Wigan - Beer Festival, Bass and Pie 'n' Mash

Four go on an adventure to Wigan, in search of historic pubs and fine ales and a beer festival in a leisure centre.
We were making good time under blue skies on the M6, the only delay encountered being the predictable traffic jam circumnavigating Oxford, some 5-minutes after setting off.  The rock playlist was curated by the man behind the wheel, Chairman John, who was going into great detail about when Richie Blackmore reached his peak.

I was spared the 8 minutes plus of Stargazer as we reached the final leg and needed to listen to the sat nav directions to deliver us to our car park by the hotel.

🕧12:30 - time to head to the Swan and Railway...

Swan and Railway Hotel (80 Wallgate, Wigan, WN1 1BA)
This is a great-lookin' red brick pub, built in 1898 by W.E.V. Compton.  There is a pleasing mosaic floor displaying the hotel name in the doorway, with options of heading right into the narrow bar or straight to a corridor, with serving hatch, Victorian tiles, some great glasswork, staircase, and routes to two other rooms.

Along the bar were seven hand pumps, serving Bank Top 'Dark Mild' (first beer thumbs-up from one of our party), a stout from Brewsmith (I'll be back for that before closing time), pale ales from Pinnacle and Beerworks, a fruity collab between Ossett and Vault City, Black Sheep best bitter, and Bass🔺.
A great choice, but I hadn't had a pint of Bass in 2025, so started the day with two of 'em.

And a pie..

The only problem with the Swan and Railway was the danger that we may never leave.  After all, we had a fine selection of beers, a seat by the fire, sport on the TV, and a pie menu. 

But we're more intrepid than that - and figured we'd be back.  As it was, we met some of the team from the pub in the beer festival later and made a couple of revisits, getting chatting to the owners about their dedication to Bass and their recent acquisition of the Woodman in Birmingham.  We also got a tip about sleeping with onions in your socks when you're coming down with a rotten cold...not tried and tested yet.

We didn't have far to go to the next destination - under the railway bridge, turn left and into the first arch.

Wigan Central (Arch No.1 and 2, Queen Street, Wigan, WN1 4DY)
The station-style signage and giant blue locomotive on the window give a clue that they've embraced the railway theme here.  They really have...railway carriage seating to one side, a bar in a bit of rolling stock, signs and historic pictures throughout, and wooden signals on the tables to indicate you're ready for service (didn't see this in action, so it may be a throwback to 20/21).

The Bank Top 'Signal' is the house beer (rebadged 'Flat Cap', I believe), alongside five other cask ales and some craft keg lines that I didn't even look at on this visit (again, we'd be back, drinking murky pale ale as a DJ souped up 80's classics at a thunderous volume in the side room on Saturday evening).  On a quieter Thursday afternoon I picked a 4.2% pale called 'Outside the Frame' from the nearby Black Lodge Brewery.

Leaving Wigan Central, we ambled up Wallgate as far as one of the pubs on the local Ale Trail, a one-time Wigan Good Beer Guide Entry.

The Berkeley (27-29 Wallgate, Wigan, WN1 1LD)
Heading straight to the bar we found four hand pumps serving 'Wainwright', 'Cumbria Way', and Moorhouses 'Blonde Witch' and 'White Witch'.
The staff member was efficient and no-nonsense...
"What's the difference between the White Witch and Blonde Witch?"
"They're both popular".
You'd have been bold to ask for more details.  Or for a taster.

We took our picks of the Moorhouse beers to a high table in the centre of the pub, asking ourselves 'how is this not a Wetherspoon's?  The sprawling size of the place, the carpet, the layout and style of the furniture were all JDW-like, as was the impressive mid-afternoon crowd. 
Looking above us at the closed upper floor, we pondered if the balconies and unusual pillars rearranged themselves overnight in a Hogwarts style...I fear we were knocking back the ale too fast and talking nonsense already - and we still had a beer festival to get to. 

