Bunting High And Low

Joe Fusniak would have been well looked after when he appeared at the White Lion, which remains a great, unpretentious pub. Not a few places in the Dales have been gastrated with varying degrees of success. I've heard of stares and even outright hostility toward visitors wanting just a pint and some crisps rather than a glass of Barolo and a bisque-infused crab and pea risotto with sun-boiled onions. None of this, mercifully, at the Fox And Hounds at bunting-wrapped Starbotton where we stopped for a post-Pike quencher. It's a classic Dales Inn - bow back chairs, flagstones, old shotguns on the walls - and a polite notice asking walkers to remove muddy boots. There are never any surprises with beer in a Dales pub. Jennings, Theakston. Maybe a Taylor's. There's always Black Sheep Bitter, which must surely have a claim to be Yorkshire's Official Pint with the demise of Tetley.



The Fox's guest was the Yorkshire Dales Brewery's Nappa Scar, and we took a couple of pints out front to watch chartered accountants wobble past on their Harleys. On our last encounter with an unsparkled Nappa Scar, I thought it smelled like a farmyard. Here it was all hops, billowing facefuls and huge mouthfuls of the stuff. I don't know much about IBUs - but I bet this wasn't far off the Stone Ruination that I tried t'other month. The hophead's perfect pint after a four-hour walk. And we didn't even mind that it was £3.20 - about the same price it would be at the Harp just off Trafalgar Square.

Ice Cold In E11

Last friday I constructed a wardrobe. It's a massive, hugely heavy thing and looks like a coffin for a couple of obese giants. I even had to affix battens to the wall to keep the beast from falling on us, which given my DIY 'skills' is the equivalent of a caveman making fire. It took me about nine hours and was like wrestling with the Ark Royal. By the evening I could barely walk. I needed a beer. The one I reached for was a Tsingtao that Mrs Wheels had put in the fridge two days earlier. Yes, that adjunct-heavy Chinese lager which invariably gets a hammering from all corners of the beer blogoshire for (among other things) its uncompromising lemony blandness. You see, I have a soft spot for the stuff, which provided one of the milestones on my 'journey' to becoming a beer nerd.

Some years ago, I walked eight miles of a lesser-visited and more or less unrestored section of the Great Wall of China, with 80-degree vertical climbs in some parts. It was a quite incredibly hot day. The hottest i'd ever experienced, and despite the guerrilla water sellers in some of the watchtowers, very difficult to drink enough fluids to keep off a raging thirst. At the end of the hike I staggered into a 'bar' - really a collection of plastic garden chairs with an enterprising local flogging drinks from an oversized coolbox. In all my years as a beer drinker, nothing has ever come close to tasting as good as the ice cold can of Tsingtao I glugged down that afternoon in Simatai. I'm pretty sure steam was actually coming out of my ears.

Those We Have Loved

I'm a photographer who loves beer, so I've often got my camera with me in the pub. I've had nothing much to blog about just recently, so I hope you don't mind me sharing some images of beer that i've enjoyed over the last year or so. Apologies if some of the captions read like an optician's wall chart - It's times like this when I wish i'd chosen Wordpress over Blogger.

Bush Inn, Morwenstow

The Lamb, Bloomsbury

San Sebastian, Spain

Bad Toelz, Bavaria

Georgbrauhaus, Berlin

Elizabethan Bar, Westward Ho

The Narrowboat, Skipton

The Square and Compass, Worth Matravers

The Ship Inn, Lyme Regis

The Beaver, Appledore

Blue Bell, York

Seehaus Biergarten, Munich

Landsberg Am Lech, Bavaria

Starnberg, Bavaria

Biked Drinks

It's amazing how much you can carry on a bicycle. In those far off, pre-car, pre-Vespa days of dwelling in Zone One I could bring home a weeks shopping on my bike. Rucksack on my back, newspaper down my jumper and carrier bags swinging from the handlebars. Easy. Beer bottles are hard work, though. Awkward shapes, hard to pack. Easy to smash - and they're heavy.



But look at this, from Etsy's Walnutstudio. A darn site more useful than its original purpose of carrying a bicycle polo mallet. A what?

(Thanks to my old friend Rubyspirit - creator of fine and unique jewellery - for the tip-off)

Homebrew 2.0

Say hello to my latest effort, brewed from a Woodfordes Wherry Kit. I cooked this up at the end of january, fermented it for 12 or so days and then barreled it without flooding the kitchen. Apart from the odd test snifter, It'd been sleeping peacefully in a cool corner of our dining room. Last friday - after a working week from hell - I could wait no longer. Out came the nonic.

