Previous Pint Pleasures - June 30th, 2001

Guinness Eileen

The Red Lion Beer Festival, Snargate, Kent, June 21-24, 2001

This past weekend I made my first pilgrimage to a famous (Romney) Martian tradition: the beer festival at the Red Lion in Snargate. When I was here before the festival fell on an inconvenient weekend; this year the Saturday afternoon was free, the car had petrol, and Doris Jemison's unique untouched pub beckoned irresistibly. (See my previous review.) So off we went.

It was a warm, extremely sunny day, the atmosphere growing hotter and balmier as we wormed our way across the marsh to the remote pub. In the car park was an old steam friction engine demonstrating its working parts while in the adjacent field two rather bored-looking horses stood watching. Inside the pub 12 different real ales were being served and the pub's three small rooms were packed. After ordering our pints we joined a group of friends outside in the pub's ample garden which was positively glowing with its lush green hedges and June flowers. As three beefy chickens strutted their stuff between the tables we sipped our quickly-warming pints under an impressively blazing sun.

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The first pint we tasted was Brooker's Bitter & Twisted ( 3.8% ABV, Harviestoun Brewery, Dollar, Clackmannanshire). This lovely golden ale, voted Champion Beer of Scotland in 2000, has a nice hoppy bitter and is a perfect beer with which to start a tasting session. It's a surprisingly English ale from a Scottish brewery.

Next we shared two excellent pints. The first was Sheeps Eye (4.1% ABV, Nethergate Brewery Co. Ltd., Clare, Suffolk). This is a lovely brew, with a rich charcoal-gray bitterness lying at the bottom of a crisp summery ale. The taste is like sunshine with mystery -- yes, a bit of mystery was needed to help temper that ruthless sunshine. I was so happy I'd remembered my sunblock or I might have ended up as crisp as the Sheeps Eye.

The other pint was Ginger Tom (3.9% ABV, Barnsley Brewing Company Ltd, Barnsley, South Yorkshire). This is an absolutely amazing beer with great character, another pure gem from the oh-so-wonderful Barnsley Brewery. Ginger Cat is a dark but wonderfully bitter ale with a heavy hint of fresh ginger. Mmmmmm, YUMMMMMMMM!!!! It's oh so drinkable...aaah, a truly lovely pint! It brings to mind the ginger toms in my life: Timothys II, III, and IV, all wonderful cats. (In case you're wondering about Timothy I, he belonged to friends so I didn't live with him. But he was a charming gentleman as well.)

At that point I heard a strange screaming from the field just beyond, a rather raucous screech. Was my Ginger Tom scaring the local wildlife? When I went to investigate I spotted a wild turkey perched on a fence demanding his land rights. Do chickens and turkeys fight? Do wild fowl and domestic fowl fight? Unlike Clint Eastwood and his pigeons in In The Line of Fire, I know so little about chickens and turkeys...

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PUB UPDATES:

  • LIFEBOAT, FOLKESTONE: The past weeks have brought a number of new tastings at this constantly rotating pub. (I'm of course referring to the beer selection; the pub itself stays relatively still.) Owzat! (4.5% ABV, Wychwood Brewery, Widney, Oxfordshire) is a honeylike beer, round and full-bodied, with a subtle bitterness which fizzes on the tongue. "Owzat!" is apparently a cricket term, and that's why there's a cricket ball on the label. I don't know much about the game of cricket, but I do know I like the baby tree crickets that come in through the windows this time of year. The next tasting was of Boss Hogg (4.8% ABV, Arundel Brewery, Arundel, West Sussex). Blecch! This is a sweet and treacly beer, a hog of a boss in fluffy clothes, a biker in drag who drinks Bud, smokes a sweet stinky cigar, and wears a magnolia blossom corsage. Apparently Boss Hogg was the sheriff in "The Dukes of Hazzard", which I never actually saw. The closest I got to any familiarization with the popular TV series was back in the 1980s at a friend's birthday party at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood, where, after a little stealthy skinnydipping we dined on Ritz crackers with olives and Hershey syrup served poolside on Dukes of Hazzard tableware. I remember the actor Richard Gere was at the hotel at the time, and because of him I ended up with a plastic shark fin in my eye. But this isn't about beer, so if you want to know the whole story you'll have to e-mail me personally. Another recent tasting was Golden Arrow (4.5% ABV, Cottage Brewing Co. Ltd., Castle Cary, Somerset), a mildly amusing beer with a malty bitterness. And then there was Bee Sting (4.7% ABV, WH Brakspear & Sons, Hemley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire), a light-coloured summer ale with a spicy hopness, effective for spicing up another dark June day. But what's with the bee venom? This doesn't sting; it's hardly irritating. Perhaps it has just a homeopathic touch of bee sting for the immune system...

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İ2001 JC Mitchell