Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 77: A “tight” 1998 European summer (San Fermin & the French Alps).
The whole point of convening in the French Alps was to recover from nine frenetic days at the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona. Our friends’ pristine Alpine idyll proved effective, and departing Les Gets was drama-free. Henrik gave us a lift to nearby Cluses, where the train schedules efficiently guided us back to Lyon, and this time awake, we made a quick change to Paris.
Don and I did not tarry in the French capital, proceeding immediately to Gare du Nord and the exclusive “Eurostar” station nested inside it. I was excited, because as improbable as it might seem in retrospect, my first official visit to the United Kingdom was in the offing — via the Chunnel (English Channel tunnel), no less.
Surely owing to contrarian exceptionalism long predating Brexit, the United Kingdom never opted into the Eurailpass in spite of belonging to the European Union. Consequently, I’d always chosen to opt out from the UK, skipping the country entirely apart from a couple of hours on the tarmac at Stansted in 1987, a fluke of a stopover necessitated by foul weather in route to Brussels.
We were allowed off the plane to mill around, although it wasn’t possible to access the terminal; regrettably, the joys of cask-conditioned Fuller’s and Marmite would have to wait eleven more years. Evidently I had more important travel priorities than paying rail fares point to point, which is a shame, as it gradually dawned on me that I’d been an anglophile all along.
Meanwhile centuries of subterranean speculation came to fruition in 1994, when the Chunnel opened for transit following six years of digging. At the time, I was vaguely aware that the new cross-channel trains, as marketed with the Eurostar designation, offered selling points of high speed, proximity to city centers, and lower or equivalent costs when compared with flying.
However, I was unprepared for the segregation (by destination) of the Eurostar platforms at Gare du Nord and the sleek luxuriousness of the plasticized rail carriages themselves.
Boarding the train from Paris to London felt like being at an airport, with the railcar interiors substituting for airplanes. It dawned on me that we were witnessing the onset of an era of rail travel gentrification in Europe, a slickness that sickened, conflicting rather violently with my romanticized vision of “real” European trains.
I stole a moment to mourn their passing. What would become of the sheer entertainment value in watching one’s deposits land on the cross ties?
(If you know, you know.)
Continuous welded tracks out of Paris enabled the Eurostar to make short work of the French countryside, then we quickly traversed the Strait of Dover, traveling 31 miles in 35 minutes at almost 400 feet below sea level at the Chunnel’s deepest point.
The requisite stop at Folkestone on the British side of the water was followed by a metaphorical screeching of brakes, and an inglorious slow-motion crawl into London at speeds rarely exceeding those of casual canal-side bicycle rides.
Welcome to merry old/new England – or, for supporters of Labour, “Cool Britannia.” It’s daunting to contemplate that in 1998, Oasis still mattered.
Don and I had gratefully accepted an offer of lodging from Boris and Dewi, two pals with a house in Bounds Green, a suburb in the borough of Haringey in northeastern London. The house was intended as an investment, although when one or the other had a job in London, he’d end up living there.
It seemed like an ordinary neighborhood of the sort that I’d inhabit in a heartbeat. Fairly near the house was a pub, pedestrian in most respects, but a convenient enough choice for a palatable pint of Tetley’s Bitter when walking to and from the Bounds Green tube station.
Next to the pub was a first-rate Indian restaurant, where we ate two epochal meals, including an hours-long, all-you-can-eat Sunday buffet that made me thankful for cask ale’s customarily sessionable strength, as there’d have been no available space inside me for adding bulkier beer.
After studying Google Maps street shots from 2024, I believe the current Ranelagh Pub on the corner of Bounds Green and Warwick Roads, and Bejoy Tandoori restaurant a few doors down, correspond to the places we patronized in 1998, although the business owners and names might have changed since then.
In particular, the pub is far posher now than I recall it being. However, I could be wrong about all of it. We put in short daily sessions at the pub, spending only as much time there as a pint (or three) and a cigar in the garden would allow, then moving on.
One memorable aspect of the experience was pre-Spotify looped 70s music, resulting in at least two-dozen renditions of “The Hustle,” courtesy of the pub’s sole cassette tape; better still, maybe it was an 8-track.
Small wonder that the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) generally opposes intrusive music in pubs; Boris is a particularly eloquent advocate of “quiet” pubs, and I can see why, although my occasional efforts to implement silence in my American workplaces inevitably failed.
Three days in London allowed for a lengthy walk along the Thames, with a glance at the exterior of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Another stroll loosened Professor Barry’s trademark glib tongue for helpful history lectures as we passed the many famous sites: Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, the Tower Bridge, Hyde Park and more than one pub pause for refreshment, because folks, hydration is real.
We also found time to visit Canary Wharf and the Docklands, the glass-and-steel redevelopment from the 1980s-90s establishing an alternative city center on the Isle of Dogs, a peninsula framed by the Thames east of London’s city center. I had read so much about it during my period of employment at UMI Data Courier abstracting magazine articles that at least a brief glance at this controversial gentrification effort seemed merited.
It helped that nearby the Greenwich Foot Tunnel connects at Millwall on the Isle of Dogs. We walked it, underwater yet again, and ended up at a pub near the observatory in Greenwich.
