Warwick Pub Explorations

It's autumn, the temperature has suddenly dropped and the forecast for this weekend is wet and miserable.
But even down in the lower reaches of the Southern Central Counties Pub-Ticking league, rain can't stop play for the whole of November.

Brewing Kit

So it was we headed out to Warwick, hopping off the train at the town's underwhelming railway station and making a quick dash to the nearby Wild Boar pub.

The Wild Boar (27 Lakin Road, CV34 5BU - web)
This is Warwick's brewpub, housing the Slaughterhouse Brewery to it's rear, the two barrel plant visible from the snug and back corridor.
We received a friendly welcome at the Wild Boar, with recommendations to "grab the table by the fire", and a cheery "enjoy your drinks".

There are a hefty ten handpumps along the bar, five of which are dispensing the Slaughterhouse beers, the others Oakham and Everards.  I'm a sucker for a brewpub, so tried the two dark Slaughterhouse ales on offer: the lovely 'Mother's Milk Stout' and  'Wild Boar' which was a decent nutty, chocolatey beer.

Early doors at the Wild Boar

We planned to get around all of the town's Good Beer Guide listed pubs during the day, opting to make the journey to the Cape of Good Hope first, this being the furthest walk in the rain.

The Cape of Good Hope (66 Lower Cape, CV34 5DP - web)
And I'm chuffed that we made the effort.  Just look at that cracking location next to a lock on the Grand Union canal.  

Drawn to the brightest one - that'll be a pint of San Miguel then.

I was thoroughly happy sitting in the front bar of the Cape of Good Hope, the wood smoke from the barge moored outside wafting in every time the front door opened.

The Crouch Vale 'Stout Coffin' was a tasty pint and our lunchtime nourishment came in the shape of pie and pizzas.
And Chelsea were beating Crystal Palace on the TV, cheering up Mrs PropUptheBar and temporarily making her forget she could be tucked up in front of Netflix at home, rather than traipsing around the pubs of Warwick in the rain.

From the Cape, we made the walk back to the centre of town. 
Stopping to take the picture below, from beneath my umbrella, was about close as I came to sightseeing today.

But probably not many of those sightseeing tourists make it to Warwickshire's 2018 County Pub of the Year...

The Old Post Office (12 West Street, CV34 6AN - web)

Not real leg.

Warwick's micro pub has been open since the summer of 2018.

It has several ticks for micro pub top trumps -
Solitary toilet 🗹
Beers straight from the barrel 🗹
Stack of old Good Beer Guides 🗹
Quirky decorations 🗹 - exhibit A: leg through ceiling.

I liked it.  There were a handful of locals lining the bar, helpfully moving aside for me to get served, and a good choice of ales on offer.
Sadly I don't think I picked the best, going for an Oakham 'Got Tash' which failed to impress me as much as their beers usually do.
The pub had a few too many scatter cushions for my liking too, but this is definitely somewhere I'd visit regularly if Warwick were my home town.

Lots of signage on the Loo 

It  was just a couple of minutes walk around the corner from the Old Post Office to the next of Warwick's Good Beer Guide listed pubs.

Autumnal Warwick scene.

Old Fourpenny Pub (27-29 Crompton Street, CV34 6HJ - web)
Why's it called the Old Fourpenny, you surely want to know?
Well, it was apparently the price of a cup of coffee and a tot of rum charged to workers building the Grand Union Canal in the early 1800's.
Now it's multi-tasking pub diversity - shop, hotel, restaurant and pub.

MrsPropUptheBar dismissed the beer choice and instead brought a Tracklements 'Spitfire Chilli Mustard', from the shelf that constituted the shop part of the Old Fourpenny.
Her patience with best bitters and golden ales is limited - by the fourth pub she's demanding peach habanero pales or 12% marshmallow stouts.
No Brewdog or crafty murk outlet in Warwick to get these (yet), so we had to make do with Wetherspoons as our next point of call.

The Thomas Lloyd (3-7 Market Place, CV34 4SA - web)
I think we picked a good time to visit, early on Saturday evening, before any rowdy Warwick weekend crowds descended.  The service was fast and the staff cheery.  One of them wiping down the bar, from the customer side, was having fun trying to 'accidentally' spray her colleague from the cleaning bottle.
COSHH training must not be until next week, I guess.

Just one look at this 'Spoons on the market square and you know exactly what it's going to be like inside.  And you'd be right.

Outdoor seating empty.

From here we just had enough time to call in at the fifth and final Beer Guide entry on the way back to the train station.

