J'accuse: Wenlock runs out

So Hoxton's Wenlock Arms faces the chop, eh? One co-owner wants to sell and the other cannot buy him out, so it's to the estate agents they go. The dread of redevelopment hangs heavy.

Those unfamiliar with this pub, famous in London at least, will not be aware of just how polarised the debate is over this establishment. Dirty, mean-spirited and clique-ridden? Or ale palace, characterful and charming?

The truth is it is both, but never at the same time. On a day when there's Chas & Dave-style tinkling of the ivories and singalongs and the locals are in on the fun it's a ding-dong right aaaahld Laaaaahndon boozer, with all welcome to join in. But you'll go in the next day to the silence of the disgusted, with tumbleweed the only distraction between you and contemptful locals who would rather sit in an empty pub without your sort. On that day, the service will run the full gamut between silent, inattentive and outright - and even shockingly - rude.

The hipsters so routinely disdained by the locals and barstaff seem to be running a campaign to keep the place open. I certainly welcome that - even if I regard their patience at the Wenlock's unfathomably mercurial mood swings as saintly in the extreme. The current management have had the place for 16 years and fresh blood could tart the pub up (a deep clean might eradicate the retch-worthy stench of foetid, dried urine emanating from the gents) without blitzing what is, all told, a characterful interior. It would be a real pity to lose a 175 year old pub that stands alone in its street as a living link with times gone by and could, in the right hands, continue to offer a great deal to the area.

And yet I cannot tolerate the notion, expressed here in the Evening Standard, that its loss would disfigure London's pub-going scene for good or eradicate 'London's best pub' - for all that it has an admirable focus on excellent craft cask beer.

The Globe in Morning Lane, Hackney, only has London Pride and Young's Bitter on cask - but both are kept well and the service is unfailingly friendly. After a couple of visits, they may not know your name but they recognise you and ask after you. The locals - mostly 50+, working class and mixed between men and women and black and white - are not in the least bothered by the minority of middle class 20-somethings that come in, rallying round to offer seats and organise tables when live jazz is playing on a Sunday. The late night regulars cheer on the midnight karaoke come Saturday ('I Get a Kick Out of You - Swing Version' is considered a bracing challenge). There are teas organised for Monday afternoons and special offers that encourage the odd treat (bottle of Prosecco for £11.50) while not promoting crass binges.

I think you see where I'm heading. CAMRA may have afforded the Globe a place in the Good Beer Guide 2010 (I don't know if it's in the 2011 edition yet) but its safe selection of ales would not excite the beer blogging world and - god forbid - were it under threat, I wonder how much support in the wider media it would muster.

London would miss the Wenlock's potential. But the Globe is a vital community resource, with dedicated staff who put in the hours and refresh the offer.

I know where I've spent most money.

Wenlock Arms photo (Creative Commons Licence) courtesy of Glyn Baker.
Globe on Morning Lane photo (Creative Commons Licence) courtesy of Ewan Munro.

Battle of the beer apps!

Enjoy this guest post from Black Lagoon blogger and TV industry legend Matt Nida. You may remember him from the optimisitically titled Cambridge pub guide video Pubcast #1. This copy was written before CAMRA very recently changed its pricing policy on its GBG app - I've published the original review plus a footnote to demonstrate how wrong it was before and how much better the situation is now.

Demographically speaking, the smartphone crowd is probably more at home in an All Bar One than a traditional pub. But whilst Apple's much-hyped iPhone might now be the archetypal accessory of the Modern London Media Tosser, few people who've actually bought one would deny that having that level of fast, easy, ubiquitous access to the internet is incredibly useful - never more so than when trying to locate a good place to drink in unfamiliar surroundings. To this end, two new applications recently turned up in the iPhone's App Store with the sole purpose of connecting drinkers to watering holes.

