Sometimes you find bars in unexpected places.
Cookstown Hockey Club is one such. Maybe I was a bit naive in thinking it was just some kind of training room/ changing facilities.
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| The Old Ticket desk |
Thursday night I took part in a charity fund raiser quiz (came second by 1.5 points!) held at the venue and was unexpectedly surprised. The venue used to be Cookstown railway station, with the bar being ticket office and waiting room and the original platforms and rails forming an outside seating area. A pub with so many characterful features has been on my doorstep all along! It's
been recently refurbished with a glass wall to allow viewing of the period features. There's also a real fire, plenty of seats and tables and old railway paraphernalia adorning the walls (as well as hockey club photos of course).
On walking in I found bass on the splendid bar (though was not on) and I settled for a mass-market bottled-lager instead. Whilst perusing the spirits shelves behind the bar (stocked with 10 sorts blended whisky!) I spotted some familiar shaped bottles...
Wells' Waggle-dance! It transpires these had been left over from a previous tasting evening.
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| Real Fire! |
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| Who's this cheeky chap? |
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| Under the arches |
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| Old loo locks |
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| Yes, that is a *** in the background |
Coming in a clear glass bottle and therefore highly susceptible to light strike it was with some trepidation I poured the contents into a glass. Initial signs were good with a good head of foam forming and nothing untoward in the aroma. In taste its a fairly malty number, that 5% ABV helping it to stand up the ravages of time. There's some sweetness from the honey too and a small touch of oxidation at the back of the finish that doesn't detract from the overall experience (so I availed them of their second bottle too).
I now plan to return and also let the NI breweries know that here, in this most unlikely of places, is another potential outlet for their beers (though I don't think they'd be stocking cask).
Bass! Wow! When I first started exploring beer many years back, Bass was almost everywhere but I can't rememeber the last time I saw it anywhere
ReplyDeletei had cask version in burton wetherspoon
DeleteThere's still the odd bar in Belfast which serves Bass, but it's become rare. Ten years ago it seemed to be available in about half of them.
DeleteIt was actually the decline in availability of Bass (even tins of Bass Export in off-licenses) which originally prompted me to be more exploratory in my beer selection - instead of resorting to Guinness or Smithwicks or lager, I took a chance with those weird bottled beers with names like Dead Chicken and Mangled Badger, or the ones shaped like jam jars. It was a slippery slope...nowadays I'm not really content unless the bottle says something like AleSmith or Cigar City on it.
Is Bass really in decline in NI? I still see it lots of places. When I was a young'un every pub either had Harp & Smithwick's or Tennent's & Bass, depending on whether they were supplied by Guinness (later Diageo) or Bass (later Interbrew, later InBev, now C&C).
DeleteThe Bass sold in Ireland is brewed by C&C at Wellpark in Glasgow. It's a different beer from the cask Bass brewed in Burton by Marston's, the English keg Bass brewed in Salmesbury by A-B InBev and the Belgian Bass Pale Ale brewed somewhere in Belgium, possibly Leuven.
A brand undergoing Death By A Thousand Contracts, I think.
not seen it anywhere else in Tyrone recently. I think its a shame heineken were so keen to keep the trademark when they sold the rest to coors if they weren't going to treat it properly
DeleteThink you have a crossed wire there somewhere. Heineken? Interbrew and its successors, as Pete Brown endlessly points out, seems to delight in abusing the brands it owns. Treating Bass properly was never in the game plan. Perhaps a positive side to MolsonCoors owning the old Bass brewing operation (which Interbrew were forced to sell against their will) is Worthington E: allegedly the Bass Pale Ale recipe from around 1970 and so the closest thing in existence to the beer's glory days.
Deleteyes-my error, had just read about it in Martyn's "Beer" just this week too! These faceless global megabrewers are hard to keep track of!
DeleteHeh. It's a morbid fascination of mine. Probably not healthy.
DeleteI'm pretty sure that there's been a significant decline in the presence of Bass here. Back in my days as a Bass drinker, the Bass/Smithwicks dichotomy seemed fairly evenly balanced. Nowadays I don't think it's anywhere near that. In the last six months I can only recall seeing Bass on tap in two places in Belfast (The Washington and the bar in the QUB halls of residence), whereas I can easily think of lots of bars which have only Smithwicks. There's still a small region of my cerebral cortex dedicated to seeking out that little red triangle in the distance whenever I enter a pub.
DeleteHave you ever blind-tasted the two side-by-side? I found I couldn't express a preference between them.
DeleteThat's interesting. No, I haven't ever done a blind-tasting of them (probably not even a side-by-side tasting). I have a very clear idea in mind of what they taste like, in which they're quite different. If I ever happen to encounter them together, I'll put it to the test!
DeleteBest place to find them together is the canned ale section of the supermarket :)
DeleteTrue - maybe the only place. Though if canned Bass is the same as it was last time I had it, a blind side-by-side tasting with fizzy water might prove more revealing...
DeleteWhy would the draught version be different?
DeleteI'm not up to scratch on what canned versions are around nowadays, but when I drank Bass there were generally two: the yellow "Bass Export" and, initially, the black "Bass Ale". Some time in the 90s, the latter was replaced with the silver cans of "Bass Beer", which was significantly blander. I didn't notice a simultaneous change in the quality of draught Bass, so I came to think of it as a different entity from the canned stuff. My most recent experiences of them have been that the silver cans contained fizzy water not worth drinking, whereas the draught version (when not flat) could even verge on pleasantness.
DeleteI can't back up any of these impressions as empirical observations, of course! Maybe it was exactly the same stuff all along.
@Michael as much as I enjoy those "big beers" there's still a soft spot in my heart for a well made cask session bitter
ReplyDeleteYeah, mine too. Or, at least, for a well made bottle-conditioned bitter. To be honest, I think that I've rarely experienced the cask bitter on top form...
DeleteSo you finally found a decent pub in Cookstown, albeit one that for the most part serves rubbish beer. Perhaps you can convince the barman to at least get some bottles of local NI beer stocked and that at the very least you will probably drink them when you pop in.
ReplyDeleteIf I make it up there again, we will have to drop in and for a few pints.
you're welcome any time! (just call ahead as i'm away a lot over the next few months!)
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