) - and it has The George, the last coaching inn left standing along the Borough High Street.
When I next go to Southwark, I will be going with Shakespeare's Local in my hand. Pete Brown has been all over the world looking at different pub cultures, and taken a barrel of IPA from Burton-upon-Trent to India, but this time he's concentrated on one historic building in one small area, and brought out everything that's fascinating about it.
At the time when London Bridge was the only way into the city from that side of the river (apart from the watermen's boats - and the watermen successfully prevented another bridge being built for centuries) the George was only one of a whole row of inns. It wasn't the most famous, or the biggest, or the best, but it is the only one left standing. Originally it stood alongside inns such as The Tabard, where Chaucer's pilgrims gathered to start their journey to Canterbury, and The White Hart, immortalised by Dickens in the Pickwick Papers.
London Bridge was also the place where traitors' heads were displayed on spikes, on the gatehouse to the bridge (and is now the area where the Clink prison and the London Dungeon pull in the tourists).
The George itself seems to be quite a large pub at first glance, but in its glory days during the coaching era it was five times bigger. Not far away is Vinopolis, a huge wine merchants - I went in there with my Young Man once to gaze in amazement at the largest selection of whiskeys either of us had ever seen - and Vinopolis is on the site of the Anchor Brewery, which once covered 12 acres!
The George is now owned by the National Trust, and run by Greene King, and it's a wonderful place for a drink in an area which has several very fine pubs, especially on a fine summer day when you can sit outside in the inn yard. It doesn't take much imagination to see the galleried building that was once on the other side of the inn yard, and the stables beyond (and there were hop warehouses, too).
Pete Brown has written other beer related books before this: Man Walks Into a Pub, Three Sheets to the Wind and Hops and Glory. I very rarely buy new books, living as I do in a town full of second hand books, but I bought all of these, and I highly recommend them all.

Beer to Drink While Watching Dr Who

There's a quite interesting post on Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog ( www.boakandbailey.com) on suitable beers to choose to drink while watching the 50th Anniversary episode of Doctor Who - time travelling beers, Tennant's Lager, and so on.

I settled down with a bottle of Old Tom with Chocolate, from Robinsons, which I have been saving for a special occasion - and wow, was this a special occasion!
(and maybe when the Doctor finds Gallifrey and re-boots it, the Time Lords will give him another cycle of regenerations, to last him a further fifty years of TV time).

I've also been enjoying An Adventure in Space and Time, which was unexpectedly sad (and with some wonderful shots of the Television Centre itself, which is now no longer used by the BBC - I think this was the last thing they did there before they moved out).

And one glorious extra treat was The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, where Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy tried to get into the Anniversary episode, with cameos from all sorts of people, including Ian McKellan and Peter Jackson on the set of the Hobbit, Sean Pertwee, Russell T Davies and Georgia Tennant. It's wonderful that so many people who have been associated with Doctor Who through the years have such a genuine affection for it.

Real Ale in Lincoln

After a long journey across country by train, when I got to Lincoln, I needed something to revive me!
Fortunately, my Young Man had already been researching the local hostelries, and led me to The Treaty of Commerce, close to the level crossing at the end of High Street.
I had forgotten that Lincoln was in the general area of the Bateman's brewery, but seeing the Bateman's name on the sign board of The Treaty of Commerce made me feel very happy. When I started to drink real ale back in Norwich, many years ago, the two breweries that I immediately took notice of were Bateman's and Adnams - and not just because one of them has a windmill as part of the brewery, and the other has its own lighthouse!
As the weekend wore on, we noticed lots of signs that this is a city with a good pub culture, and it's not only a stronghold of Batemans - there are Marstons pubs as well, and quite a few with CAMRA signs in their windows.
On the first evening of Steampunk Asylum, we had been told that people would be gathering at Widow Cullen's Well, which is also the meeting place of the local Steampunk society. This was when we found out just how steep Steep Hill really is! By the time we got to the doors of the pub, we were gasping - and definitely in need of a drink! Widow Cullen's Well is a Samuel Smith's pub, and the pints amazed us with their low prices. We tried the dark mild and the Imperial porter to start with, and followed it up with the (more expensive but still very reasonable) bottles of Oatmeal Stout and Chocolate Stout. The building itself is 14th century in origin, and there are exposed beams upstairs. We sat near a bay window which was obviously far later in date than the medieval tenements that had occupied the space originally, and looked across the narrow street outside - which had once been the Roman Via Principalis - the main road up to the Roman fort at the top of the hill. I reckon they wouldn't have been able to march more than four abreast - and there's no way any horse drawn carts could have made that climb, in any century.
The two main pubs that seemed to be used by the Steampunk community over the rest of the weekend were the Victoria at the western entrance to the castle, and the Lion and Snake by the Assembly Halls, both of which we spent time in. The food in the Lion and Snake was good pub grub, and the beer in both (the Lion and Snake is a Marstons pub) is excellent. The Victoria serves Batemans and several guest ales, and also does food. Both of them were good places to watch the world go by and marvel at the inventiveness of the costumes.