The clock had ticked past post-pandemic hotel check-in time (it's never going back to 2pm is it?).  So we drank up, and got ourselves settled in our lodgings.  A thirty minute 'freshening up' break - cup of tea, spot of a daytime TV quiz show, a glance at the local map to see how far it was to the pubs I wanted to visit - then we were back on the move. 
A walk up Millgate took us to Winstanley Gardens and the Face of Wigan...

We were heading to the John Bull Chop House, which is situated on a cobbled lane to the side of the gardens.  Although I suspect we'd have diverted here anyway as soon as we heard Master of Puppets playing from the speaker in the doorway.

John Bull Chophouse (2 Coopers Row, Market Place, Wigan, WN1 1PQ)
This is very much the rock pub to complement our in-car soundtrack on our journey up the motorway.   As such, we ended up back here late on both Friday and Saturday nights - wild rumours may suggest that I did a little dance at some point.  Cracking music and a great atmosphere when it was busy with customers in the night-time.  Here, however, is the early doors photograph...

Timothy Taylor 'Boltmaker', Thwaites 'Gold', or Thwaites 'Brewhouse' were the cask ale choices on our visit.  The malty, treacly, 4.3% American brown ale Brewhouse was delicious.  A few of these were sunk on our consecutive visits. 

We'd come to Wigan because of the beer festival with an enticing list of beers, so figured it was about time we made the effort to get there.
We hopped aboard the vintage bus which had been laid on as a shuttle between the town centre and the Robin Park Leisure Centre.

Situated between a retail park and Wigan's football stadium, the leisure centre was an odd venue for the festival, with non-beer-quaffing folk doing healthy sporty stuff and posters advertising various medical clinics including, ironically, free liver scans.

 

The bar was split into light and dark halves - the dark side for me on Thursday evening, with a switch to the paler stuff on Friday.  I started with Vocation 'Birthday Cake' milk stout from the wooden cask, complemented Clay Brow's 'The Hooded Monk' as having the best pump clip of the festival, and spent a while trying to decide whether or not I actually liked the draft red wine barrel aged 11% old ale from Romanian brewery Blackout.  Yep, this was a festival that really did the craft keg justice.
Top marks for the value pie and peas available on the catering stall which nourished me well for two visits.

Wrapping things up/running out of tokens, we caught a bus back to the centre and popped back into the Swan & Railway for a nightcap that I probably didn't need.

I'll be back in Wigan for the next post as we continued to explore the pubs of the town.

Rugby Beer Fest, Tap Room and a BCA Duo

An afternoon spent in the town of Rugby, visiting a couple of pubs that were new to me, then popping my head into the beer festival.  And let's squeeze a cheeky Coventry tick in on the way home, why not?
Yep, having grumbled profusely about the Six Nations last week, here I was heading to the birthplace of the game...

  

My last visit here was in 2019 when I made an idiotic valiant attempt to get around all the Good Beer Guide entries in one go.
The one I missed that time around was the Raglan Arms, now under the ownership of Black Country Ales but out of the Guide.  Whilst the new entry (a closed pub in 2019) is The Windmill, also part of the Black Country Ales empire.
Anyone still with me?

The Windmill Inn (1 North Street, Rugby, CV21 2AB - web)
Three storeys with bay windows on one side; and a very different second half, with an old carriageway entrance.  All overshadowed by the mock-Tudor of The Crown next door.

This was a pretty big pub with a pretty small number of customers on my visit.  All of whom seemed to be local, several of them taking the time to tell me the barman was changing a barrel and would be back in a moment. 

From the usual wide BCA choice, I ordered a Weatheroak 'Keystone Hops', my decision based purely on name and pump-clip, like the beer professional I am.

Lots of beers, no bar man

Sturdy bench seating

Quick picture of the best building in town...

Then a short walk past the Rugby School and through an underpass to the second Black Country Ales pub of the day.  I'll do all 42 of them eventually, but by that time they'll probably have added more.