CaskFinder is a free app that pulls its data from two different sources: the Cask Marque Trust's pub quality inspection scheme and the Cyclops beer database. This gives you two different ways to find a new pub. Click on the Cask Marque Pubs button and you'll immediately be taken to a map showing your current location (courtesy of the iPhone's handy built-in GPS) with all the nearby Cask Marque-accredited pubs marked clearly with quaint little pint icons. Tapping on a pub takes you to a page which gives you the address and telephone number of the pub (tap again to ring the pub directly), a link to the pub's website and a list of beers currently on offer. These are divided into those tested by Cask Marque and those that haven't been; tapping on one of the tested beers takes you to a page giving you some basic facts about the brew in question, such as alcohol content, colour, taste and smell. From here, you can add your own rating which will be reflected in the average star rating at the top of the page.

Back on the main menu, there's also a Beers button, which takes you to a database of beers that you can view either by name or by brewery. Tapping on a beer will take you to its stats page, at the top of which there's a "Where to Drink?" button. Tap this and you'll be taken to a map showing all the pubs in the surrounding area serving this particular beer (as results are likely to be sparse for most beers listed, you can zoom out to increase the range and thus the likelihood of a pub serving your beer). This is potentially a killer feature, but annoyingly the list of beers itself is somewhat patchy; for example, there are no Harvey's or Timothy Taylor's beers listed at all. Still, it's a neat idea, and Cyclops claim to update the database daily, so hopefully it'll become more useful over time. There's also a couple of other fun features in the form of a "beer of the week", a beer festival calendar and a beer blog by Pete Brown.

Where CaskFinder falls down somewhat is the interface. Whilst I admire the developer's courage in shunning Apple's attempts to standardise all UIs to the same conventions, the rather sickly yellows and Tellytubby-ish icons and typefaces aren't particular polished or pleasant to use, whilst the background, although clearly intended to be a foaming pint of ale, looks rather like a pale blue Aero. Moreover, the lack of any overt curation or comment about the pubs in question ultimately limits the app's usefulness; beyond their certification, there's little indication what a pub might be like to drink in once you get there. Still, if you trust Cask Marque's standards then there's no doubt that CaskFinder will speed up the process of finding a decent pint, and once it's a bit more comprehensive the beer location feature could well prove incredibly useful.

Elsewhere on the App Store is CAMRA's own Good Beer Guide Mobile, an iPhone version of the organisation's hugely successful annual book/bible. CAMRA are by no means infallible, and I could probably argue some of the finer details about their criteria for what makes a good pub, but there's no denying that the GBG is an authoritative and on the whole reliable guide, so you could be forgiven for approaching the app with high expectations. Its premium heritage is reflected in the price - a princely £1.19 - and upon launching you're immediately presented with a much classier, Apple-ish menu than CaskFinder's. The main menu offers you several ways to search for a pub; once again you can use the GPS to look for GBG-listed pubs in your immediate vicinity, or you can search by address, postcode or (neatly) London tube station. Search results are presented in a listed sorted by distance in miles, with a range of icons indicating amenities at each venue. Alternatively, they can be viewed on a map. Tapping on the pub takes you contact details, and tabs at the bottom of the page allow you to pull up a beer menu (with comments on each beer from the GBG), a list of features, a map and the all-important Good Beer Guide review. Tapping a star button at the top of the page let you save the pub to a list of favourites for quick access later on.

And... that's it. There's no access to any of the other editorial features of the GBG, no beer or brewery index, no user ratings, no ability to search for pubs via beers available or indeed using any criteria other than location. It's an unbelievable own goal. Given that the app pulls its data from one of the most comprehensive critical drinking resources on the market, it's incredibly limited in terms of how one can interface with this data. Even a simple full text search would have been nice, but that's too much to ask for. Essentially, unless you're using the GPS feature, it's actually quicker to find a pub that piques your interest by flicking through the paper copy than using the app.

