Real Ale, Real Music

A football-away-trip-cum-stag-do taking in two different towns. First up we headed east to the market town and port of Boston for the football, followed by an evening and a stopover in the historic market town of Newark-on-Trent in the middle of Nottinghamshire. Here's what happened.... I was picked up around 8.45 last Saturday morning, and after a hearty breakfast and catch up with the other lads at the Shay Cafe, which nestles in the shadow of the Shay Stadium home of FC Halifax Town, we set off in two cars on our journey to the far-flung south-eastern corner of Lincolnshire. We were on our way to Boston, where the local team were back in the National League after several seasons in the league below. I had been here for football once before, but it was not on the last occasion the teams had met one level below in the National League North when Town triumphed 4-1 in their promotion-winning season of 2016-17. I checked back and my last visit had been in 2011, when the sides had sha...

Here's a tour around a number of Manchester pubs and bars in the network of streets between Piccadilly and Great Ancoats Street, including a couple that are settling into life under new ownership.... It had been over two months since I had last been to Manchester so with a spare day I off I decided to go over one of my favourite cities and check out a couple of new bars that had opened recently under new guises. One of them was the Rat & Pigeon, a re-working of a previous pub, Mother Mac's, the other a takeover of the former Pelican bar by new owners, Fell. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and it can certainly be a source of frustration too. I thought I knew where the Rat & Pigeon would be, and to be fair I do know Manchester pretty well. But I should really have checked the address before I set off towards Piccadilly. I walked amongst and out beyond the seething masses of Piccadilly Gardens and then looked to where I thought the pub should be...but it w...

In which I bring you a heady mix including another festival or two, shouty girl bands, illuminating conversations, a radical exhibition, a few decent pints, and more big brewery shenanigans.... I stayed local last Friday. Well, by local I mean I stayed within a few miles of home. I travelled by bus as well, and all the timings went to plan, which is not something you can say every time. I had planned to go to the Elland Beer Festival, spend a couple of hours there, and then head to the Grayston Unity where I had a ticket to see rising Manchester band Loose Articles as part of this year's Town Festival of Music & Words. I left home just after 5 and caught the bus into Brighouse where, having earmarked a bus earlier in the day to go to Elland at about 6, my thoughts were on grabbing a pint from the current barrel of Two by Two that had been drinking well in the Crafty Fox the night before. However, when I spotted a bus waiting that was going to Elland from Brighouse imminently, o...

A new location has just been announced for the Great British Beer Festival for 2025 which takes it away from London for the first time for many year, and whilst we are now in the midst of the festival season here's a look back at the history of large scale beer events.... So the Great British Beer Festival is to leave its longstanding home at Olympia in London, and is moving to the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, making it the first change in its location since 2012, when it moved back after a five year period when it was based at the older and more characterful Earl's Court, having first taken place there in 1992. The planned 2024 festival was advertised to take place in August at Olympia once again, but was cancelled a few months earlier as due to the venue being refurbished they couldn't accommodate CAMRA on the requested dates. Whether this was what prompted the organisation to seek pastures new, I don't know, but it marks a welcome return to the regions f...

The 2025 CAMRA Good Beer Guide was published a few days ago, bringing with it joy to those had been included, particularly for the first time. The day after publication I visited one such place and then called in a former Guide regular only a couple of miles away that had failed to make the cut once again this time.... Pecket Well is a small village situated on the edge of the Pennine moors a couple of miles out of Hebden Bridge. To get there I turned off the main A646 Calder Valley road as I arrived in the town and then took the A6033 up the hill towards Oxenhope. Houses, some of them over-and-under-dwellings, a feature of this part of the world where flat land is at a premium, were perched on corners at crazy angles and clung to the side of the road for dear life as I began to leave the town behind. Following a twisty and vertiginous climb through dense woodland the road eventually emerged into the open at the fringes of the tree line as the slope began to lessen. Here I came to a we...