So what's it like? Actually, pretty damn good - and nobody is more surprised than me. It's sweetish and malty with a long bitter finish and a proper, lacing head. It won't set any hophead's hair on fire, but It's a decent 'brown' session beer. Importantly, it doesn't taste like homebrew - I'd be happy to sup this down the pub. For some of the night, anyway. I forgot to take the original gravity, but it's something in the neighbourhood of 4%, though anyone reading my tweets on friday night may have thought I was on something stronger.

When I barreled this beer, I siphoned off a bottle for my mum and dad. Given the enthusiasm for it when they cracked it open last night, ("We've had worse in Wetherspoon's") bottle conditioning might be the way forward for my next brew. The Wherry kit is notorious for stuck fermentations - which I avoided - and failing to properly drop bright - which I didn't. There's a faint haze, but it's a helluva lot better than my last effort which looked like Bisto.

Merry? Mungo In Fridge.

I'm partial to the odd Pure Brewed Lager from Samuel Smith - but as I'm still doing a one-man boycott, the Tadcaster bullies' beers are off limits. Apart from that, I've never really got on with British lager, even the 'craft' stuff. I don't even get on with Meantime Helles. If I want something golden and fizzy to go with a Thai meal i'll grab a few Zywiec from the shop next door.

Hang on though, what's this? West St Mungo in our local Waitrose. Oh yes. I've read about these. Glaswegian, but run by folk from Buttenheim in dear old Bayern. They brew to the Rheinheitsgebot, which as I know from my German days may be a good indicator of purity but not of flavour (Paulaner - i'm looking at you).

So what's it like? Gassy, woody nose and very nearly the colour of another Scot; Irn Bru. The head fades away in seconds. Taste is clean and bready with a bitter finish that clings. The natural carbonation is a bit sharp for me, and there's a flavour that I can't quite place which doesn't quite appeal. By bedtime I still had a quarter glass undrunk and warm. Never a good sign. Decent stuff, but not my Great British Lager. That I actually prefer a Heineken-owned Polish macrobrew to this probably says a lot about my tasting 'skills'. Zywiec is six for a fiver from our local offy. Cooking Lager would be proud.

Devon Knows

Just realised - I forgot to mention that after years of searching, I've finally found a decent pub in Barnstaple. It's the Rolle Quay Inn, a two-minute walk from the northern end of the High Street. It's much bigger than it looks from the outside, and a bit chintzy on the inside - but none the worse for that. We had a couple of first class pints of Proper Job (it's a St Austell house), served up by a friendly and knowledgeable barman, and enjoyed them while we sat defrosting by the pub's fragrant woodburner. It was light years from the usual Barno boozers with their knots of shivering rollup smokers, karaoke, pints of vinegar and two-for-one WKD promotions.





(Didn't have my camera with me when we went to the Rolle Quay - these pics were taken on Westward Ho! beach a day or two earlier)

Yeastender

So, here's the result of my first-ever go at homebrew - the Brubox 'London Bitter' Our Lad got me for Christmas. I followed the (somewhat vague) instructions to the letter, especially the bit about the dangers of the bag bursting through over-pressurisation, which was no empty threat. Had a look the morning after I charged the brew with sugar and found the bag blown up to the size and shape of a beach ball and climbing out of the box. We were perhaps seconds from disaster. As I er, released gas I felt just like Jack Bauer.

But what does it taste like? Despite being opaque (at this stage anyway), it's pretty good. Malty, fruity and bitter - if a tad 'yeasty' - and miles better than it looks.

American Friends

Mrs TIW's uncle and auntie are spending their retirement touring the US in a Fifth Wheel - or the world's poshest caravan, as it's also known. You can read about their escapades here. They've got an uncanny knack of bringing me over some superb and fairly hard-to-find American beers, like this Stone Ruination IPA, one of a brace that they got me for Christmas. I've only seen it for sale at Utobeer, and for about eight quid, though it might also be in those ur-fridges at the Euston Tap.