Those were the pubs we actually managed to visit, but there were others that we wished we had time to go into as well. The Magna Carta, on the square between the Castle and the Cathedral, for instance - another Marstons pub which was reputed to be one of the oldest in Lincoln (which means that the 14thC Widow Cullen's Well isn't one of the oldest in Lincoln!), and the Green Dragon, a stone building down near the river, which we saw from the windows of the taxi but never got close to.

A Pub Not to be Missed

A little while ago, I got a book called London Heritage Pubs, and amongst the top "Ten Pubs not to miss" was the Black Friar.
Last week, I finally made it there. We had a delicious meal, a mixed plate of nibbles to share, and a pleasant half of Adnams Fat Sprat (which they brew to support the Marine Conservation Society).
It's a long narrow building, which was once a corner on narrow streets - all gone now. We sat in the bar, which was impressive enough, with the frieze above the bar of cheery monks going about their business - but the Saloon was a marvel of marble and brass! There were little mottos attached to the pictures, such as "Tomorrow will be Friday" under a picture of the monks catching fish for their Friday meal, and "Don't Advertise it, Tell a Gossip".
The pub was almost lost, along with so much else in the redevelopments of the 1960s, and Sir John Betjeman the poet laureate was one of the famous people who campaigned to save it.
The reason for the name Black Friar is that there was a Priory of Dominican Friars, known as the Black Friars, in the area during the middle ages. Medieval Parliaments met there on occasion, and Henry VIII held his divorce hearing against Catherine of Aragon as a guest of the friars - and later dissolved the Priory along with all the other religious houses in Britain.

Great British Beer Festival

The main reason I went to London last week, rather than any other time, was to visit the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia.
Getting there was interesting. We went to Earl's Court, where there's a little branch line that goes to Olympia, only to be told on the station that no trains were running along that branch line (despite the major event being held there) so all those thirsty people with beery slogans on their tshirts had to get back on the Wimbledon tube for one stop, and then take the overland train to Olympia - where we found a tube train was in the station after all.
After that, though, it was plain sailing.

I estimated that I would be able to sample only about 1% of the 800+ beers, ciders, perrys and foreign beers on offer, so it's always important to choose carefully - and ask for a third of a pint at a time! I always start with Woodforde's - I learned to love Wherry when I lived in Norwich, so if possible that's always my first choice. This time, Nelson's Revenge was a very pleasant alternative. After that - well, these beers are not in the order I drank them!
We first discovered Umbel Magna at the Beer on the Wye beer festival in Hereford a few years ago, and have been looking out for it at beer festivals ever since. It was just as good as we remembered - a smooth, creamy porter infused with coriander.
On the same stand, I was delighted to see Uley Bitter. I have happy memories of visiting the brewery years ago with a party from CAMRA, and sitting in the vaulted cellar while the brewer played his accordion and we all sang. I seem to remember he doesn't like his beer to travel far - the furthest being the magnificent Fleece in Bretforton, which is owned now by the National Trust. The taste didn't disappoint - hoppy without being over the top, and a bit of fruitiness too.
In the Lancashire area, Moorhouse's Black Cat is an old favourite - I'm quite fond of milds when I can find them.
I was keen to try something from Hook Norton again, too, and Old Hooky was there - again, I have happy memories of visiting their brewery tap (the Pear Tree?) and the Rollright Stones on the same sunny afternoon. We went back to the Rollright Stones to see Mark Rylance's company perform The Tempest, the year that the Globe opened in Southwark.
Back to East Anglia now, for Adnams, and Ghost Ship - along with Woodforde's, Adnam's was one of the first breweries I became fond of when I lived in Norwich.
And how could I ignore a beer called Triple Chocoholic? It's brewed by Saltaire in Yorkshire, and has three dark malts in it, with cocoa, chocolate syrups and essence!
It's always nice to step outside the comfort zone and try a foreign beer, so we shared a bottle of Stones, from the States - it wasn't the one listed in the booklet, but I think it was Levitation.
Finally, there was a beer that my Young Man had told me I really had to try. It was only available at certain times in the day, and they would only serve thirds until it was gone - 5X from Greene King. There was a long queue. It's a 12% beer, and a beautifully complex taste.
To mop up all that beer (even in thirds) we had to eat, and the wild boar burgers from Inyama were delicious.
And then there were the other stalls to tempt us, so I also came away with a Seal of Rassilon keyring and a tshirt with a picture of Winnie the Pooh peering out of the Tardis (Whovians are everywhere now!). We also treated outselves to some of Martin's Jerked meats - partly because they are delicious and partly because Martin himself posts comments on the Living History Forum which I visit regularly - historical re-enactors should stick together!

