The sparklerisation of Britain
Yesterday I wrote about Wetherspoons. Last week I wrote about sparklers. I've been critical of both.
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After lunch today, we took a detour into The Crosse Keys (9 Gracechurch Street, London, EC3V 0DR, map), an impressive Wetherspoons bank conversion in the heart of the City. The good news - Nethergate Umbel Magna, the coriander porter I reviewed yesterday, was on. The bad news - after pouring half the pint, the barmaid tutted to herself, before rushing off and returning with a lurid green sparkler.
Before she could start screwing the foul appendage onto the tap, I asked her to stop. I didn't want my beer aerated, with a "creamy head" like a pint of effing John Smith's Smooth. She tutted at me (her second tut in as many minutes), and said she'd been told she had to put it on, otherwise my pint would be flat. After a brief exchange of forthright views, she was willing to bend the rules just this time, but she definitely wasn't happy.
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So it seems there's a new rule at 'Spoons HQ - sparklers are to be used for certain beers, regardless of the customer's preference. That's almost as daft as the company's dictat about leaving pump clips facing forward, even if a cask is spent. I think I'll leave their pubs to the WKD Blue drinkers from now on.
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By the way - take a look at the photo of the unsparklerised pint, taken on my phone a few minutes after it was pulled. It doesn't look flat to me. What did I tell you about natural carbonation?
10 comments:
Well I have to say that, from the photo at least, your unsparklered pint looks great just as it is - and I can only imagine that the "gentle" hint of spice you describe it as having in yesterday's post would have been destroyed by it being aeriated.
Is really odd that JDW should object so strongly to a customer requesting an unsparklered pint (especially when it seems from your description that it would have been no extra work for the girl) - this is after all the kind of place that would happily accede to customer requests coming from binge drinking youths asking for another 8 blue WKDs and a round of black sambucas... Sparklers is a strange place to draw the line in customer care!
I think that this just emphasises the problems that 'spoons have with Real Ale - seemingly committed to it, but with nobody to care for it, and no training given to bar staff, it's terribly hit and miss.
Previous experiance of mine is that they keep the real ale at virtually freezing, so you are left with the choice of waiting ages for your pint to warm up and become drinkable, or lose out on 90% of the taste if you're thirsty.
Stonch,
I long for the day when a pub - chain or otherwise - trusts to serve the beer in the style of its local area.
You go on about how Belgian beer should be served Begian-style in a matching glass, not a standard British half glass - the same should apply to our wonderful UK beers. That should mean sparkler for northern beers, regardless of where they are sold and without sparkler for southern beers.
Btw, while I loved your comment of Wetherspoons as daycentres, I admire their commitment to real ale and value for money. A winning combintion for all but the snootiest fo beer snobs.
Back in my student days, I was shamefully a "Spoonee" at The Masque Haunt, and unless they've changed their policy, the barmaid's excuse was bull. You're more then welcome to remove the sparkler if the customer asks, and it was a common request as we naturally put sparklers on all Theakston beers.
It's more likely that the barmaid hasn't been trained properly (a common occurence at JD's) and didn't know if she could or not, so she took the "safe" route and said she couldn't do it, rather than do as requested and potentially face a telling off for tampering with the equipment. It was probably explained to her in a brief induction what the sparkler does, and not why some people may request not having it.
BTW - JD Wetherspoons used to pay the best wages of all the pub companies, so I'm surprised they don't get better staff.
Andy, agreed, it's no trouble at all to take the sparkler off. I used to do it all the time when I was a barman up North.
You need to remember also that I wasn't even asking her to take the sparkler off - I was asking her not to put it on.
Add to that the fact that the beer in question was from Suffolk, not the North, and you've got a ridiculous situation that only a massive, centralised pubco could dream up.
There have been reports that pubs throughout the South have started to use sparklers in completely inappropriate situations. This has a negative effect on the quality of the beer served (bitterness in the beer migrates to the artificially creamy head). This will set back efforts to turn people on to cask ale.
After all, how can we maintain that the real stuff is better, if it looks, feels and tastes like a pint of Tetley's Creamflow?
what most people do not realise is that sparklers do not stop beer being flat; they do the opposite.
when you stir up and aerate beer the CO2 escapes, so your pint actually become FLATTER.
Such a shape cos that such a ncie Wetherspoons! :-(
*shame
Excellent points. The worst sparkler situation I faced was having a Shepherd Neame pint served with a sparkler, in bleedin' Kent. I tell you, you need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll let anyone serve a pint..... >:O)
Your experience reminds me of a conversation I had with a local brewer here in Ohio, USA, about the serving of his cask ale. I told him that I deprecated the use of sparklers and that I had had trouble at his brewpub when asking for them to be removed, and his reply was that he doesn't allow his serving staff to remove the sparklers, because as he put it, you can't just let them do what they want. Pathetic.
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