Stone claim that 'Ruination' is what's going to happen to your taste buds after drinking this. Well, my mouth recovered after about an hour but it's definitely not a beer for food matching. Unless you're eating handfuls of hops. It's massively, heftily, grandly, bitterly hoppy this beer. Despite that it was an easy drink once I'd got over that big hop punch, and settled into citrus and sort of walk-in-the woods pine notes, all somehow balanced with those intense, 100+ IBU shovelfuls of Columbus and Centennial. After swigging nothing but meh* beers over Christmas in Devon, this was like being plugged into the mains. Beer as a primary colour. And in the States you can get it on draught. Sorry - "draft". Lucky Yanks.

* (TIW passim) honourable exception: Hartland Beers at the White Hart, Bideford.

A King At Night

The original Tron was baffling for the thirteen-year-old TIW sat in Keighley Picture House. But Our Lad and me were there for the computer animation rather than the confusing but lame storyline. All done on the Foonly supercomputer with its astonishing two megabyte memory. There'd been nothing like it before - but of course, there's been a lot like it since. Last night I saw Tron: Legacy. Not without its moments - though every time the CGI 'young' Jeff Bridges came on screen I couldn't help but think "why have they made him look like Gary Barlow?".


After that a drink was needed, so we nipped round the corner to The Kings Arms. The pub's on Roupell Street SE1, part of a conservation area of early Victorian terraces which looks like it belongs on the cover of a book by Valerie Wood called something like 'The Ragged Princess' ("she was the daughter of a jellied eel seller, he was the Fifth Duke Of Witney").

The King's Arms is a multi-room boozer, modernised a bit but still retaining a lot of character and original features. When I worked nearby, I came here a lot, but i've not been in for months. Back then the beer could be a bit inconsistent, but last night the Adnam's bitter was in prime nick, unlike the Doom Bar I kicked off with which just about OK. Out the back there's what looks like a converted courtyard where you can be brusquely served Thai food. The bar staff are pretty brusque too. I don't expect a high five when I order a round, but some verbal communication would be nice. And please, do something about the rickety bar stools. Sat swaying three feet in the air does not make for a relaxing visit. It was nice and warm though - old fashioned iron radiators and a real fire crackling away in the tap room. Good atmosphere too, and pleasingly busy for a chilly monday a week into the new year. Bit of a curate's egg for me, this pub - it ticks a lot of my boxes but I didn't find myself wishing I could still nip in after work. Hmm.

Photo by Lars Plougmann

Git Yer Brew On

When I were but a nipper, my dad was a full-grain homebrewer, boiling the mash in a huge, copper jampot. The aromas of his small-scale efforts filled our street and mingled with those from Timothy Taylor 200 yards down the road. Along with golf, dad's primary hobby these days is researching the family tree, which has thrown up several ancestors running pubs and brewhouses in Leeds.


Now it's my turn. Our Lad got me this for Christmas. It's a Brubox, a sort of one-pot homebrew system. Very straightforward. Sterilise, boil up the 'teabag' of hops and grain, add the malt extract, fill with water and add yeast when the temperature gets down to 18 degrees. Actually, that was the hard bit. The temp went from 22 degrees and settled at 16, which was a bit cold for the yeast to get its mojo working. A bit of wandering around with a thermometer showed that the dining room was the best bet, so after bunging in the yeast that's where I left it, wrapped in old blankets. Stand back, light your pipe. And that's that. Came down this morning to find the airlock blooping away and a satisfyingly crusty 'krauesen' forming on the top. There's a lurid warning in the instructions about venting off gas if the fermentation gets carried away and causes the bag to burst.

So, in about a month I'll know if I've got 20 pints of 'London Bitter' or 20 pints of vinegar. Or a dining room freshly decorated with malt extract and a supremely angry Mrs TIW.

LocAle

"Don't have that. It's horrible." Said the the friendly James May lookalike behind the bar. He was right. The sampler of Brodie's Kosher Rye Ale he gave me smelt like gloss paint, and tasted like grass clippings. His recommendation of Old Hopper was right on the money though.

It was saturday evening and pouring with icy rain. Mrs TIW, my brother and I were warm and snug in the William The IV in Leyton. This is the tap of the prolific Brodie brewery, which produces its beer in what looks like a big stone shed round the back. The pub is a large former gin palace, with original mirrors for Truman and Charrington on the walls. It looks and feels like a mash-up of the Cross Keys* in Covent Garden and former TIW saturday night favourite The Old George (AKA Kempys) in Bethnal Green, and the place was bustling. There was some sort of fraternal organisation having a black tie do in the back room, footy was showing unobtrusively on an enormous projector screen, watched by leather-jacketed geezers. The other punters were a mixed salad of East End hipsters, couples, locals and beard-stroking beer-o-nauts. Staff were zipping around clearing glasses and wiping tables, and one of the barmen kept interrupting his roast dinner to leap up and help out on the pumps, which were everywhere you looked - about twenty of them.

