A cut above

We always get our beef fillet now from Country Cuts at Santon Bridge (notice Grockles - there is only one "t" it's NOT Stanton!!") The beef is especially good. We buy a whole fillet and trim it out, cut steaks to our specification and then Dave does his dry marinating bit.

Last week we had our first cause to mildly chastise Country Cuts for a poorer than normal fillet. Apparently the butcher was on holiday and Jason wasn't well. This week they excelled themselves with quality, delivering an excellent fillet so we thought the reasonable thing to do was share it with you.

Just look at the fat marbling, it might have been a lean summer for the pub trade with all the wet weather, but the cows must be doing alright feeding on the fell pasture overlooking Wasdale, the Best View in Britain!

A bit of light rain

It rained a little yesterday, just for a change.






The beer garden was full of water and the Irt at Holmrook got pretty high. See pics






We thought it would be a good idea to put some information on this blog about what beers we have on. A bit late in the year we know, we'll try harder next year.

Today we have:





Stout Tenacity 3.8%, it's a stout!! not as bitter as some and a bit lighter. Brewed here.


Old Faithful 4.0% - Tirrel Brewery.


Thirst Chestnut 4.0% - Keswick Brewery. The name probably say's it all.

Caption comp

We still like this one. We hope to get a really good one of the squirrel but Dave took this by accident. Captions please.

Getting blogged down

Dave has well and truly got into this blogging lark now. He's been getting more and more worked up about all sorts of issues relating to beer and pubs. He's spent so much time lately getting on his high horse about it that it's difficult to get him to do any real work.

It's a good job we've still got Razvan!

Anyway, Dave's beer blog is here. It's a bit heavy and discusses the various issues surrounding the beer and pub industry. If all you want to do is drink beer then you're best steering clear of it. If you are interested in some of the problems of the pub and beer industry and want to hear some of Dave's thoughts then have a look - but we've warned you.

Music

Some of you have mentioned about the apparent lack of any mention of music on our web site. Well we have been forced into the situation where paying for musical events is just not viable anymore.

We still have folk sing rounds, normally the second Saturday of the month. We will be having one this Saturday as our friend Ben is spending some time at the Youth Hostel up the road.

We are always interested in anybody who would like to play here, providing you don't need us to pay you any money, as we've got non.

As an aside, I don't want to get political here, but please consider one thing at the next election. The current government have laden so much bureaucracy on the pub industry that it has increased the small operators costs to the extent that things like live music are a problem.

We would advertise live music events and possibly it would make them work, but unfortunately we know that the local council would be likely to poke in and cause us problems over licencing if we did. This would all be in the name of public safety, you know because roots and folk music is sooo likely to cause rioting and all this real ale fueled disorder would be too much.

The problem is that I know the other side will not be any better after the next election. Governments seem to have only one function - make new legislation so they can justify spending the money they take off us.

Sorry about that, I'll have to watch out otherwise people are going to start thinking Dave's writing this blog as well.....

AS winter approaches

The mountains and trees are starting to look very autumnal, all browns, reds, yellows and golds. Our squirrel, or one of them, we've never seen more than one together but we hope there is more than one, is busy collecting acorns

All things considering, it's been a good year. We are starting to think that we might just have saved this ancient hostelry from failing by our determination and lateral thinking. The year has only been dented a little by the awful weather, but we've still managed to stay ahead even if only just.

So we can now start looking towards next season. For our customers who have seen many changes over the years our intention is a period of stabilisation. We are very happy with the general service we now provide. Small tweaks here and there, a lick of paint, finish the tilling in the gents that sort of thing. We are starting to think about what we might get done this winter, but for sure it won't be as radical as in previous years.

Dave is due to go over to see Ted and brew some beer on his plant. Perhaps he'll take Ann and the children as well and get some skiing in. There will definatley be something on here about that.

In any case there's only 2 weeks to go before we move into the winter season as we see it. Customer numbers are already very low some days and with the increases of fuel prices we have little choice but to have close days to help reduce the overheads.

We hope though to refresh both ourselves and the building a little during the winter, progressing forward our goal of improving the quality of the service ever further.

Damn Emmerdale!!!

Ever since we've been here we've struggled with the fact that The Woolpack on ITV is more famous than us.

It seems there is a chance that they might start selling Woolpack beer - see Corrie Beer - perhaps it's time to Trade Mark

Woolpacker(TM) !!!

