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The Great Sunderland Pub Slide
There is a crossover between the love of real ale and
football so it was in that tradition that myself and Pete Clarkson set off on
another weekend to the frozen north (and this time it was frozen!). The original
agenda was to watch Sunderland vs. Norwich then take in a tour of some of
Sunderland's and one or two other place's finest. Nature intervened early to
cause a slight agenda change, we had almost got to the ground when we overheard
someone on their mobile phone saying that the match was called off. No
alternative but to commence the drinking early. Drat!
We didn't so much go on a pub crawl as a pub slide. Although the roads were
clear the pavements were covered in snow and ice and navigation wasn't helped by
the fact that the parts of the A to Z we needed had been overtaken by
redevelopment! The first port of call was the New Derby, a typical 70s estate
pub with hanging baskets, there were only two real ales, Caledonian Deuchars IPA
and Timothy Taylor Landlord. The beer quality was average and we weren't
impressed.
Still things could only get better and they did with the Harbour View, a fairly
modern looking pub on the sea front with windows with criss crosses of lead
strips with six hand pumps on. The beer was on good form and it was worth
staying for three pints. This pub is also conveniently next to a B&B (shame we
hadn't booked in there).
The best was yet to come with the next two pubs, after a lengthy slide and
getting lost we finally found Fitzgerald's, a pub owned by the small north east
real ale pub chain Sir John Fitzgerald. The pub wouldn't look out of place in a
village centre, never mind the centre of Sunderland. The pub has about nine hand
pumps mainly selling beers from the North East microbrewers in two wooden
floored bars with plenty of room for seating. The best beer without a doubt was
Redburn Summus, in fact so good we took the rare step of having two pints of it.
From there we went to the Ivy House, a traditional, if somewhat large back
street free house once again with several beers on, which were of more than
drinkable quality but nothing really stood out there. After there we went to our
hotel in South Shields and a combination of tiredness and a lack of decent pubs
sent us to bed after watching the football highlights on TV. All in all the
Sunderland drinking experience was enjoyable and, barring the first pub we drank
no beers of less than drinkable quality and went in no pubs we wouldn't return
to.
After breakfast we headed off to suburban Jarrow to visit
the Robin Hood, home of the Jarrow Brewery. Whilst thumbing through the A to Z
to work out how to get there, the woman sitting opposite us offering to help
with directions was the wife of the Jarrow Brewery CAMRA Liaison Officer!
The journey was made all the more difficult because of the previous day's
snowfall. The pint of Venerable Bede and the friendly bar manager made the
journey worth it. We were greeted by four Jarrow beers and a guest.Venerable
Bede is a delicious full-bodied golden 4.5% beer with plenty of Malty flavour,
the rest of the beers we found to be somewhat lacking in taste and some had a
distinctly metallic flavour. The bar manager was extremely forthcoming in
talking about the brewery and the history of the beers themselves and showed us
round the brewery, which is housed behind one of those huge wooden doors, you'd
expect to see in a medieval castle.
The building has been a pub since 1824 and has been recently refurbished in a
modern but sympathetic style. The names of the beers reflect the area's history;
The Venerable Bede established a monastery on the south bank of the Tyne in what
is now Jarrow, Palmer's Resolution, a rather insipid 3.8% bitter was named after
the shipyard whose closure sparked off the Jarrow march of the 1930s and Old
Cornelius, a pleasant if under-flavoured 4.7% old was named after the locally
surviving participant of the Jarrow march (who was virtually a teetotaller!).
From there we went to Newcastle and has a couple of beers in the Victorian style
Bodega and watched the end of the Carling Cup final and weren't quite sure how
to react to Middlesborough winning! We then visited two pubs in York on the way
back to Birmingham; The quaint looking, but very smokey Maltings and the Achorne,
both selling distinctly average beers and then settled down for the journey back
to Birmingham.
Overall, we were impressed with the beer, particularly in Sunderland (if not the
weather). Apart from the cancelled football match it was a very enjoyable
weekend and the cancelled game at least gave us £23 extra beer money!
Cheers
Clive Walder
(c) 2004
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