It was a very satisfactory day out (and neither of us had hangovers in the morning).

And here's one of the most flamboyantly dressed people I saw on the day - he had matching Welsh flag knickers, too!

Hunting for Historic Pubs

There are few things nicer than sitting beside an open fire, with a glass of real ale in one hand and a good book in the other, in a historic pub.
In Hay-on-Wye, we are spoilt for choice. There's Kilverts - the bar area there looks quite different to the way it looked when I first came to Hay, but it has a constantly changing array of guest ales and an open fire. I usually spend an afternoon a week in there, while my washing is at the launderette - there's just time for an unhurried half and a chapter or so. The Blue Boar also scores highly on the real fire and real ale front, and so does the Rose and Crown. The Three Tuns has been extensively renovated after a fire, but it is one of the oldest buildings in Hay and the renovations were very sympathetic to the fabric of the building, as well as opening up areas that had never been on public view before (there's an area upstairs between the beams that used to be Lucy's bathroom - Lucy being the old landlady who ran it for many years before the fire). The Black Lion is more orientated towards food, but the building is very fine. I was once taken down into the cellar to look at their medieval flooring, and one of their guest rooms is known as the Cromwell Room, from a story that Cromwell once stayed there.

When we last went to Manchester, we visited the Shambles, or the Old Wellington - a building that was lifted four feet back in the 1970s to fit in with the design of the new Arndale Centre, and more recently was shifted bodily to nestle beside the Cathedral after the IRA bomb that prompted extensive re-building. (I've met more than one Mancunian who cheered when that IRA bomb went off; I was one of them. The original Arndale Centre design was not well loved!)

When I go down to see my Young Man, in London, he tries to take me to pubs that he thinks are particularly special. In Southwark, it was the George, now the subject of Pete Brown's latest beer-related book, Shakespeare's Local. It's a magnificent building, which might indeed have been Shakespeare's local, as well as Dickens' local - and Chaucer's pilgrims set off from another inn just down the road.
I love Southwark - there's the Borough Market huddling under the railway arches, with an exceptionally fine beer stall and a small pub called the Rake which seems to be where small brewers from all over the country end up when they're in the capital. No real fire, but more real ale than you can shake a stick at, and a pleasant little garden area. Scenes from the Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang were filmed just outside the Clink prison, and there's the Cathedral, and the wine and whisky emporium - and the Globe, and the Golden Hind - and a sparkly pavement under a bridge that always makes me smile!

Wonderful as Southwark is, though (and there are other pubs we have visited there which are also rather fine), it's nice to venture out to other parts of London to see what's there.
So I was rather pleased to find a copy of London Heritage Pubs by Geoff Brandwood and Jane Jephcote, which is a beautifully illustrated tour of historic pubs in London. It was published by CAMRA, so there's an interest in the beers that are served in the pubs as well as the fabric of the buildings. And what fabric! The Young Man has mentioned taking me to the Black Friar at Blackfriars, but we haven't made it yet - the pictures of the interior in this book make me want to make the effort very soon!
There's polished wood, gleaming Victorian tiles, stained glass and ornate pub signs, beams and mirrors and wrought iron work.... It's going to take a long time to visit all of the pubs mentioned in the book - but there are worse ambitions in life!

Ancient Brewhouses

One of the blogs I follow is Zythophile, a blog about all sorts of beer.
I was also once an archaeologist - so I found his post on brewing Viking beer fascinating.
The structures involved have been known about for a long time, but they have always been interpreted as saunas or bath-houses before - which shows the importance of interpretation of finds! A wrong interpretation can completely skew ideas about the site or even an entire culture in some cases. These buildings were usually next to the drinking hall of a settlement or farm, and though it is well known that Vikings liked to be clean, it probably makes more sense to brew the ale next door to where you intend to drink it. The one in the picture on Zythophile's blog is in the Orkneys. It has a stone box with a hole in one side to light the fire, and the cauldron would have rested on top of the walls of it.
Merryn Dineley, the archaeologist, and her husband Graham, who is a craft brewer, have also been doing experimental archaeology on the subject, which is to say they actually brewed some beer, using the original equipment at Bressay Heritage Centre in Shetland! In this case, the stone trough was Bronze Age, and they got out a very drinkable ale, rather like a barley wine. They heated the mash with hot stones, as this one is built into the ground with no room underneath to light a fire.