Raglan Arms (50 Dunchurch Road, Rugby, CV22 6AD - web)
There were another handful of locals hanging out at the bar in the Raglan, but it was very quiet other than that, probably due to being just out of the town centre, at a time when sensible people are at work or sitting at home watching Tipping Point.
There was a nice snug in a front room, Northamptonshire skittles and darts at the back, and seating in the window alcove on repurposed beer barrels.

I know I'm in a minority - but I like sitting on old beer barrels!

I enjoyed a half of Welbeck Abbey 'Admiral Keppel', peacefully sat on red cushioned bench seating, reading Inn Touch, the local CAMRA beer mag.  A completely quiet and uneventful pub visit, which suits me fine sometimes.
Back-tracking on myself, I decided to pop into the Rugby Tap Room as I passed by.

Rugby Tap Room (4 St Matthew's Street, Rugby, CV21 4BY - web)
The bottle shop next door seems to have gone since the last time I was here, leaving just the one room with the bar at the back alongside a shelf of funky cans and craft gins.  It's a decent micropub, with some proper seating on benches, friendly folk and a good beer selection.
Cask ales are all dispensed straight from the barrel and on this visit came from Brunswick, Byatts and Phipps NBC, whose retro-looking 'Diamond Ale' was my pick.  This was a tasty amber ale, brewed to an old 18th century recipe and most enjoyable. 

Beer festival, then?
2022 marked the 37th Rugby beer fest, offering 36 beers as well as ciders and several European bottles.
'Foreign Beer List' item number one was Tynt Meadow, from Leicestershire.  Crikey, I know we're a divided nation, but I missed the part when Leicester became foreign.

Beer fest venue

The festival was taking place in Arnold House, a former finishing school for girls, which was subsequently brought by the Masons in 1935.  Somewhere within is a temple, but it's beyond locked doors, sadly preventing tipsy inquisitive CAMRA members wandering into it, slopping beer from their festival glass.
Instead, all the action was in a hall and adjacent bar on the ground floor.  The tables had all been grabbed by the enthusiastic early arrivals, well on their way through ticking the list and scoring the beers.

Those beers came from Warwickshire and surrounding counties, plus a few which had traveled a bit further, with a selection from Liverpool, hometown of the festival organiser.
The Flagship Brewery coffee and orange stout, 'Strobe', was probably the best of my picks, whilst I also enjoyed a Church End 'Rest in Peace'.  The latter was listed in the programme as "our strong beer for the brave or foolish".   Aha - foolish - that'll be me!

On the same day, Blackpool Jane was at Wigan beer festival, providing Wigan with a comprehensive '20 minute read' write-up.  Rugby get the raw deal with my reportage - a couple of hundred words from this amateur drunkard.  But I did enjoy my short visit, this being the first indoor festival that I've attended since March 2020.

Deciding it was time to move on, I navigated back to the railway station and made the 10-minute trip to Coventry.  Where I figured I may as well break my journey and visit the one city centre Beer Guide pub that I hadn't yet been to. 

Town Crier (Corporation Street, Coventry, CV1 1PB)
I've passed this a fair few times and knew it had appeared in the Guide before, but had never set foot inside.
Built in the 80's by Banks's Brewery, this takes up a remarkable amount of city space for a pub, on land that is now probably being coveted by developers to build Coventry's 333rd student hall.

Stepping inside, it's one large open-plan room, with raised areas, low walls and pillars sort of dividing it up and giving it a bit of character.  On the bar was a choice of Tetley's, Pedigree or Hobgoblin.  A pint of the Tetley's 'Orignal Cask' for me - okay, but not a patch on the dark beers I'd be drinking at the beer fest.

Funky lighting, writing on the beams, and a group of ladies who you just know are gonna cause trouble later

Just needed to make sure I didn't get carried away and spend too long with my Tetley and  the poptastic soundtrack and miss the train.

If only there was somewhere I could keep an eye on the time...

