I wonder how many bad puns I’m able to come up with before I get bored.
Yesterday I was in the chocolate box city of Bath. There must be few places in the UK more Christmassy, and what more Christmassy pub is there than the rather lovely Raven:
Voted Bath CAMRA pub of 2010, it’s a cosy two floored little place with Pieminister Pies a plenty and a rack of good beers on the bar. The staff are perhaps a little on the young side with no obvious great knowledge of what’s good to drink but given you can try everything it shouldn’t really make any bones. Here’s what they had on last night. Unfortunately, we seem to have visited at the back end of a Christmas beer festival and they only had the one Christmas ale left:
I drank:
Raven Gold from Blindman’s Brewery in Somerset – good session beer, light and very easy drinking, could be a bit more bitter
We Three Kings from the Three Castles Brewery – struggled to see what made this a Christmas beer. It was OK, perhaps just not really my thing. Harsh to say but not surprised it was the last one left.
PG Steam from RCH Brewery in Somerset – very floral, not my thing at all but some nice guy at the bar recommended it and I didn’t want to be rude.
I also ate a Raven Pie which was superb. They seem to have managed to get Pie Minister to make them their own variety (it’s got one of the Raven beers in it but I’m not sure which one). Nice touch that.
We then moved on to the Pig and Fiddle which is the main venue for watching Bath rugby matches. We only went there to watch the second half of the football so i didn’t really intend to write about it other than to mention the Glastonbury Ales Festivale I drank:
A Christmas beer infused with Cranberries. For some reason I thought this might be something like a lambic, with the sour taste of cranberries instead of cherries complementing the bitterness of the beer. How wrong I was. In reality, it was like an average beer with sweet cranberry juice added. Absolutely rank. I’ve still not had a Christmas beer I particularly like, so I’m a bit frustrated by that.
And to end, how to stave off the Christmas related beeriness in the morning. I hardly ever have fry ups but this looked too good not to post.
