Peggy's random hand pump
There's a random, disused beer engine on the side bar at The Queen Vic. You always see it when people come down from the rooms upstairs. It looks rather lonely. They should put a real cider on that. Bag in box ciders have a fantastic shelf life, you see. Perfect for a random hand pump.
The Vic is a freehouse. Sharon bought the freehold from Luxford & Copley in 1991, when the Beer Orders forced breweries to divest themselves of much of their pub estates. However, as their beer deliveries all seem to come from one place, I think they're currently party to a barrelage contract.
12 comments:
I agree, they should.
I'm stupid or something. It took me at least three minutes to work out that you were talking about a fictional pub. I even used to watch the damn thing in the eighties..
A sophisticated metrosexual like you watching Eastenders ?
Do you have your tea on a tray on your lap at the same time ?
Have you also noticed the bar in the Rovers' Return in Coronation Street (an ex-Newton and Ridleys freehouse)? Alongside the handpumps are strange, box-shaped keg taps from the 70's, surely they'd have replaced them with tall smoothflow founts by now. Maybe it's something to do with camera angles.
I haven't watched Coronation Street since I was a kid (well, that's untrue, I watched the episode where Mike Baldwin died), so can't comment. I do remember the Rovers burned down in the 80s, so surely all the fixtures and fittings would date from no earlier than then?
On S4C - thats a Welsh channel for those who don't know - there is a soap called Pobol Y Cwm in which the local pub, the Deri Arms is a brew pub.
Bullmastiff brewery in Cardiff has been used to film scenes in.
I tell the lady squeeze when she watches that crap, "Why are they in a pub, in the real world they'd be at home watching soaps with a can of lager".
Cooking Lager, in fact if you look carefully the EastEnders cast are increasingly middle class, so that's not quite true. Like football, pubs have become a middle class sport. The introduction of decent food and wine and the removal of TVs and fruit machines from decent pubs could be likened to the removal of stands from football grounds.
PS. One of the great things about being well educated is that one doesn't have to eschew popular culture in an effort to appear intelligent.
Brew Blogger, I once tried to date a girl who was on Pobol Y Cwm. It didn't go too well though. I don't think she fancied me. Can't think why.
To say all pubs are now full of middle-class, wine drinking foodies is very sweeping. I'm sure that's true in the gentrified bits of London - in fact I've seen it happen at The Star in Highgate - but up here in Manchester there is thankfully still a vast choice of basic, working-class pubs selling cheap, well kept beer and classic snacks like pork scratchings and scotch eggs. And yes they still have TV's and fruit machines, some even karaoke - how plebeian!
You're right about football though Jeff. The working class has been driven as thoroughly out of that as New Labour has driven us out of politics.
I think the results of the Euro elections in the North proved that the angrier elements of the white working class have somewhere else to go now that Labour is seen as having abandoned them...
That's only partly true. The stereotype of the typical BNP voter as a middle-aged white working-class bloke sounding off in the pub is just that. They're just as likely to be a suburban racist, ex-Tory 'Daily Mail' reader, as the BNP's leaked membership list showed.
In the North West and Yorkshire where fascist MEP's were elected, their vote actually fell. It was their percentage that went up because of a low turnout as Old Labour voters stayed at home.
Post a Comment