Back to the Beer Festival

The sun was shining, spirits were high, and we were heading to our first beer festival since March 2020, making our way to Twyford, Berkshire.

Casting my mind back to the heady, carefree times of 2019 we had a calendar marked with tons of beer festivals, from those in the back of a pub to those in marquees and huge halls.  

Beer festivals brought us spectacular choices of real ales, sometimes in wonderful buildings such as our very own Oxford Town Hall...

And sometimes with a smaller choice..

Sidmouth Conservative Club Folk Week beer fest

Occasionally with visits from the local Morris dancers...

Aylesbury Beer Festival

And gourmet beer festival cuisine...

Pie in a Cob, why not? GBBF

On Saturday 26th June, we were back...boozin' in the middle of a field in Berkshire!

Making our way to the 11th Twyford Beer Festival, a smooth-running journey meant we arrived super-early before the gates were open.  We could technically have been the first ones in, but hung back and let other folks form a queue, so we didn't look too eager.
The bonus of coming early was picking a good spot and getting the first few beers in without any waiting time.
We found a fine spot with view of the stage and short trek to the bar, sitting next to three chaps with fantastic beards worthy of a ZZTop tribute act.

My first couple of beers came from Ascot's Disruption Is Brewing - a lovely pale ale, followed by 'Like Father Like Son', a hefty imperial Russian stout which only a complete imbecile would order at 12:15 in the sunshine.
All the ales traveled a short distance from Berkshire and surrounding counties and most were priced at £4 a pint.  We supped some wonderful beers from Rebellion, Dolphin, Bond Brews and Elusive.

Choices, choices...

The elephant in the room. 🐘
We're kinda still 'locked down'.  Sort of.  Aren't we?
When 'freedom day' failed to happen on the 21st, we figured we'd be getting an e-mail informing us that we'd have to wait a couple of months more for the beer festival.  But remarkably enough it went ahead, all done above-board in consultation with the local council.

I guess we were sat no closer to anyone than we would be in a busy beer garden or on the  south coast beaches when the Daily Mirror tells us we're due a heatwave at the weekend. 
Helped by my seismic epsilon variant hay fever, which was enough to deter anyone from settling down too close to me!

The downfall - the bit where it didn't work - was when the site reached peak business mid-afternoon.  The bar is the white tent on the right side of the picture below and the queue to it stretches just off the left side...

Thirty-plus minute queues proved too much for us and we used our remaining tokens in one go.  You couldn't keep popping back for halves.

But a big round of applause to the folks who organised Twyford beer festival in the strangest of times and put on a successful event.  Bands played to audiences for the first time in ages.  Everyone from youthful hipsters to families to miserable old buggers like me looked to be having a good time.  And a stack of cash was raised for charity.   So all good all round, then! 🍻

It's a shame we left a little earlier than intended and I missed the Elusive 11% imperial stout (and their fantastically named 'Crisp Whitty'). 
Never mind though - there was something stupidly strong with my name on it in the Weather Station in Reading.

Wantage Beer Festival and Pubs - a last weekend of normality?

The 10th Wantage Beer Festival, on Friday and Saturday 13th and 14th March, just managed to go ahead, creeping in before the current Covid-19 outbreak took a turn for the worse and even a visit to the local pub is being advised against.
Troubling times indeed.

Social Gathering.  Now frowned upon.

We received a warm welcome from the White Horse CAMRA representatives at the entrance to the Beacon Centre.
There were around a dozen members of the Oxford branch who'd make the trip here today, and it was a pleasure to get together and enjoy the ales, putting the doom and gloom of world news out of our minds for a while.

Wantage beer fest always manage to get a nice mix of local ales and a selection that you're less likely to see.
The 8% ABV Barley Wine from Corinium Ales proved to be a popular choice and was a fantastic tipple - albeit, just the third of a pint measure being advisable.
It's also been a while since I've seen anything by the Farringdon Brewery - their finely named 'Black as your Soul' being an enjoyable (very) dark mild.
Wiltshire was well represented, with Hop Kettle managing to throw in a contender for beer of the day, alongside a number of the counties breweries that I'm less familiar with.