Brodie's are very active, as anyone who follows them on Twitter will know. They currently produce about 12 regular beers, as well as seasonals and what seem to be experiments, like the Kosher Rye. We only tried two out of the battalion of pumps - the smooth and bitter Amarilla and the Old Hopper, brewed with hops from Cable Street down in Whitechapel. Both beers tasted rather green and young - like they often do at beer festivals. Still perfectly enjoyable, especially the Hopper which was miles better than the version served at another Brodie outlet, the Old Coffee House in Soho, home of the most miserable barman in London.

The William's certainly had its ups and downs in recent years. Never quite knowing if it was on an up or a down is the reason that i've never taken the short journey to visit until now. Brodie's is in fact the resurrection of the pub's old Sweet William micro, brought back to life in 2008 by James and Lizzie Brodie, and the pub's new ascendency is clearly down to their hard work (and maybe helped by their £1.99 a pint pricing). We certainly felt instantly at home - it's that kind of place - and I'm looking forward to going back.

Disclaimer: Our lad and me had spent a good chunk of the afternoon in the Euston Tap getting acquainted with Fyne Ales' Vital Spark. So don't take my word for it, go and have a look. Leyton's really not that far from Zone 1.

*I've heard the Cross Keys and the Old Coffee House is are run by the owners of the William IV. Can anyone confirm?

Rail Ale

Never thought I'd look forward to visiting a pub near a train station. Finally got to the Euston Tap for a late-afternoon visit on monday. At first, the place was empty, except for an extremely posh young man who appeared baffled by the beer menu ("Um, what's a nice beer?") and a grizzled CAMRA vet in a faded beer festival shirt stretched over an impressive belly. Twenty odd-beers on the blackboards, reasonably priced and numbered like a Chinese restaurant*. Two fridgezillas creaking with bottles. We liked the place instantly.



No sign of Boak and Bailey's snooty barmaid, thankfully - the lad behind the bar was smiley enthusiasm personified. Mate had a Bristol Stout ("excellent") while I settled for a Lagonda, the first Marble beer I've really enjoyed. My pint was none the worse for a slight haze, something that seemed to affect the other light-coloured ales we saw served up. Our only real complaint was that the place was freezing. Even though the barman was in a t-shirt - everyone else had their coats on. Another gripe was that we'd left it too late to stay for more than one before we had to go and meet the wives.

The Euston Tap is full of potential and deserves to do well - and might even prove to be something of a kick up the arse for the capital's beer 'scene'. Range+decent prices = happiness. More of this sort of thing, please.

*You're meant to order by number, apparently. We were ignorant of this, but the barman didn't mind. Perhaps just as well - I even get baffled by the ordering system in Nando's.

Playing The 'Spoons

I've been offered some bad pints in my time, and i've even had to bat off the infamous "It's meant to taste like that" cliché on a couple of occasions. But this is the worst example yet, encountered last friday at the (usually reliable) Crosse Keys as we caught the tail end of Wetherspoon's real ale festival. Wasn't even a full pint. Changed with no drama, but still - it shouldn't have made it to the civilian side of the bar. It was meant to be a Marston's Old Empire, but looked and smelled exactly like the residue in the bottom of the fish tank one of my housemates had back when I was a student. I think the correct term is 'mulm'.

David Vs Goliath Vs Valuev

This is one of Marks And Spencers British beer range; Yorkshire Bitter. Not a bad drop - bottle conditioned, a chewy, fruity mouthful. It's made for M&S by Cropton, currently undergoing legal proddings from eccentric Tadcaster brewer Samuel Smith. I don't know about you, but the first thing I notice about this bottle is that large white rose. It's the white rose on Cropton's Yorkshire Warrior labels (which actually show the Yorkshire Regiment's cap badge) that caused Samuel Smith to get in touch with their learned friends. I wonder if one of Europe's largest companies - who presumably have a correspondingly large legal department and very deep pockets - can expect a letter from a Tadcaster solicitor?

Ghentrification

Just back from a short trip to Ghent. Castles, trapgevel, bicycles, chocolate, bells, canals, frites, stoverij, beer. Nice town - unlike Brussels, which seems to get filthier with every visit. We weren't in Ghent long enough to really investigate the pubs, though we did have a couple of hours in the excellent Dulle Griet, squinting at the beer menu through the tobacco fug.


