They Drink A Lot In Derby

My friend Simon, The Reluctant Scooper, lives just outside Derby and spends a fair amount of his time drinking within the city walls. Simon likes a drink, as those of you who read his excellent blog will have discovered for yourself by now.

It seems though that he's not alone in liking and drinking real ale in Derby, not that I ever expected he was. In fact it seems Derby drinkers polish rather a lot of the real stuff off.

As this article demonstrates, more pints of festival beer were sold in The Standing Order during the Wetherspoons Festival, than any other Spoons establishment, with the other (better) Spoons pub in town, The Babington Arms coming third.

There are rumours that beer is so expensive in Derby freehouses that the locals can only afford to drink in Spoons, but that's just malicious if you ask me.

One thing that worries me though is the comment in the penultimate paragraph of the article that St Austell Proper Job in The Babington tasted like "liquid pasties". Something wrong with their pipes methinks.

Derby Beer Festival

The Assembly Rooms in Deby are pretty ugly from the outside, but at beer festival time we can ignore that for inside is a beautiful place to be.

I went to this year's festival on Thursday in the celubrious company of haddonsman and DJMonarch. There was a huge emphasis on Scottish beers this year, as well as the usual selection from closer to Derby. Beers are available in two rooms: the (over) air-conditioned main hall, and the Darwin Hall, where a small selection is available on handpump.

I was most looking forward to trying beers from BrewDog, a fairly new brewery in Fraserburgh in Scotland. Their beers have gained a good reputation very quickly and are rated highly on RateBeer. They brew beers with attitude. They are not frightened to use quality ingredients and lots of them. I was pleased that Punk IPA and Riptide were both available on my visit. Punk IPA is as heavily hopped as you would like it to be with such a name, and has a nice amount of malt together with 6% ABV, to give the beer a good body. Riptide is an 8% Imperial Stout and is big, bold and full of flavour. I really enjoyed both of these beers, scoring them 3.8 and 4.1 respectively.

Two other beers I enjoyed and scored highly were Inveralmond Sunburst Pilsner and Kelburn Carte Blanche. Carte Blanche was champion beer of Scotland in 2006, and I found it far preferable to Highland Dark Munro which won the award this year, which I also tried at Derby.

Other beers I tried were from

Dove Valley
Sulwath
Atlas
Harviestoun
Spire
Williams

All in all a great festival in a good venue with some top beers. The only dodgy bit was the pianist, with what could only be described as an ecletic selection.

A couple of beers in The Alex on the way back to the train station, and I think you'd agree, a pretty decent day of beer.

The Brunswick - Derby

I am fortunate enough to have regular expenses paid trips to Leicester, Nottingham or Derby as part of my day job, and today I had a meeting, and thus a session afterwards in The Brunswick in Derby.

Back in the mid 1990's Derby used to be the best city in England for a pub crawl, an accolade which is now held by Sheffield, although this week's floods have had a temporary effect on that position. No crawl of Derby was complete without a trip to The Brunswick, and bearing in mind its proximity to the railway station it made a perfect first or last port of call. Back then the brewery was independant and the head brewer was Trevor Harris who now owns Derby Brewing Company. The Brunswick Pub and Brewery now though are owned by Everards.

Initial worries that the pub would go significantly downhill were ill founded and the guest beer policy continued. I think it's fair to say that the range of guest beers is not as good as back in the good old days, but when you add on the range of home brewed beers there is still an ample selection to choose from.

The pub itself is a gem. It is multiroomed with four distinct drinking areas as well as an outside patio. One of the rooms is non-smoking, although of course all the others will be from Sunday, and the signs are already in situ ready to be unveiled at the weekend. There are a fair number of old train and railway photos on display together with the odd item of breweriana and old beer bottles. A colleague today stated that "the pub's not much from the outside but it's lovely inside". For what it's worth I think it's pretty special architecturally, appearing to be triangular from some angles.

Food is available which is standard pub grub, but it's the beer we come for and each of the five beers I tried were in fine fettle. It's a shame I wasn't able to have a crawl of the city like I used to, but spending a few hours in 'The Brunny' is a worthwhile use of anyone's time.

For the record four other pubs worth visiting are

The Alexandra
The Flower Pot
The Babington Arms
The Smithfield

A visit to each of the five makes for a hell of a day!