Punch Bowl (1 The Butts, CV34 4SS - web)
"The Famous Old Punch Bowl" according to what's written on the front of the pub.
"Warwick's finest real ale pub" according to their website.
I have been here before in 2014, but if memory serves me right, it's much-changed since then.  Very sports dominated on this occasion, with screens in every direction on every wall.  Great if you wanted to watch Jamie Vardy scoring against Arsenal.
They're obviously doing something right, having made it to the Beer Guide for 7 years on the trot, and my dark mild, 'Nutty Slack' from Wigan's Prospect Brewery was a fine pint.

Leaving a dark, wet and chilly Warwick behind, we caught our train back to Oxford where a visit the newly re-opened Holly Bush ended the evening for us.

Gouden Carolus in Mechelen

On day two in Belgium, I planned to head to the nearby city of Mechelen to visit one of the countries oldest breweries, Het Anker, purveyors of the wonderful 'Gouden Carolus'.

Mmmmm...

In my Brussels hotel I was up relatively bright and early in the morning.  Remarkable, seeing as I wasn't able to resist a visit to Moeder Lambik the previous evening, drinking some wickedly strong beers after my gig was finished at Magasin 4.

The morning's blue sky and sunshine turned out to be a false dawn: grey skies and a touch of rain took it's place before the train had pulled in to Mechelen.
But who needs sunshine to brighten things up, when you've got big yellow street-art like this...

Mechelen is a small city, midway between Brussels and Antwerp and home to just over 86,000 folks.

I made a long detour around suburban streets despite the brewery being well signposted, eventually making it to the home of Gouden Carolus.

Brasserie Het Anker (Guido Gezellelaan 49 -2800 Mechelen - web)

You can visit the brewery.  I didn't as I was scared of having to cancel a booking at the last minute and be charged the whopping €90 (!!!) late cancellation fee shown on their website.

So, no pictures of shiny fermenting vessels - just a grey, dull picture of the brewery tap...

Brasserie Het Anker and the brewery in the background.

But the Brasserie alone really is worth a visit. 
You can drink sensible strength beers with the 'Maneblusser' ales, but surely you've come for the traditional 'Gouden Carolus' that Het Anker is famed for.
It's named after the golden coins produced by Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who lived in Mechelen in the early 1500's.
I ordered the 'Hopsinjoor', a modern, hoppier interpretation, launched in 2008 and brewed with 5 varieties of hops to appeal to IPA enthusiasts.

Stopping for a second, I reverted to the 'Classic', a delicious 8.5% ABV amber brew.  You get raisins, caramel and orange, with a lingering sweet, alcoholic finish... I really have no idea what I'm talking about...
Also worth a visit is the shop to the rear of the brasserie, with good value bottles available, including some wonderful limited editions and barrel-aged versions.

Mechelen - looking grey but looking good.

Leaving Het Anker behind, I returned to the cathedral spire and paid my (hefty) entrance fee for the pleasure of climbing 500+ steps to reach the top.
St Rumbold's cathedral tower was designed to be 167m high, which would have made it the world's highest church spire, but financial restraints led to plans been curbed.
Even with the grey skies, Brussels and the Atomium were visible, with some great views in all directions.

Mechelen does, of course, have more than one bar worth visiting, but in my case I wanted to get back to the capital by mid-afternoon, with tickets in hand for more live music in the evening.

Back in Brussels...

A fleeting mention, if I may, for Le Barboteur Birotheque (Avenue Louis Bertrand 23, 1030 Brussels) which I detoured to, hopping off the train at Brussels Schaerbeek station (actually nowhere near this bar - my understanding of 'scale' on a map is getting worse).
Le Barboteur offered a great choice of beers from microbreweries, plus a large choice of bottles and cans on shelves along one wall.  On tap, I chose some imperial porter madness, with a 'Decontrol: Marshmallow & Vanilla Pie', an 11% bad-boy from Moscow's Zagovor Brewery.

Street corner beer cafe - Le Barboteur.

Across the other side of Brussels there is somewhere completely different...

Beerstorming (Chaussée d'Alsemberg 75, St Gilles - web)
Beerstorming is a micro-brewery located in a shop unit in the St Gilles district.  It consists of one single table at the front and dinky stainless steel brew-kit to the rear.
Their logo is "Our brewery is yours" and what they do is offer small groups the chance to learn about the brewing process before being unleashed on the kit to concoct their own.  These beers are brewed in 75 litre batches and, judging by those on offer to try today, the trend is to conjure up something wild 'n' wacky.

Easy to walk past... the unassuming Beerstorming Craft Brewery.