And then there's the pricing. Your up-front £1.19 isn't the only cost. Once you've downloaded the app, you can use it for thirty days, after which time you'll be asked to pay a further £8.99 (!) for another year's access. If you're a CAMRA member this actually makes the app more expensive than a physical copy of the book, despite being significantly less functional and despite the distribution and material costs of the app being a fraction of those behind publishing a book. If you already own the book, you've got no choice other than to pay for it again. In the past I've been critical of the aggressive race-to-the-bottom price wars in the App Store, and am happy to pay a fair price for a decent app, but there's no excuse for the Murdochian "PROTECT THE PRINT REVENUE!!" pricing of digital goods this way.

Ultimately, CAMRA could have sewn up the market here, but in classic foreheard-slapping CAMRA fashion they've dropped the ball badly. The Good Beer Guide text remains useful and dependable, but the really limited interface indicates that no-one really thought through how users might actually want to use this app. The hugely unrealistic pricing is the final nail in the coffin, suggesting that CAMRA developed this app because someone told them they ought to do one in order to keep up - shovelware of the worst kind. CaskFinder, on the other hand, is ugly and patchy in places, but makes a few gestures at dynamic content and has some fun features that give the user a few different options for tracking down a good pint quickly. Plus it's free, so you can use the money that CAMRA would otherwise gouge you for and spend it on, say, some beer.

STOP PRESS!! It seems CAMRA decided very recently to adopt a different pricing model, slashing the £8.99 cost to just £4.99 and allowing users to download the data. This means you still have access to the 2010 Guide on your iPhone if you decide not to renew the subscription in 2011 - fair dos and a big improvement. Good job. Having spoken to Matt, he confirms, however, that his review of the app as an app remains the same.

Finally, take a look at this debate on the Guardian's excellent Word of Mouth blog about which pub guide is best. The comments promise to be entertaining.

Too Stoned to blog - a leaf out of Tandie's book

He won't realise the effect he's had on me. Both of my loyal readers have been plaguing me of late, asking what I've been up to.

In fact, I've been taking Tandleman's oft exclaimed advice to get out of the house and drink beer in pubs a lot more - which has led to me writing about ales and the pub trade a lot less.

Every visit to the St Radegund Pub - with its gorgeous, reinvented and dry-hopped Milton Habit Ale, the Rake (where decent, friendly staff have finally been found and Stone Imperial Russian Stout can be supped), Ye Olde Mitre and Stonch's peerless gaff the Gunmakers (where the food has gone from super to destination-class) has seen me whip out my phone, take a snap and resolve - this time! - to update the blog.

To no avail. Though - and I suspect this is where I'll face Tandie's wrath - I have been updating the @jesus_john Twitter feed with beery experiences, et al. That's still worth a look for the criminally bored among you.

But I'm hoping this mea culpa will spur me to greater things in the coming weeks and months before another inevitable trough in activity.

In the meantime, it would be remiss of me not to point all and sundry to the beer blogging masterclass BGBW 2009 top gong winner Pete Brown gave on how parliamentary forces are warping statistics to back their claim we're all one Drambuie away from liver-related oblivion. This work is proper journalism at its finest, challenging perceptions with a fair approach. Good work - read all the related posts, they start here.

Until next time, beer fans.

Lights, CAMRA, action!

A conversation with Impy Malting led inevitably to the subject of pubs & beer and, for want of something new to say about them, their presence on the silver screen.

Can any cinematic beer moment top this from classic 1958 war flick Ice Cold in Alex?



No, basically. John Mills' able quaffing has me all aflutter - though not, perhaps, as much as the charming Sylvia Syms does.

There is, however, a fierce contender. This depiction of the Wenlock Arms from 1981's An American Werewolf in London stands the test of time. As does the pub itself - it hasn't changed a bit.



So, what other good'uns are out there?

Roman holiday

While the two-week honeymoon my wife and I enjoyed from Rome through Umbria in September was, perhaps, a little too geographically limited to qualify on the eighteenth century Grand Tour scale of mind expansion (we didn't, after all, visit many brothels), some of the beers we enjoyed certainly did. Italy is incubating a beer culture that looks almost ready to pop out of its parochial shell.

