Where to start? At the beginning, I suppose. And that means Barnsley Bitter. The first really good beer I tried. And which disappeared forever not long after I had come to love it. How did it taste? That's been blurred by the passage of time. firmly bitter and dry is about all I can come up with.
Funny thing is: I only ever drank it in two pubs. The Wing Tavern in Newark and some pub in Grantham. Which I only went to once. (And where it was served through a metered electric pump.) For my first CAMRA branch meeting. Possibly my last, too. Despite being a member since my 18th birthday, I've never been very active. Other than volunteering at the GBBF. I've mostly supported cask beer in a drinky sort of way.
The Wing Tavern was an odd pub. With no street frontage. Which may explain why it was the last pub in Newark with working handpulls. And the last serving Barnsley Bitter.
Why, when Newark had its own Courage brewery, was Barnsley Bitter being served? It's all to do with exactly how the takeovers of the two Newark breweries went down. Warwick & Richardson was first bought by John Smith. Who branded the pubs, and served them from, their Barnsley brewery subsidiary.
A couple of years later, Courage bought the other Newark brewery, Holes, and also John Smith. With closure of Barnsley in mind, Newark's former Warwick & Richardson pubs swapped over to the bright beer from the former Holes brewery.
The Wing Tavern, as one ow Newark's least fashionable pubs, wasn't top of the list for conversion. And sold Barnsley Bitter.until the brewery closed in 1976.
Lots more to come. If I can be arsed.
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5 comments:
I once heard it was similar to Timothy Taylor Landlord; would that ring true?
Ron for me it is St Mel’s Brown ale a lovely 5.2 percent English type brown ale. Sadly in late 2022 the brewery shut down and I only got to enjoy the brown ale in bottle form only in the last few months of brewing until the supply ran out.
Oscar
Thom, it was probably around 3.8% ABV as opposed to TTL 4.3%
Acorn brewery has been up and running again for a few years now and seem to brew as authentic a BB as you can get with modern malts and hops, they claim to use the original yeast.
When I stayed with relatives in Yorkshire near Cudworth, on the bus into Barnsley I'd pass the original Barnsley brewery which was going full blast. As an underage drinker with my cousin we'd hit the Three Horseshoes pub up the road from Cudworth and drink BB.
Of course it all ended and the pub transformed into a John Smiths. JS tank via electric pump was a decent beer but the modern canned version is crap.
Interesting question (and answer).
Although you've got a few years on me Ron, I've also got a list of beers I miss. Hell, my list is intercontinental, so I'll refrain from listing any more than the greatest hits.
#1 on the list is, hopefully, soon not to be missed anymore, as it's Anchor Steam and, for me, it's departure from taps and shelves was the loss of a beer that had been a regular part of my drinking life from pre-adulthood sips of my father's beers through to my own efforts to homebrew California Commons.
The others on the list are a real mixed bag...Pope's Royal Oak, Celis White, Schultheiss Berliner Weisse (the real stuff), and, of course, any number of craft beers that were one offs (Santa Fe Brewing kettle soured and barrel aged State Pen Porter, for instance) or from breweries that closed.
And yet I'm still looking for historical beer styles to recreate. We're all nuts in this beer game.
Loads of Barnsley Bitter still around Newark. My local sells it, initially from the Oakwell Brewery. Great pint. 3.8%. From the local paper "The beer is brewed using yeast strains that were used in the 1850s to brew ‘Barnsley Bitter’. Now transferred to the " Stancill Brewery in Neepsend, Sheffield. Another local paper says "Brewing Barnsley Bitter in Sheffield may have sounded like heresy to purists. The secret was that Sheffield’s water supply was still sourced from the Pennines, just like the original Barnsley Bitter. Barnsley Bitter remains popular with drinkers". Obviously you know more about this brew than me. I never tasted the original but loving the current version. A real old style traditional drinking bitter.
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