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 Out-of-towners have complained to me before about the fact The Gunmakers doesn't open on weekends. Boo-hoo. Well, if that's prevented you from visiting before now, come down this Sunday, when the pub will be open from 12-5pm.
The annual Italian parade (formally, the Procession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel) is taking place in Clerkenwell, starting from the Italian church a few hundred yards from us. The Gunmakers is right in the middle of Eyre Street Hill, which will be closed to traffic for the day so a massive street party can kick off. Italian food stalls and entertainers will line the streets, and we'll be serving booze to the masses.
If you can get down here, you'll not only be able to enjoy our ale - we'll have Landlord, Harvey's and two guest beers - but you'll also be taking part in a real piece of London history.
Here are some more photos of the parade itself on Flickr. Although the pub is closed on weekends, you can book the place out for private functions. Details are on the website here. I'm pleased to say that four of our bookings have come from readers of this blog - including an upcoming wedding reception.
I grew up in the North. I've lived all my adult life in the South (Oxford is not in the Midlands). Read into that what you will. Judging by recent comments on this blog, it certainly winds some people up.
This evening, a couple of our regulars - bespoke tailors who work nearby - rocked up with a business associate for a pint. He stared at my handpumps in dismay and groaned out loud "oh, don't you have anything from the South? I don't drink Northern beers". Quite apart from the fact a fat Harvey's handpump was staring him in the face, we all found his attitude a tad extreme. This is a man who's taking the North/South divide too seriously.
Today's ales are Tim Taylor Landlord (West Yorkshire), Moorhouses Blond Witch (Lancashire), Mordue Workie Ticket (Tyne & Wear) and Harvey's Best (Sussex). I do tend to serve more beers from the North than the South, but that's by accident rather than by design.
To paraphrase Basil Fawlty, don't mention the (Algerian) War. That's a fairly good rule of thumb when engaging in kitchen banter with our chef. He's a Frenchman and holds some pretty strident views on certain matters. During quiet times, he's always got Le Monde open on the worktop.
Today he pointed out an ad in the newspaper placed by the French government. They've introduced a massive VAT cut for bars and restaurants: on July 1st, the rate was slashed from 19.6% to just 5.5%. Prices are falling across the board, as the benefits are passed on to consumers. That's got to boost trade, creating jobs and shoring up businesses that give people a place people to eat, drink and make merry, as opposed to sitting at home watching telly (have you seen French television?).
For me, this puts the debate about Britain's excessive alcohol duties into perspective. A targeted VAT cut on the French model would benefit the licensed trade far more, without leading to any suggestion that the authorities are failing to tackle this country's supposed "binge drinking" problem.
This is the first serious post I've written for some time. I haven't had a drink in three days. The two things are indubitably connected. That does it. I'm hitting the pop hard today.
I've written about Tennent's Super before. Here's the article. It's a superstrength lager from Scotland favoured by tramps (fitting, considering how many of London's homeless hail from north of the border). But in Italy, the InBev product enjoys a different profile: it's positively hip. I've spotted pumps dispensing it some fairly tasty bars and clubs. The marketing bods over there have succeeded in passing it off as a premium product. Pictured below is an example of their dark arts. I spotted this stencilled bit of graffiti in Rome's Trastevere a couple of weeks ago.
 The weather outside is frightful. I blame this cold, damp snap on those joyless, trogolodyte tossers who moaned about the heatwave. Bah. If you want to stay out of the rain tonight, come and visit The Gunmakers. Guest beers are Moorhouses Blond Witch and Mordue Workie Ticket.
Has anybody else noticed that the price of everything apart from their own ales is vastly inflated in Young's houses? Don't order a pint of Peroni. Don't order a rum and coke. You have been warned. It's nothing short of extortion for those of us with non-ale drinkers in the round.
Beer tasting notes are very often a bit cringe-worthy. I once called something a "toothsome splash" on this blog, and I've never heard the end of it from a couple of pals. It's hard to say essentially the same thing about a hundred different beers in a way that reads well. That's why I've largely given up.
An effort on Hip Hops - written by Eddie, one my bar staff, and his flatmate James - really did make me laugh. They describe St Austell Tribute as "unsurprisingly moist". Lovely stuff.
This week, my stewardship of this boozer has been a little like an extended Dean Martin impression. Am beginning to feel the effects. Thank Crunchie it's Friday.