I had a 'Zwanzibar' which should have had chilli peppers in the mix, but they'd been disappointingly shy and you could barely taste them.  A little more flavoursome was the 'God Save the Beer' a 5.2% ABV IPA brewed with Earl Gray tea.
Also on the tap list was a sage beer and a nutmeg brown ale.

Beerstorming is well worth a visit, although don't expect your average bar - and be prepared to sit at the solitary table and chat all things beery with the staff and other visitors.

It's also only open Friday 2-6pm and Saturday 2-8pm.

 

Ça sent la bière - Brussels Bar Explorations

Brussels Beer Explorations

Including a couple of the Belgian capital's best bars, a Jacques Brel statue (from whence the post title comes), Punk IPA opportunities and Japanese psych rock. 

It was about time I went back to Brussels to negotiate an orderly withdrawal from the EU 
...to drink lots of beer and watch some noisy live bands.

I checked into my hotel, in the vicinity of the Avenue Louise shopping district and Palais de Justice.  From there I navigated my way down to the old town and made a bee-line for the crowds gathered around the inexplicably popular Manneken Pis. 
Just across the road from this is one of the cities most famous and characterful bars.

Multi-coloured bicycles on the walls, but still not detracting tourists from photographing the urinating toddler.

Le Poechenellekelder (Rue Du Chene 5 - web)
You've gotta love a bar full of mannequins and other assorted odd decorations.
Don't you?
Or perhaps I've just been affected by coming-of-drinking-age when ramshackle, cluttered 'olde ale houses' were all the rage.

That lengthy name roughly translates as 'puppet cellar', with the building once housing a puppet theatre.
My mid-afternoon visit was good timing to get a great table near the bar and efficient, friendly service.

There were three beers on tap, but a wealth of delightful bottles available from a hefty beer menu. From this I picked 'La Guillotine' - an 8.5% ABV Belgian pale ale by Brouwerij Huyghe.   Gutted that Newbury Tim beat me to the 'losing your head pun' on Untappd.
To accompany this, I ordered myself a tasty & filling plate of Spaghetti Du Chef.

This is the kind of place that you could happily linger, sampling a few beers and enjoying the fantastic surroundings.

When you strike up a conversation with him, you know you've had too many of those 8% beers.

But I didn't linger too long, as just a little further up Rue du Chȇne is a small square, where a bar I'd heard a lot about was situated.

Gist (Oud Korenhuis 30)
Gist focuses on micro breweries from Belgium and beyond and, unusually, serves a couple of them on cask.
I grabbed myself a 'Mongy IPA', brewed by Brasserie Cambier, hailing from somewhere in northern France.
Music comes from a big vinyl collection at one end of the bar and, on my visit, favoured wicked noisy psychedelia.  Which suited me down to the ground as I had tickets to see Japanese psych-rockers Acid Mothers Temple this evening.
Some bonkers music and a great beer list - I couldn't resist staying for a second, this time 'Pigeon', a 3.5% ABV sour IPA (?!?) brewed by La Source Beer Co.

Jacques!

Now, do you really need to visit Brewdog when in Brussels?
Probably not, but I was curious.
Their Brussels branch, opened in 2015, is located in the modernist buildings by Central Station.  This was, in a past-life, the headquarters of Belgian national airline Sabena.

Brewdog Brussels (Putterie 20 - web)
Once inside it's all very familiar to anyone who's visited a Brewdog-or-two: industrial-chic decor, big white beer-boards above the bar, neon signage, and seating ranging from canteen tables to high stools and wooden blocks.
Super-quick service ensued, despite the bar being pretty busy.  So quick that I was put on-the-spot to make a hasty choice from the list of 30+ beers.  I opted for a 'North X Temescal IPA', before twigging that North Brewery are from Leeds and it wasn't really the plan to come to Brussels for Yorkshire beers.  Nice as it may have been.

Looks familiar

Walking a fair way through the city centre, I made my way from Central Station eastwards, calling into the great Brussels Beer Project en-route.

Crossing the canal, it was ten-minutes walk further on to get to Magasin 4. If your musical taste takes in grungy, alternative, noisy & experimental delights, do check out Magasin 4 - it's a cracking venue.
And as an added bonus they serve several different types of local No Science beers in bottles for under €3.00.  'Heavy Porter' in hand, I picked my spot to stand and enjoy the psychedelia of Acid Mothers Temple.  

Acid Mothers Temple at Magasin 4.

More Belgian beers and bars and waffle (the written type) in part 2 shortly...