On his blog, Jeff has waxed lyrical about the Trastevere district of Rome and its stellar pub Ma Che Siete Venuti a Fà - none of which will stop me doing the same. First of all, the tiny, long corridor of an interior, with wood smothered in footie memorabilia (chiming with the establishment's nickname as 'The Football Pub') is in itself tremendously imbued with the charm of its locals, exuding warmth and humour. On mentioning I knew Jeff a little, Manuele (pictured above, left with jesusjohn) was generous to a fault and invited his locals to regale us with anecdotes of their trip to see Jeff and experience CAMRA's GBBF a couple of years ago. To hear Romans excitedly claim, seemingly with genuine affection, 'I love Earl's Court - it's a special place' was one of the more surreal experiences of the trip, but lovely for all that.

Manuele's beer selection is first class and his sourcing of these nectars, on questioning, seemed to rely on byzantine links of friends with vans and hauliers able to grab some bottles, a keg or a cask (yes, cask) or two on their way back from other business. All a bit Smokey and the Bandit, I thought.

The mind-boggling collection of international beers was striking (BrewDog Chaos Theory on keg, Tokyo* in its bottle - not many places you'd find that here in Blighty - among many others), but the Italian offering was compelling.

Would that I could wax lyrical about a selection, but Manuele directed me to Urtiga (4.8%) from Milan's very own Birrificio Lambrate and I dropped on that for most of the session. With a slight haze, orange-gold hue and generous head, the impact was gorgeously earthy, with herbal hops and a well-matched body of malt. A superb lesson in the art of balance and proof, if any were needed, that mid-ABV beers can deliver a distinctively pleasing experience (something I think we beer enthusiasts lose sight of all too often in the quest for novelty).

The clientele spilled into the street; young and cosmopolitan, the crowd was split between those there for the beer, those there for the football - crammed round a tiny TV right in front of the bar itself and those who just wanted a good time.

All are well-served by this terrific institution, which could teach bars the world over a thing or two.

Do watch that Smokey & the Bandit video, incidentally (link above).

Here, gratuitously, is a trailer for Andre de la Varre Jr's epic Grand Tour '70, which is described in what I can only assume is de la Varre Jr's characteristically modest tone as 'probably the most important travel adventure you've ever seen'.

I'll let you be the judge of that.

Studied hiatus

Well folks, I'm signing off until the end of September to get hitched and try to catch some Italian sunshine.

Rome, then Umbria, namely Spoleto, Assisi and Perugia. Beer tips, of course, welcome. This place in Rome comes highly recommended and, would you believe it, is just a stone's throw from our hotel. What a stroke of luck!

Meanwhile, enjoy what's left of the summer, golden ales and hop monsters. Beer-wise, I'm ripe for thick, black malty stouts again...

Ciao for now.

Don't lose your bottle in facing the flu!

Many thanks to those who suggested Manchester watering holes; alas, the Marble Arch and suchlike will be for another trip. No sooner did I arrive for my beery weekend than I contracted the dreaded swine flu. Not to be recommended. Match abandoned.

Thankfully, the good friend with whom I was kipping looked after me (indeed, long after I was meant to have left), securing Tamiflu, discussing the world athletics hoo-hah and in countless other ways making a bad situation tolerable. Hats off to the lad.

By way of thanks, having returned to the land of the living and made it back to sunny Cambridge, I logged on to Beers of Europe to send up a thank you pack. My friend received, by country:

Belgium: St Bernadus Abt 12 (10.5%) - a gorgeous, rich, thick, dark glugging, boozy Christmas pud of an ale; Gouden Carolus Classic (8.5%) - in the same ball park as the Bernadus; Girardin Kriek (5%) - a lambic and the best kriek bar none.

Germany: Augustiner Lagerbier Hell (5.2%) - a fantastically clean lager, fresh, pale and with hay, grassy hop tones.