I'm sitting upstairs, on the window sill, watching a classic episode of Only Fools and Horses. And I bust out laughing. And everyone outside the pub looks up. And I repeat what Delboy just said. And no-one laughs. Not getting laid tonight.
 Last summer we sold oodles of Hop Back Summer Lightning - the golden ale from Salisbury - here at The Gunmakers. It's returned to the bar for the rest of this season. It's a brilliant beer and you really should come down here today and start caning it. It's the brew that made Hop Back's name, and it still accounts for the bulk of their output. The brewery's celebrating the ale's 21st year in production, and have sent some point of sale gubbins our way. We've got the glassware, the beer towels and the bar mats. I love all that shit.
Also included in the box of tricks that arrived yesterday were a couple of t-shirts. Cask ale brewers seem to love giving out branded clothing, but why do they insist on supplying it in fat bastard sizes only? I didn't even know there was a size called "2XL", but apparently that's what we should be aspiring to. If you think you can fill out one of these tents, please come and collect your prize (the t-shirt, not the drastically reduced life expectancy).
Kudos to my pal Wee Rossie, who took the photograph outside The Gunmakers last September. Those were two of the last pints of Summer Lightning we served here in 2008.
I've just received an email from Jason, the hanky-waving Aussie who frequents this pub, to say the Westminster Morris Men will be performing this evening - in this heat - around the Baker Street area. Some of them are big lads. Those outfits have got to be pretty stuffy. This is going to be comedy. Details of their planned route are here.
Ravello has given its name to a thousand cafes and restaurants in this country, some of them less than lovely. It's a town that towers above the Amalfi coast, looking out on one side on the village of Minori, where we rented a house last week. I first visited five years ago. Few places have made more of an impression on me. This time, we were lashed by rain as we ascended - ears-popping - in an open top-bus. (What a mistake-a to make-a: the grey clouds that hung overhead as we hopped on board by Amalfi's harbour gave ample warning). Still, that serene central square didn't disappoint, with a duomo on one side and a sheer drop to a lush and green valley opposite. Neither did the glasses of Paulaner lager from Munich, sold to us by a cafe that peeks out from one corner of the piazza. As we enjoyed our beer, the rain stopped and the sun came out.
CAMRA are having a meeting in our back room tonight. The staff are under strict instructions to pour their beer flat, with absolutely no head, and I've asked my regulars to pretend to be working class. If we don't tick those boxes, I'll probably be told my pub isn't up to scratch.
I think the meeting is of the Great British Beer Festival organising committee. To be fair, the Earl's Court event is about the only CAMRA gig I have any time for. I attended in both 2007 and 2008 and plan to do so again this year.
 Of late, I've struggled to keep the blog going. Weirdly, readership has grown considerably in the first half of 2009, so I can only assume that most people actually prefer the pithy one line posts. Nevetheless, I recognise that I need to put some meat on the bones. Here's just a few of the beery things I've done that I should have written about, but didn't get around to:
- A seminar on lager at Thornbridge in Derbyshire. It was attended by, among others, Alastair Hook from Meantime and one of the chaps from Birrificio Italiano. Here's what Martyn Cornell had to say about that one. (All I remember is the bloody long journey there and back and Roger Protz refusing to drink canned Guinness on the train home).
- A return to the first pub I ever worked in - The Steamboat - after 12 years.
- The Tuesday evening when a Society of Independent Brewers' AGM happened to co-incide with a British Guild of Beer Writer's committee meeting here at The Gunmakers. That was a funny one - the regulars didn't know what to make of it. Pictured are Jeff Pickthall, Pete Brown and Chris Marchbanks of the Guild tucking into some samples of unreleased Brew Dog beers I brought up from the cellar that night.
- A tour around the tiny but much-respected York Brewery (I now sell their beer fairly regularly, as it goes: Constantine's selling well at the mo).
- A beer writers junket to Sharp's in Cornwall, which was followed by a somewhat pished evening in charge of dangerous knives at Rick Stein's cookery school. Here's Zak Avery's write-up. (You can see the dodgy long hair and sidies I was sporting back then in one of his photos).