Just doesn't seem right that a Micro like us might have to take such steps. ITV might already have done it - it would cost us £80 to find out or risk £200 to register and loose this if it's already registered. But if it isn't registered after paying to find out we still need to pay for registration after that. Is this fair??

Beer makes you more intelligent

Well we have this theory. It stems from studying artificial intelligence (A.I.). You know, the cause of machines starting to think for themselves in The Matrix. Dave studied this at some previous time when he thought that getting qualifications might help him...it didn't, but then he's even beyond the best psychiatrists help.

It's a difficult theory to explain but, basically when you are training a neural network, a kind of computer "brain", you give it input and adjustments are made to the network algorithms until the output shows the best solution. This is an iterative process. The problem with this technique is that local best solutions can be found that may not be the overall best. This is a bit like looking for the lowest point in a field. You might find a low point but it might not be the lowest point if the higher points are hiding the lowest. Do you follow so far?

Well the solution to this is to kick, metaphorically, the network into a completely new part of the field and see if there is anything better over there. The process is called annealing.

It is our view that alcohol can provide that annealing effect. Loosening up to new areas in the field of thinking. How else is it that such brilliant ideas often occur over a pint of beer?

Now before the dreaded Portman Group get hold of us, we have to point out that we believe this to only work with smaller doses of the aforementioned intelligence drug. Excessive amounts result in annealing effects that make all ideas good ones. Oh and the same annealing drug is also found in wine, spirits and even, get this, alcopops, although we do think that lager has a fake version.

This is brought to mind as a result of Dave spending too much time reading other blogs about beer. There seems to be so many ideas and thoughts out there, some of which we agree with, some of which we do not and many that lie somewhere in between. It seems to have got Dave all confused about what's right and wrong. Some annealing is being prescribed for later.

Meanwhile, here's some blog links for the reader to think about:

Beer names - Jeff Pickthall
Portman Group on beer names - Roger Protz
Real ale is for the rich - Kerran Cross
Why I'm Not a Member of CAMRA - Jeff Pickthall

Dave seems to be unable to rationalise these conflicting opinions - anybody any ideas??

Supporting information:

The Intelligent Choice

Food and beer - they need each other

Today we have the problem that there is too much to blog about. Ann and Dave have just spent a couple of days in London to visit the restaurant show at Earls Court. This is the third visit to this show and normally great leaps forward in our ideas for the food service part of the business are made. On this occasion, it has simply resulted in us realising that we are close to our goals with food and we came back with few new ideas in this area.

But turning towards a most important subject, that of beer, now we're talking! We had a great time at a talk by Hamish Anderson of Tate. He looks after the wine and beer lists for the restaurants there. It has to be a positive thing that there are quality restaurants looking at speciality beers to sit alongside wine. There are many good arguments made by Hamish as to why restaurants are taking more notice of beer.

We believe this to be quite key to the problems pubs are having. The classic pub is struggling because of the issues surrounding quality and price of the overall service. Pubs tend to be cheap. No, really they are! Restaurants are more expensive and offer a higher quality service. This is why restaurants and gastro pubs are fairing better. Now the restaurant sector is waking up to beer. Watch out the pub....

There is likely to be more on on this blog regarding the lessons learnt here. Meanwhile, we'll give you this to think about. Enterprise Inns had a large stand at the show, see picture. It is interesting that running a food business is probably more attractive than running a beer business.

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One of the interesting things about this WEB2.0 thing (user generated content - blogs, reviews etc) is that it is normally only people who feel strongly about things that contribute. For reviews, read "feel strongly" to mean annoyed. We look at beerintheevening from time to time to see what people say about us and what they might say about other pubs. There are rarely good comments on this site about ANY pub.

After visiting Earls Court Dave decided that having tasting some interesting wines, beers, sherry, food, bottled and fizzy beers he had to have a proper pint of cask ale. We popped into The Courtfield opposite the main tube station on Earls Court road. They had 5 handpulls running with good ales. A nice start to the evening. It was not the most wonderful pub in the world, but it had 5 handpulls running and was OK. So why does nobody say OK things about it on beer in the evening??

And why did the restaurant show have no cask representation??? What a market for beer!! Pubs are closing or going gastro but cask has a place in both, yes, we believe even restaurants.

Anyway, we thought about going back the second day, but decided that there was little else there.

