English pubs

While I was studying in England during the years 1986-1992, I learned to really like pubs. At first, Denise and I went to pubs simply to keep warm. We were living in a flat that had no insulation, and our two horribly inefficient electric space heaters were gluttons on very expensive electricity. We tried to use an odd type of coal called 'coke' for a while, but it was difficult to light, and once lit did not really produce much heat. It was cheaper for Denise and I to drink beer in a warm pub than to try to heat our own flat.

As I got settled into graduate work, I soon realized that the pub was as important to the university as the library. It was a place to take stock, integrate, make sense of, and articulate the day's tsunami of ideas, and listen to what other people had been thinking about. Those casual conversations with friends in the pub were the breeding grounds for some of the best ideas I had at university.

Our North American idea of an English pub is all wrong. Not once did I ever see a piano, and never did I hear anyone sing, apart from a Glaswegian football fan singing a Rangers song, and he was bounced very quickly from our sight. We have this strange idea that English beer is served at room temperature. However, lager is served cold, but just about everything else is served at cellar temperature.

Over the years, I developed criteria for what I thought made for a particularly good pub. The one that ruled over all else was the quality of beer. One can find the entire spectrum of beer in England: lager is the lightest, then pilsener, ale, bitter, and stout. However, and in my opinion, the best English beer is ale, and the best ale is not made for mass consumption. Rather, it is made in thousands of small independently owned breweries around the country in limited quantities, and we'll never see the likes of it here in North America: it does not travel so well, and there simply is not enough for even domestic consumption. We will only see the English beer made by the big corporations for mass export and it simply is not the same. The ale I am talking about has a glorious flavour, is not particularly fizzy, and the alcohol content is much less than in Canadian beer. While one trips over pubs that sell the mass produced beer in England, one has to seek out those pubs that sell really good ale. The picture above is of the Cooperage (a cooper is a barrel-maker) pub in Newcastle upon Tyne. It has very, very good beer.

The second most important thing was good music. The jukebox had to have music with a depth far beyond the Top Forty, and at the same time, not stuck in the 1950's and all that early rock and roll bubble gum stuff (Why must I be a teenager in love?). However, as the main purpose of going to a pub (beyond getting warm!) was to have a good conversation with friends, the music could not be too loud: no-one wants to have to shout.

Finally, the pub was particularly good if it had a pool table and a real fire to warm the bones.

My English friends tell me that those really special pubs that I am talking about are starting to die out as they simply cannot compete with the big beer company pubs. This is a real shame.