USA: Flying Dog Snake Dog IPA (7.1%) - a textbook US-style IPA with ballsy American hops; Stone Brewing Co. Arrogant Bastard Ale (7.2%) - a real treat for the boy, as I've never tried it (nor any Stone beer for that matter - I'm keen for him to test it out).

Generous to a fault, I'm sure you'll agree. But what would you have sent? Do you, like me generally, go foreign with bottled beers (with the obvious exceptions of BrewDog and Thornbridge), or do bottle conditioned UK ales tickle your fancy?

And which ones work - any guaranteed UK bottle conditioned gems (I'll start the list with Worthie's White Shield)? And perhaps someone can answer this age old question - why does UK bottle conditioned sediment ruin a beer when Belgian/Dutch sediment, while offering a different experience, can be a positive addition?

As he opened a crate of ale...

A quickie this - will be in (central) Manchester this weekend catching up with an old friend and am looking for tips from my merry, if few, readers. Naturally, I have CAMRA's reliable Good Beer Guide, but your thoughts on, say, a top three unmissable pubs would be welcome, as would beer guidance.

Cheers - and have a great weekend.

Looking for pubs that blend beer choice/quality with decent pub atmosphere, I need hardly add.

I feel the need to stress that, while the GBG is not perfect (too much focus on whether beer is good than the atmosphere convivial is a criticism I've often heard and have some sympathy with), I do feel it cannot be beaten as a pub guide and it is a credit to CAMRA. For the traveller entering completely unknown territory, it is essential. Buy it here (er...or don't, wait a couple of months and buy the 2010 edition, but you catch my drift).

Old Hooky, Amsterdam stylee

A recent Benelux trip yielded bizarre experiences and happy (moreover, it has to be said, boozy) memories. Not many weekends involve dinner with a notorious call girl and madam, but Van der Valk's stomping ground is a city of many delights.

'Happy Hooker' Xaviera Hollander, a publishing sensation in the early 1970s with her vivid account of days and nights spent turning tricks in the 60s, used to sell her body but now sells her image, running a B&B (self-styled 'bed and brothel', though it is thankfully nothing of the sort with regard to the latter) from her leafy south-Amsterdam pad. Her dinner parties are studied affairs in the art of hosting; Hollander regales guests with blue anecdotes in the manner of an XXX-rated Peter Ustinov. I owe my dear friends who organised this most postmodern of stag dos (ahead of my imminent nuptials) a great many thanks. It was an astonishingly executed and brilliantly conceived night out.

What's this to do with beer? Very little in and of itself, but the incident does strike me as a rich source of banter for pub-going sessions and should remind us all (as we wax lyrical over 18% hop monsters and the pant-wettingly arcane selection of beers at GBBF's BSF) that beer is a social drink over which to share tall tales and create new ones. Amen to that, reverend.

A round-up of the trip from a beer perspective would bore terribly. Suffice it to say anyone visiting Leiden should make their way to WW, an excellent and friendly locals/beer pub, and the terrific offie Bierwinkel.

Raking over the coals

As those following my Twitterpub wall will know, I did a non-GBBF pub crawl around Borough, London, last night. All in all, it was a splendid affair, made all the better by being chaperoned by an old friend.

There is, of course, nothing wrong at all with this - call a mate, arrange a rendezvous, and get some beers in. But I think there is a question raised by such a plan. After all, when many of us bemoan the dearth of 'real' pubs, I suspect we mean 'pubs where, if we went often enough on our own, spoke to regulars and didn't make a tit of ourselves, we'd become regulars, too'.

This kind of pub is becoming rarer and rarer.

The reason, simply, is that folk (especially young folk) these days don't have to rely on the pub for social interaction. School creates friendship networks, university or work enhances those. Facebook, Twitter and even the positively jurassic mobile telephone by itself facilitate easy communication - and pint-ahol sorties follow. The idea of nipping into a nearby pub with the paper and a pencil looking for a quiet pint and, perhaps, a chat with Bert on the off-chance, is not anathema to a young person - indeed, when I introduce friends to my local and exchange greetings with men and women of all types and ages, they often bemoan the lack of such an institution in their own lives. But the following is certainly true: while not anathema, it is totally alien.