While we where in London we meet up with Dave's brother Simon. Knowing Dave's interest in beer Simon decided on lunch at the Porter House Covent Garden. Not a real ale pub as such, well OK they have a couple of handpulls, one of which was serving Turners Sticklbrackt Bitter, which was nice. But what they do have is a very large selection of bottled beer.

The pub has an enormous amount of copper handrails and a very interesting clock that ticks like a tambourine and was 12 minutes slow! The beer menu had some comments about how good beer lacks many additives and in particular we like the bits about how to avoid accidently buying bland beer. The comments seem to have been contributed to by Jeff Pickthall who is one of those people who is a fan of speciality beer and has also made money out of it - he's got some progressive ideas about how the industry can move forward. Bars like this are also the future - pubs that stay in the past will be part of history.

The beautiful things in life

The war of words continues surrounding the price of beer. Roger Protz, in the Good Beer Guide, continues to remind us to go to the Supermarket to buy beer, because it's cheaper. Tesco have just announced a profit rise and the prospect of new jobs being created. So it might be a brave person, with the perceived economic situation as it is, to criticise the supermarkets.


But there are more beautiful things in life than cheap, low quality, supermarket beer. The boss of Scottish and Newcastle said in The Morning Advertiser recently "Don't get hung up on the gap between on and off-trade prices" and if you look the difference between quality bottles ales in the off trade and a pint of the same beer in a pub there is a significantly smaller margin.

Tesco's - Hobgoblin - £1.47, Willies - £1.67, Bombardier - £1.52, Morrissey Fox - £1.89. But I never got a clean glass, there was nowhere to sit, there was no friendly chat from the staff and I'm guessing I would not have been made to feel welcome if I'd tried to drink them there. But seriously, although I enjoyed every bottle later, I did find them somewhat overgassed, except perhaps the Hobgoblin, compared to good hand-pulled ale. The Morrissey Fox probably comes from the smallest brewery - hence the highest price.

There is a new, exciting licence trade out there. It is suffering the inertia of history, a history that we all reminisce about. But we cannot afford to allow this nostalgia to kill the industry completely.

Yes, the smoking ban has also kicked the licensed trade sideways. But it is noticeable that many of the higher quality Inns in our area banned smoking months or even years before the Government. There is a realisation that there is a nicer, kinder, more discerning group of customers out there. The aforementioned Mr Protz has reneged on his previous opinion on the smoking ban and is now saying that it is damaging the pub industry so much that it should never have happened. Perhaps he is right and for sure there are a lot of licensees out there that are finding times very, very tough indeed.

Food is becoming the thing that keeps an establishment alive. For most establishments it is not a question of whether to do food or not but exactly what food to do. The type of food offered will mark out the biggest difference for most pubs. It is perhaps a shame that the "Gastro" pub is being singled out as part of the death nail for British Pubs. We could argue about what the term really means and it means different things to different people. Independent industry analysis shows that the higher quality establishments are fairing a little better due to the inherent move away from the high volume market.

This is the crux, in our view, of the solution for the licensed trade. The trade is moving away, largely due to customer choice, from the low end quantity market and into a better, more refined version. Less and less people are just nipping out for a couple of pints or popping in for one on the way home. Many customers want more than just the regular pub fare to fill them up. Many hard working people save their money to treat themselves once a week and they are looking for quality. Many might go out for a meal and a few drinks because it's a birthday, anniversary, kids got good exam results, Mum has been away on business, we're on holiday, we've worked hard and we deserve it.

There is a hardcore of customers that hark after the good old days of cheap beer, smelly sticky carpets, chicken in a basket and smoky rooms. Life on Mars shows a window into how it was. The days of Gene Hunt have long gone and even though we like to look back on it, we're thankful that society has moved on. Industry statistics show that it is the old fashioned boozer that is the style of pub that is failing. These same statistics show that, even if we don't like it, quality is what succeeds. The pub industry is going through painful realignment in the same way as the economy.

Real Ale is the product that bridges between history and quality in the modern pub. Whatever the food offering, providing quality Real Ale alongside food will ensure a discerning audience. Worrying about the quantity of beer that is sold, or the total number of pubs that exist is worrying about an eventuality. The Real Ale community is missing a trick in not embracing the more quality dining establishments and therefore vying for a place alongside fine wines - we for one believe that this is the future for a proportion of pubs.