Real Ale, Real Music

A return to sample a few different places in what surely has to be one of the best beer towns in the country . I visited a popular micropub, a newly-opened brewery bar, a traditional pub that is a magnet for real ale afficionados, a lovingly-restored community pub, and an excellent brewery taproom. Here we go.... I had been planning to come back to Stockport for a while. All the word seemed to be it was up and coming, new bars were opening, there was a great vibe about the place, and there was some excellent beer to be had other than the local brew Robinsons. Now don't get me wrong, their beers are fine and they have some good pubs, but their erstwhile hegemony of the local beer market had until recent years rendered the town a fairly dull place to come for a drink unless you wanted to drink Robbo's. But with the cost of running a business in central Manchester escalating over the last few years as the city has grown, it has helped the beer and hospitality scene to grow and flo...

It was the annual Good Friday Day Out which this year saw a group of us visit, for the first time on this long-established event, the North Yorkshire town of Harrogate where we enjoyed a tour around some of the town's finest pubs and bars.... Our well-established Good Friday Day Out is a tradition that started in the West Yorkshire town of Brighouse a good few years before I moved there 25 years ago. Indeed, it has only been since the mid-2010's that I have been a regular participant in the event. The origins of the Day have become a little lost in the mists of time as few of the original protagonists are either still around or at least going on them these days, so myths have sort of developed around them, be it about the year when there was a group of 40 or so in attendance, or the long treks to isolated beacons of real ale situated in a dodgy part of Manchester or Salford. These days, the numbers tend to be around 15-20, with the mix including husbands, wives/partners, and th...

Following my trip to Hartlepool last time out, I've been back in the North East, checking out a few places I'd not visited in ages, plus a few old favourites. Here's where I went.... The last time I'd visited Newcastle was almost 6 months ago to the day, back in September when I combined a visit to see the family with watching FC Halifax Town's game at Gateshead. A few of us had come up on the train on the morning of the match and arrived in the toon to be greeted by steady rain. We'd gone to the Newcastle Tap, just across the road from Central Station, had a couple of decent pints there, and moved on to the Town Wall where from our seat by the window we could see the rain getting heavier. We moved on through the rain to Bodega where I remember we had a great pint of Jarl, and were watching the Merseyside derby on the big screen when news came through of a not entirely unexpected pitch inspection at the International Stadium. Surely this would simply be a formal...

Another football away trip, this time to Teesside, which gave us  the opportunity to pay another visit to a fantastic and famous little micro pub in Hartlepool. Here's how the day unfolded.... It was an early start. I was meeting our Mick and Gaz for the 8.16 from Halifax to Leeds for the first leg of our journey to Hartlepool where FC Halifax Town were hoping to maintain their push for the National League play-offs. I arrived at the station first, my taxi dropping me off at around 8am. Not long after I arrived it was announced that the train had been cancelled and the next one was delayed by animals on the line! So with the lads finishing their breakfast at a local cafe I messaged to appraise them of the current situation but received no response. They turned up a few minutes later, quickly walking just before our booked train was due to leave, telling them when I broke the news there had been no need to rush! In the end we caught a train to Leeds going the other way via Brighouse...

This was my first-ever visit to this proud city at the western end of the West Midlands where I only managed to visit two pubs in what I found was a very welcoming place, but what good pubs they were.... It was bright sunshine and blue skies all the way as I travelled from Halifax via Manchester to Wolverhampton, a journey that took around two and a half hours in total, and this continued to be the case as I had a look around this city of around 263,700 inhabitants, the third largest in the West Midlands after Birmingham and Coventry. I arrived at the city's modern railway station, which has one of the highest bridges across a railway line I have come across! Back on terra firma I walked out on to the concourse and got my bearings. One of the pubs on my list seemed to be close by, but I decided to leave that until last and head off to two others which were more in the city centre and get them done first. The city's name is a derivation of the Anglo-Saxon for Wulfrūn's high ...