There are, of course, exceptions. Without wishing to seem like a brown-nosing fanboy, Jeff Bell at the Gunmakers, Clerkenwell, heads up a pub facing forwards, with a genuinely mixed clientele that aims to foster a sense of identity for the pub and its drinkers. Similarly, my local, the St Radegund, Cambridge, while steadfast in its traditions, is the most welcoming place I've ever stepped foot into and many fast friendships have been made there and good times had. Students and old-time residents alike feel most at home.

But other great pubs such as the Pickerel, Cambridge, or the Market Porter, Borough, while superb and serving a wide-ranging crowd, never feel like places you could enter alone and finish the evening sharing laughs with strangers in.

Some will see this as not necessarily bad in itself. I disagree. The Rake, Borough, has a beer list worthy of the gods, but the hip young trendies working there, who can't even price a beer at the same level twice and look through you if you're not Bat for Lashes-cool, don't figure warm service among their job requirements. They don't care for convivial bar-stewarding when they're out and about; they don't want a chat with the barkeep, they want a round and back off to their chums. As long as they're with friends, all is well.

Maybe I'm a sad old fart long before my time. But I think the magic of the pub, for a punter, is its ability to surprise and create social bonds. Yes take your friends down the boozer - it's brilliant. Perhaps, though, a pint and the paper and a few words with Sally about her son's ballet class wouldn't go a miss, too, from time to time.

25 and in need of booze? Barcode your face!

I'm 26 years old, making me a cool eight years older than I need be to score a hit of booze should I so desire. So, I ask myself, what's with Think 25, a Tesco policy to challenge whippersnappers in their youth to provide ID if they even conceivably look younger than a quarter of a century?

Apparently, this has been up and running since late March, so I'm obviously late to the party (though not as late as I would be if between me and the party were an officious bastard behind the counter at the store that loves to remind us 'every little helps'). According to the Daily Mail, Asda, Morrisons, M&S, the Co-op and Sainsbury's are all on board, either having implemented this demented fuck-wittery or planning to do so by September. Only Aldi and Lidl shoppers will be safe, in addition to those more refined youngsters frequenting Waitrose.

Now this is obviously preposterous. Were I intellectually challenged, I'd probably dub it 'political correctness gone mad'. Of course, given political correctness is simply a mechanism through which we collectively attempt to find ways of saying things without meaning to cause offence to segments of society, it isn't. But were I thick as pig shit, I'd undoubtedly say it and believe it.

The real culprit is - as ever in situations involving 'crazy' health & safety advice and paedo hysteria meaning school trips can't take place unless all the accompanying parents are either castrated or otherwise neutered - is the gut-wrenchingly risk-averse and litigious nature of British society, in part imported from across the pond.

Indeed, Tesco's jumping on the bandwagon stems from a lost court case in Blackpool (admittedly, a prosecution and not a civil case) after a 16-year old was able to buy brain-pop on three occasions. Of course, in the no-win-no-fee, knickers-in-a-twist country we inhabit, this particular government has routinely surrendered to supposed moral panic regarding the decline of the nation by legislating to ride the crest of the frothed up rage.

Tesco doubtless has a grey man in a grey suit, hired primarily due to his uncanny resemblance to Spitting Image's John Major puppet, tasked with establishing risk reduction solutions and due diligence compliance procedures by way of response. Think 25 is his idea. He has three children, called Julian, Sophie and Giles, and lives in Sevenoaks, Kent. He has not had intercourse for five years.

We have the whole young people and alcohol debate so sullied by poor representation in the media. It also has to be said that social atomisation in the UK, with fewer families than ever sitting down together for meals or enjoying inter-generational nights out, has reduced the number of opportunities to mentor teens into the ways of the drop.

But nothing smacks so much of wrong-headed pointlessness and rank human cynicism as this. I've always thought that, rather than 'is this person over 18?', a better and more useful question would be 'is this person really 17?'. Asking a person who's 25 to provide ID would seem crazy if this latter question were also in the mind of the shop assistant.