Another stop was the astounding Hopduvel, a ten minute walk outside the old city on the left bank of the Coupure canal. There are something like 1,200 different beers brewed in Belgium - and most of them are available in this barn of an off-licence. This selection is all I could physically carry - a curse of being a photographer is that my camera gear takes up space of at least six bottles.


Hiding at the back there is the most expensive beer I've ever bought - a Westvleteren 12, probably the most hyped brew of recent times. I'm sure you know the story - tiny batches, no labels, hard to find, yadda yadda. The beer is only officially available from the St Sixtus monastery, with its slightly bonkers reservation system. If you buy it anywhere else, it's a sort of 'grey export'.

WV12 is considered by some (not least Ratebeer) as the best beer in the world. How much of this opinion is formed by the exclusivity of it is hard to tell - but i've been looking for a bottle to try for two or three years. I picked this up at De Bier Tempel - researched by Mrs TIW as our best bet - in central Brussels along with a Westvleteren Blond and Westvleteren 8, the only three beers the monks brew commercially. I have no idea when i'll try it - i'm almost scared of it.

On our walk back to Midi station we were shadowed by the world's most obvious bag snatcher, culminating in a staring match before we got to the sanctuary of the Eurostar terminal. This is the third or fourth time we've been to the Belgian capital, and if anything Midi station is getting worse - reminding us of the stygian terminals we encountered on our rail journeys in China a few years back. Midi is certainly incomparable to the high Victorian glory of St Pancras that welcomes you back to London. Sort it out, Mr Van Rompuy.

In The Club Style

Now it can be told. I'm a member of a club where men go to meet other men, and women are not allowed.

There used to be dozens of these social clubs throughout the North. They were set up during the inter-war period by what were once patronisingly termed the 'progressive working-class' as a more respectable alternative to town pubs of the time. There are very few men-only clubs left, but two or three linger on in the Keighley area. I joined through tradition and because my dad and my uncle have been members for decades, and you really can't beat having a pint with your dad and your uncle. In our club there's a TV room, a small library and the click of dominoes. You get frowned at by older members until you remove your hat. The two full-sized slate snooker tables are immaculately maintained by the same local firm that installed them in the 50s. There are three handpumps, one for Timothy Taylor's Best Bitter and two for Golden Best, the stealth mild that is Taylor's biggest seller in their home market. Guinness is by the bottle, and Tetley Cask has recently been usurped by its ugly cousin, Smooth. I'm pretty sure that on my first visit a few days after I turned 18 they still weren't selling lager (no ladies, see), but these days there's a Carling tap.

When my dad, uncle and their mates joined there was a two-year waiting list and it would be three deep at the bar on a friday. Prospective members had to attend at least twice a month for those two years, and then present themselves to the committee to prove that you were of good character and had no criminal record (and presumably, not a woman). When I joined some eight years ago, there was no waiting list, and my exile Down South gave me special dispensation not to have to prove my worth in person. Fridays are very much quieter and the club no longer opens during the day. Times change. There's still an annual club trip - usually to Scarborough - though these days it's limited to veteran members and a crate of Landlord is no longer hoisted onto the coach.

The only female permitted on the premises is the Steward's wife - and she's not allowed out from behind the bar, even to collect empties. Some may consider the place a sexist anachronism, but it's a well-loved sexist anachronism, and one that nobody really minds too much about. The club's constitution doesn't actually bar women, but none have shown the slightest interest in joining (as my mum has pointed out) what amounts to two rooms of middle-aged and elderly Yorkshiremen complaining about the state of Rugby League and (in summer) cricket, and at all other times, the government.

Members still talk about the only time a woman got over the club's front threshold. One night an unknown elderly bloke pulled up in a Bentley and doddered in with a fur-coated peroxide blonde half his age, before being frantically but gently ushered out.

"I'm surprised they didn't rebuild the place after that" noted my mum at the time.

The Darkness

Autumn. Season of clichés and mellow fruitfulness. We've got a handsome cherry tree outside our house, which at this time of year sneezes about a ton of leaves into the front yard every couple of days. On saturday, sweeping that lot up put me in the mood for a dark beer, and it doesn't get much darker than Harveys Imperial Extra Stout. It's the Aleister Crowley of ales.