Strangely, on the same day as I came across this story, I also found an archived post from Moore's Group Blog, which is an archaeological blog. In October 2007, they posted "Ale, brewing and fulach fiadh: Archaeology Ireland" which looks at Irish ancient monuments which consist of a horseshoe shaped mound and an associated trough. No-one was sure what they were for, apart from agreeing that water was heated in the troughs by putting hot rocks in. So they, too, did some experimental archaeology, after much research about brewing around Europe, and the discovery of a similar method of heating the wort which is still used in Finland for a traditional ale. Originally, the liquid would have fermented using wild yeast which is in the air - lambic beers in Belgium are still made by this method.
There's an interesting digression about magic wands, too - if you kept using the same stick to stir the brew, it made fermentation easier, because some of the yeast from last time was still on the stick.
They got a drinkable ale in three days, but pointed out that the hard work was all associated with processing the barley. They used the spent grain after the ale was brewed to bake bread and feed to the cattle. (When I was growing up, bread buns made with brewer's yeast were known as barm cakes.)
They also have a new post on brewing, including a story about St Brigid apparently making beer from bath water, for the 1st Feb this year.

Over 300 Beers!

This was the main reason I was in Manchester recently - the Winter Beer Festival, which is the last one they will be holding in Manchester. The next one is going to be in Derby, I think.
I say "in Manchester". The posters cheerfully said that the Sheridan Suite is only 15 minutes walk, or 5 minutes bus ride from the City up Oldham Road. It seemed like a lot longer! We needed a beer after that walk!
Once inside though, things couldn't have gone more smoothly. We had the booklet detailing the 300 beers, as well as foreign beers, cider and perry; we had the Festival glasses (I liked the way I always got a handled glass when I asked for a half while I was 'up North'), and we had lots of time. We'd also had a good meal at Bella Italia on Piccadilly Gardens before we started out.
I'd decided that I wanted to find as many Manchester beers as possible, or from that region, so I started with Pendle Witches Brew from Moorhouses, which was sweeter than I remembered. Moorhouses also do the excellent Black Cat, which I had later on. In the meantime, though, my resolve to drink only Lancastrian ales was broken when I saw the Adnams beer clip. I started grinning broadly when I saw that, not only was it Adnams, but the beer they had sent to the Festival was Adnams Old Ale!
A word of explanation may be in order here. When I lived in Norwich, I was introduced to the wonderful world of real ale through the beers from Adnams, Batemans, Woodfordes and other East Anglian breweries. It was actually on a trip to Southwold, where the brewery is (and it must be the only brewery to have a lighthouse on top of it!) that I discovered that they were stopping the brewing of their Old Ale. It was a commercial decision, to drop the least commercial of their beers, I imagine - and now it's back!
This made me very happy indeed.
What made both of us very happy was the Robinson's Old Tom (we only had a third of a pint of this potent brew - it's 8.5%), and we also sampled the Robinsons 1892, and the Unicorn. The unicorn is their logo, and featured on the side of the Festival glasses as they were the sponsors of the glasses.
Mark was also very pleased to see the Bushy's Oyster Stout, from the Isle of Man, and the Red Beacons, from Brecon. I didn't have any of that, because I knew I could get it locally later. I did try the Moonraker from JW Lees, though, another Manchester brewer, and another fondly remembered dark beer.
We also tried some beers that were new to us - after all, there's no point to going to a Beer Festival if you don't try anything new - so we enjoyed Sleepless from Red Willow, Old Slewfoot's Friend of the Devil (another full-bodied beer at 7.7%) and Isle of Skye's Cuillin Beast.
Mark is more of a drinker of foreign beers than I am, so he tried the German Wagner Dunkel and the American Flying Dog Wildeman Farmhouse IPA, both of which he enjoyed for their different styles.
By that time, we'd reached capacity, and it was time to take the bus back to the town centre (there was no way we were going to walk back!)
So we didn't get round to sampling any Joseph Holts or Marble or Hydes (more local brewers). Mark spotted the Nethergate Old Growler, but what he really wants to try again is their Umbel Magna, which he first sampled at the Hereford Beer Festival, Beer on the Wye. If I remember correctly, it's made with coriander!
It was nice to see a scatter of Welsh breweries, too, like Purple Moose and Conwy as well as the Brecon Brewing - and I'd had the Grimley's Brown Bombshell from Quantum over lunch the day before at the Joshua Brookes pub, which was very pleasant.
Worthingtons seems to be branching out too - the famous White Shield has been joined by Winter Shield, and I've heard that they have a new brewery to play with.
Everyone seemed cheerful (and the place was heaving with people), and though there were rather more men there than women, it felt a safe and friendly atmosphere for a woman to drink in - and the following morning, we woke up without a hangover!