Anyway, there is one thing far more dangerous about this than the accessibility of alcohol in our shops. It's that this issue has put me in agreement with Stuart Maconie. Not a nice place to be.

This came up because my fianceé was asked for ID in a supermarket claiming it wants you to 'try something new today'. Those of you pondering whether I've bagged myself a child bride calm down - she's my age (well, give or take, your honour...)

I should add that things being dubbed 'political correctness gone mad' makes my blood boil. The left always gets it in the neck for this kind of dung, but nine times out of ten, western risk-aversion and litigiousness is at the bottom of it - as I've said, most prevalently in the states, which could hardly be considered communist. Stewart Lee (see video below) makes this point better than I ever could. And funnily, which is a plus.

On selling beer

Those of us living or working in London knew the recession was coming when tube station billboards started carrying the same ads for months and then, eventually, became bare. Ad spend is - crazily - seen by bean counters as discretionary in a downturn.

Last summer, a few weeks before Lehman's collapse revealed just how buggered we all were (and sewed up the US election for Barack Obama, thank god), Fuller's ran this ad campaign for their organic brew Honeydew (pictured).

A boring ad, I think all will agree. Far from being evident, it does nothing to demonstrate why people love Honeydew. A row of pints and a tagline about being the country's favourite organic beer is hardly going to stop traffic.

Compare, then, with this billboard directly next to it for Amstel.

Now I thought this was terrific, neatly encapsulating the social role of beer while at the same time using arresting imagery. No allusion to flavour or provenence; no 'since 1345'; no sweeping fields of barley. Lovely stuff.

I'm sure Heineken (which owns the Amstel brand) has far deeper pockets in terms of marketing than Fuller's. But I do think the comparison provides a good example of the lack of imagination demonstrated by some UK - and particularly cask - brewers.


Apologies to Fuller's - this campaign is hardly the most egregious example and, to be fair, I do think their London Pride cinema ad recently was terrific - voiceover by Michael Gambon, no less! For the record, I think Amstel is horrible with a weird metallic ting that ought not to be present in beer at all. A big fan of Fuller's, I've got to say I really dislike Honeydew - but then I've got a bit of a downer on honey in beer per se.

Luxembourg's secret is out...

Luxembourg is not famous for its beer, perhaps, but those in the know will have come across the eminently quaffable Bofferding, marketed as 'the secret of Luxembourg'. Its ad campaign (see below) is tremendous - and could teach UK brewers a thing or two; though it shows how deep even Bofferding's pockets are that they could get Saatchi & Saatchi to do it.

Bofferding is ubiquitous there - a pale session lager that is extremely clean finishing. Nothing special about it, but it is fine at what it does. The urbane and sophisticated young Luxembourger heads for the city, scoots for the relaxed Grund district and hops from bar to bar until the wallet is emptied or capacity reached (this being Luxembourg, of course, the former is unlikely to occur before the latter).

My favourite bar in the Grund is Aula Cafe (pictured) - where glasses of Bofferding can be seen off with a potent honey eau de vie secured from a local farm. It's small, shadowy and filled with relaxed young things; some so young they're ordering wine and coke - a peculiar concoction also loved in Spain, for some reason. The walls may once have been white - who knows? - but neither paint nor paper is necessary when smoke adheres to every surface and provides a dull, satisfying beige hue. When someone is drunk enough to believe they could be the next Duke Ellington, a key from the barman will unlock the piano and music spues out.

There are better Luxembourgish beers - Battin has a wonderful caramel look and is full of superb lagery malt and hop. Simon Pils and Simon Regal are fine efforts indeed (though Simon Presitge - with added Luxembourgish sparkling wine - is to be avoided at all costs).

But to shun Bofferding would be ridiculous. From teens who should know better to bankers who should definitely know better, a glass of this unifying brew is usually what's drunk. And that's not a bad thing.