Goodnight Sweetheart Stout

It will come as no surprise that I was a big fan iof the TV series "Goodnight Sweetheart". It was set in the past and heavily featured a pub. Watching it probably induced one of my best ever dreams. The one where I was on a pub crawl of Newark in 1940. I even got to taste the beer. It was that good a dream.

It's a while since I'd seen an episode. I hadn't realised at the time what effort they'd put into getting the pub scenes right. Until Mike, who's new to the programme, pointed it out to me. Thanks for the screenshots, Mike.

The Royal Oak, quite realistically, was a Truman's house. As you can see clearly from the dray making deliveries.

A display of bottled beers behind the bar also clearly have Truman's labels. I can remember when I watched the series the first time around wondering what the beers they drank were like. You can guess what's coming now. Details of Truman's beers from 1940.

The Strong Ale will be their Burton. The others are pretty self-explanatory. You'll not that their Bitter was still a decent strength, at around 5% ABV. The Mild, with a gravity of 1035, was pretty much like a modern one, though perhaps a little less attenuated.


The exterior shots were of a real East End pub:

Royal Oak Hotel
73 Columbia Road,
Bethnal Green,
London.