Stockport

One good thing about beer is that it’s always there to pick you up when you’ve travelled to watch your football team lose.

I recently went to Stockport to watch Brighton and Hove Albion lose on a freezing Tuesday night in November. First we travelled to Manchester and did a selection of the usual real ale pubs. There’s no real need to go into detail about these pubs because Manchester’s real ale pubs are well documented. Suffice to say that the beer was all above the average expected quality and it’s good to report that The Smithfield has escaped the threatened Compulsory Purchase Order and has been pleasantly refurbished although it was a bit spooky to get speaking to a guy in the pub who moved from Birmingham and now drinks there.

The Crown, Stockport

We didn’t do Stockport that thoroughly; the awful Robinson’s pub on the way from the hotel to the ground was well worth forgetting. The first pub tried after the ground was a former free house that is now a Hyde’s pub, The Olde Vic. The Hyde’s Original was in good form and one of the regulars clocked my southern accent and made some lame joke about locals all having pet whippets. We then went to The Crown on Heaton Lane which is one of Stockport’s best pubs. I instantly fell in love with this pub; the customer is greeted with an array of 8 or 10 hand pumps. I plumped for a Tayberry beer followed by the Williams Bros seaweed beer Kelpie. For a 4.4% beer it was heavy and took ages to drink and I’m not sure I liked the seaweed flavour anyway. We must have been desperate afterwards because we went to the 24 hour Mcdonald’s near the station. I was rather miffed that I couldn’t have a KitKat McFlurry because the machine was being cleaned.

The next day started badly; it took ages to find somewhere to get a cooked breakfast and the first pub we were going to try was closed. We decided to visit the spa town of Buxton in Derbyshire and Glossop on the way back. A £9.20 Greater Manchester Wayfarer takes you not just all over Greater Manchester but also to parts of Cheshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and West Yorkshire.

Not only was it raining in Buxton we also had problems understanding the town map. It took us half an hour to find the first Good Beer Guide listed pub only to find that it didn’t open in the daytime. A short walk away was The Swan which sold an excellent pint of Storm Windgatherer which we supped while chatting with the locals. The next pub, The Beltane, was altogether different; a converted shop with three hand pumps. The pub is food orientated in the daytime and beer led in the evenings and is also a popular meeting place. It looks like a trendy bric a brac shop and the walls are adorned with what look like new age pictures but they are actually pictures depicting ancient Celtic rituals celebrating the coming of spring.

The No 61 bus took us to Glossop on a journey that would have been picturesque if it wasn’t dark. We nipped into a mediocre Hyde’s pub to use the Gents and had a poor half of one of the Hyde’s seasonal beers. We then went to the Globe brewpub and had the entire range (including one that went on while we were there). I passed the time chatting to Stacey the barmaid and a helpful Guinness drinking local called Adrian. That only left time for a visit to the pub next to the station and I had a quick pint of Arundel Something Willie. It was then time to travel back to Birmingham.
Balance sheet of the trip. Football match terrible beer good.

By Clive Walder