Ready to serve.

Last time I wrote about this beer fest, we headed around the corner afterwards to the wonderful and highly recommended Royal Oak.
So this time I thought I'd cover a couple of other pubs that make a beer-drinking trip to Wantage well worth the effort...starting with this one:

The Shoulder of Mutton (38 Wallingford Street, Wantage, OX12 8AX - web)
I've always really liked this traditional Victorian street corner pub - full of character and reliable for a good pint of beer.
There's a left/right conundrum on the way in.  Heading to the right, service is from a small counter to the side of the bar, on the corridor leading to the rear yard and function room.

The lady behind the bar is not transparent in real life...

No idea how I managed that.

There's always been a robust choice of ales in the Shoulder of Mutton.  From the beer list below, I made a fine choice, picking the 'Heartbreak' stout, from Barefaced Brewing of Bournemouth.

Butt's Barbus tempting due to the artwork.

Between the two rooms of the pub is a great snug, with white wood panelling and cushioned seats around one large table.
We shared this with a trio of professional beer tickers, in their caps and t-shirts advertising Ealing Beer festival 1998 and such like, jotting down notes of the ales tried at the Beacon.
There's no music or distractions at the Shoulder of Mutton, just the gentle hum of conversation from contented ale drinkers.

Glasses emptied, we moved on, straight across the road to another of the town's Good Beer Guide pubs.

The Kings Arms (39 Wallingford Street, Wantage, OX12 8AU - web)

This used to be a neglected and run-down town boozer, but has been successfully resurrected in recent years.  With a make-over which just about manages to retain an historic feel, it was proving a popular spot this Saturday afternoon with a good crowd of customers.
There was a superb selection of beers on the bar on this visit.  A Dark Revolution session ale, 'Sonic', was my pick of the bunch, whilst I headed back a while later to try the murky, fruity, modern IPA from Elusive.

Leaving the pub, we walked up the road just in time to see an Oxford bus departing.
Which meant a 20-minute stop-off and an Arkells '3B' in the Bear.
We ALWAYS just miss a bus and end up in the Bear.

Back on the S8 a short while later, we pressed the stop button and jumped off in East Hanney.
There's a handy house locator for the villages of East and West Hanney, ideal for tragic people like me who can't use Google maps cause they've run out of phone battery uploading pump-clip pictures to Untappd.

We found a footpath, promising West Hanney was a half-mile away, and took a brisk stroll across the fields as dusk approached.  Ten minutes later, as the path took us through the churchyard, we could see the lights of The Plough Inn...

The Plough (Church Street, West Hanney, OX12 0LN)
This is one of nine community owned pubs across Oxfordshire, having been brought by a local group when Punch Taverns put it up for sale in 2015.
Dating back to the mid 17th century, The Plough is timber-framed with thatched roof and a great country-pub feel to it.
The furthest room looked to be set up for dining, although I didn't venture into it (half-arsed, pub explorer!).  The tables around the bar are on two levels, with cosy corners and a door through to a pleasant garden.

From four ales on the bar, I grabbed a 'Chapel Rock' by Skinners, which was in fine condition and an enjoyable pint.

A big thank you goes out to our friends Tim and Marta who unexpectedly came to pick us up from here, hence saving a stagger down the country lane in the dark.
And a big apology goes out to Tim and Marta for my subsequently falling asleep on their sofa.  I blame the Corinium barley wine!

I was gonna end this post with my jovial plans to get around all those remaining Oxfordshire Good Beer Guide pubs which have so far eluded me.
But due to the Perils of the Pandemic, it's questionable whether pubs can, or should, stay open.
We've an obligation to support our NHS by not acting in a way that assists the spread of the virus.  But on the other hand, I fear for the many businesses which, without significant government support, rely on our custom to survive.

Looking forward to a time when I can get back to planning nationwide pub crawling...
Take care.