All of those happened months and months ago. It would be strange to write about them so long after the event. Boo-hoo. But, from now on, I'm going to start writing properly again. I did used to enjoy it, after all. So bear with me while my online mojo returns. You'll love it, I assure you*. * I can't promise to write anything that'll turn beer geeks on, through. Let's face it, that ship sailed a long time ago. I don't really drink strong bottled beers and I don't go to beer festivals and grotty tickers' pubs anymore, so I'm no good to ya.
I just arrived back from Italy after a very delayed EasyJet flight from Napoli. The problem with budget airlines is that when something goes wrong, the person who tells you is invariably unattractive and painfully common. Sort it out, Stelios.
I'll write some bits and pieces about the week when I get a chance. We hooned it up on our first night in Rome, at my good friend Manuele's pub and restaurant. The rest of our time was spent in Minori, a seaside village that's only a ten minute, white-knuckle cliffside drive from Amalfi. We'd hired a villa that sat above the outsized basilica. The whole place looked like a toy town from our terrace. Every evening, we drank Paulaner from litre steins and played elementary card games at a little pub by the beach. We didn't do much else, really.
Tomorrow morning, I'm off to Italy for a week. Our first night will be spent at my favourite beer bar in the world. John O' will be taking the helm here at the pub (if he makes it back from Paris, where he's inexplicably ridden to on his scooter this week). See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya.
I got a parcel in the post this morning. When I opened it, dozens of beer mats plastered in BNP propaganda spilled out. Eek.
I would never buy a pewter tankard myself, but I do own several of them. First off, there are those little ones I found in The Gunmakers' cellar. The guy I bought the pub off liked a flutter, and on race days he and his bro would serve Guinness and champagne in them. Then there's the pint jug, engraved with my initials and a message of goodwill, gifted to me by former colleagues in early 2007 when I left a job where I had a lot of good friends.
This evening my secretary from back then - who organised my leaving gifts - came in with some of the others to see the pub. I polished up her present and drank from it for the first time. It's something I'll always love (even if it does remind me of Real Ale Twats).
I can't deny the obvious. Is it because I've lost interest? Well, not quite. There's loads I'd like to write about. I just don't have the time. It's not like every minute of every day's bound up in running this pub, because it isn't. No, it's just that I value my spare time, and when I have less of it the internet's the last place I want to be. I hate computers. (Well, that's not true, I loved my Commodore 64 and my Amiga 500).
What's apparent to me is that I've built up something pretty good here. I don't want to throw that away. On the whole this blog has a good following, and it's launched me into a new, more fulfilling career. My life has changed immeasurably since the beginning of 2007, when I started writing here to stave off the office blues. You, as readers, have all helped to motivate me as I've sought a new and more fulfilling life. Thanks for that. Being a leveraged finance lawyer never was my bag, you see. Being a publican suits me much better. As old friends remind me, I've always wanted a pub. And now I've got one. And it's great.
This evening, I sat at my bar after a swift, breakneck run around Holborn, Covent Garden, Soho, Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury. Endorphins dance a merry jig, Tim Taylor Landlord meets my lips, and a gorgeous steak dinner sits in front of me. John O's entertaining the customers as one of our new recruits - a firecracker personality - backs him up. A couple of O.E. barristers who went to my college rock up for a nosey (a familiar situation). And I look around, and I'm proud of the place.
In the back room, the Magpies - the London branch of the Newcastle United Supporters Club - are having their monthly committee meeting. The Gunmakers was their home in the 70s and 80s, before idiots tried to turn it into a restaurant. Happily, they've got wind that the place is a pub again, and they've become regulars once more. All I need to do is put in a darts board, and they'll be in heaven, they say. Not likely, I reply.
The photo was taken on Sunday (on my mobby, naturally) from Holborn viaduct, which passes over Farringon Street and the subterranean course of the River Fleet.
There was a great article in yesterday's FT about pubs. Here's a link. Those who moan about the price of pint should note the comment about pubs being a service industry and staff costs being key. Likewise, it might help those who blame all the industry's woes on a couple of pubcos to apply a bit more perspective to the issue.
Here's a picture of the Westminster Morris Men dancing outside The Gunmakers. Their website is here.
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Out-of-towners have complained to me before about the fact The Gunmakers doesn't open on weekends. Boo-hoo. Well, if that's prevented you from visiting before now, come down this Sunday, when the pub will be open from 12-5pm.