Why is it so hard to find a shop with a good selection of interesting beers in London? I can only think of two specialists now that the Beer Shop in Shoreditch has turned up its toes. Utobeer at Borough Market is a five-minute Boriscycle from my desk, though the fact that they hardly ever put a price label on their bottles puts me off. Well, that and their prices. Did I really see them selling Duvel at four quid a go? The other place is Nelson wines, way down yonder in South Wimbledon, a place that claims to be in zone three but feels like you've gone far enough to drop off the edge of the south coast. Nelson's is much cheaper than Utobeer and arguably has a bigger selection - there are bottles from floor to almost the ceiling, and stuck in every nook and corner. It's well worth the trip, even if the shop itself looks like it sells dirty magazines rather than dusty bottles.

Nelson's is where I picked up this Imperial Extra. It comes in a nice cork-stopped bottle and pours a viscous and total black, like the sump oil of a 1985 Lada Niva. Very thin espresso-coloured head and very little carbonation. Get your nose in the glass and there's spice, almost curry, coming up. First swig is a big treacly mouthful. It tastes a lot like what we in Yorkshire call 'Spanish' and everyone else calls liquorice, with distinct hints of port, and that 9% certainly makes its presence felt pretty quickly. All this ends with a bittersweet, tickly finish that goes on and on and on. I've never drunk anything quite like it - in fact, to me it had more in common with a digestive liqueur like Unicum than beer. That or something dug up on Time Team. Can't imagine having this more than once or twice a year - but it'd do very nicely for hallowe'en. Cackle.

You Probably Didn't See It Here First.

I'm not normally one who spends time reading the planning applications in provincial newspapers. But in this week's Keighley News was a submission from the best brewery in the world (Timothy Taylor, obviously). It was informing the Environment Agency of their plans to drill on their new site, over the road from the famous Knowle Spring brewery. This is the old WASK foundry and currently Taylor's storage facility and parking for their racing green drays. The drilling is for a water source for 'cask washing', 'bus cleaning' (some local buses are parked there) and a new brewery. Hmmm.

Spot The Difference

The Tadcaster brewer Samuel Smith seems to embody many of the attributes of the music hall version of the professional Yorkshireman. Stubborn, self-reliant, shrewd and reticent to the point of only getting a website in August 2010. They're certainly eccentric and somewhat secretive - they never seem give interviews. Their London pubs are a bit love-or-hate, but they certainly care for the fabric of their buildings. A few years back, they closed their famous gin palace The Princess Louise for several months while they restored its 1891 interior. Given the quality of the work, literally no expense was spared. As far as I can tell, they didn't even bother with a press release saying what they'd been up to. There's something nicely old fashioned about their flagship ale, Old Brewery Bitter. It's not to everyone's taste, but I like it - it's a decent standby for a swift quencher, and one of the few beers still drawn from the wood. They have a cooperage at the brewery. Local deliveries are by drays pulled by shire horses. Traditional isn't the word.

Just one bit of folklore about Smith's claims that the reason OBB is so cheap is that tax and duty apart, the brewery hasn't raised prices since they first started brewing it. Ah, yes. Folklore. And Rumours. For fear of getting my wheels sued off I won't go into any here, but speculation about one or other members of Smith's senior staff on this site might somehow help explain why they're taking the Cropton Brewery to court.

In 2008, Cropton launched Yorkshire Warrior, a 4.4% ruby ale. Profits from sales go the Yorkshire Regiment Benevolent Fund. More than £10,000 has so far been raised. The bottle displays the regiments' badge, which of course features the Yorkshire Rose. Samuel Smith, in their wisdom, say that having the rose on the Warrior bottles is 'confusingly similar' to their own labelling. A writ has been served for 'copyright infringment'. You now have the absurd situation of seeing Warrior bottles and pump clips with the county symbol on it blacked out.

Cropton, y'see, are a Yorkshire brewer. Go to Leeds on a match day and half the men (and I dare say a few women) in the city centre will have a white rose tattoo on their arm. How many businesses in the county incorporate it into their own logo? It's everywhere. It belongs to Yorkshire. It does not belong to Samuel Smith, who in any case use the symbol upside down. They may have been around for 252 years but Sam Smiths shouldn't take their great age as a guarantee of brand loyalty, especially when it comes to something like this. It's so petty and wrong-headed it defies logic.

The case will reach the High Court next July. Cropton have said they will fight the claim all the way, but if they lose they are likely to face bankruptcy. I don't know about anyone else, but I won't be darkening the doors of any Smith pubs for a while.