Don't stop the press!

A mid-week session is a fine balancing act. On the one hand, five days of uninterrupted slog can kill off any residual traces of humanity. On the other, oblivion on a Wednesday would make Thursday unbearable.

Claire, Michael and I have hit on a decent balance during our Wednesday or Thursday beer hunt. It started off being always on a Wednesday, or as we called it 'Blendsday'. We'd fire ourselves off into different pubs experimentally trying out different half-and-half combos (the best thus far is probably the 'Bishop's Stortford' - half Fuller's London Pride, half Milton Sackcloth - christened by St Radegund barkeep Ollie).

But novelty has given way to Michael's no-pratting-around demeanour, making Claire and myself big fans of a very decent Greene King boozer. Some will scoff. The brewery's ubiquity in our part of the world certainly breeds contempt. Additionally, there is a school of thought that there is no such thing as a decent Greene King pub - because there is no such thing as a decent GK beer.

The Free Press, Cambridge (pictured left), proves both propositions false. It's a warm place with a varied crowd all huddled over pints and halves. The lease clearly gives them the opportunity to raid the GK 'real guest' list - the earthy Tom Wood's Bomber County bitter and Bath Ales' easy-drinking Gem are good examples.

But the real triumph is Greene King XX Mild. It has a gently sour base delivered through a thick, gluggable body. At just 3% ABV, it is sessionable in the extreme - and session drinking is social drinking, end of.

It's a good match for meat dishes, which are in plentiful supply at the Press. The pub offers probably the most reliably enjoyable food in Cambridge. The landlord is keen to secure meat from local suppliers, making perhaps rather vanilla-sounding dishes such as liver & bacon and sausages & mash works of true joy. The sausages we chose earlier this week were pork & black pudding and were robustly juicy. As you can see, Claire and Michael (pictured) very happily scoffed the lot.

I'll go along with those who bad-mouth GK IPA - it's never an ideal drop, delivering the characteristic GK sourness without any balance. With the turnaround GK often expects, the beer is seldom well conditioned. But the Free Press makes a point of storing its beers long enough for them to develop - the Abbot, for example, is a reliable (if unexciting) pint. Even so, the real star is that mild. In this pub it's a beast of a beer.