A highlight of London for me was the Cabinet War Rooms, renamed Churchill War Rooms ever since a museum devoted to the former prime minister’s life was added a few years after our visit.
The War Rooms comprise the underground command center constructed when a second world war seemed entirely imminent, so as to enable the British government to continue functioning during aerial assault. It included a master bedroom for Churchill’s use where the prime minister continued to begin his days with champagne upon awakening, even during the worst of the Blitz.
Churchill survived; international pop star Al Bowlly wasn’t so lucky.
Cambridge was next on the itinerary. Back to school?
—
My friends Russell “Roz” Tate and Jason Masingo were completing a summer program of course work at the University of Cambridge, as applicable to their degrees at Indiana University Southeast.
Accordingly, I regarded my visit to be an educational seminar in its own right, offering me the overdue opportunity to closely examine cask-conditioned ales in a more relaxed urban milieu than pulsating London.
Cask-conditioned ale, often referred to as “real ale,” is old-fashioned, unpasteurized and absent the forced-pressure C02 systems to which the world has grown accustomed. Rather, it is naturally carbonated in the firkin (the “cask”) by means of a secondary fermentation.
Although some English pubs follow the venerable example of the gravity-pour method, most vend cask-conditioned ales with the help of a beer engine, colloquially referred to as a hand pump, or a hand-pull. Their firkins are stored in the coolness of the cellar, to be tended and prepped for serving. When ready, the ale is pumped into pint glasses.
Real ale conceived, brewed, packaged and served in this natural manner represents the indigenous, tasty, beery glory of the British Isles, although it came disturbingly close to extinction during the 1970’s.
Then as now, conditioning ale in a firkin and serving it properly at a pub is thoroughly old-school: time-consuming, labor-intensive and missing the marketing-borne sexiness of mass-market commoditization, the dictates of which demand industrially-produced, cost-effective “dead” (artificially re-carbonated) ale and lager in conventional kegs, bottles and cans.
Thanks in large measure to decades-long advocacy by CAMRA, one the modern era’s most principled and effective consumer lobby groups, cask ale’s decline has been arrested, even though dozens of older brands and breweries have disappeared via merger or outright closing.
A new generation of smaller craft-oriented brewers committed to cask-conditioning has kept the tradition intact, albeit with freshness-extending cask breathers, enabling us to cherish “living” ale as symbolic of both pre- and post-industrial life. It’s the way beer was treated for thousands of years, and today, real ale still tells the story of slow food, green living and an appreciation of natural virtues in food and drink.
Roz and Jason had reconnoitered the scene, and there were several worthy pubs suitable for sampling. In addition, I’d brought along the latest edition of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide. One pub that we all agreed would merit a visit was the St. Radegund, which offered a small but well-selected range of libations and maintained three hand pumps pouring fresh and superbly tended real ale, including Fuller’s London Pride on an everyday basis.
Not only that, but the Radegund’s landlord Terry Kavanagh was, by all accounts, one of those larger-than-life impresarios glimpsed more often in literature than real life, except that flesh-and-blood Terry amply fulfilled his advance billing as a warm, garrulous and welcoming host, albeit caustically unwilling to coddle fools for the sake of a pound.
Eventually I saw an internet comment that said it all: “My only concern about St. Radegund is that its life expectancy is linked to that of Terry the landlord’s liver.”
We stayed in Cambridge for three days, and each of them boasted a lengthy evening session at the St. Radegund. I’ll come back to Terry and his pub shortly.
—
The UK’s archaic pub licensing laws, dating to World War I, were still in force in 1998, stipulating early closing times. Many pubs also took afternoon breaks. To compensate, we elected to start drinking early in the day, and closely examined the CAMRA guide for hours of operation.
Irrespective of normal mealtimes, each day in Cambridge concluded at a renowned late-night fast food joint named KFC — Kashmir Fried Chicken, or maybe Khoshkebija Fried Chicken. It was independent, quite consciously named, and creative in skirting trademark violations.
Hazy memories tells me that this renegade KFC’s hyperbolic but personable street-hawking owner was an immigrant from Iran dating to the time of the Shah’s ouster, although he might have hailed from any nation in the British Commonwealth.
After checking into a bed and breakfast somewhere near the train station, Don and I managed to find the modern university building at Newnham College where Roz and Jason were billeted.
They were unconvincingly pretending to study, yet no less welcoming of an opportunity to ditch the books and study local pub architecture instead, which placed the four of us squarely on the path to the St. Radegund Free House (via the Anchor, for lunch, probably) and love at first pint.
The next day, after I was refreshed and properly caffeinated following a full English fry-up at the B & B (extra baked beans, please), the four of us met for a mid-morning stroll through Cambridge’s historic university grounds, which date to 1209.
This attempt at enlightenment and edification soon devolved into a day-long pub crawl that introduced us to ten or more of the city’s licensed establishments, among them the Tap & Spile, Bath Ale House, Fountain Inn, Granta, Champion of the Thames and of course St. Radegund. We even found time to eat once or twice; maybe thrice. Alas, there were no glimpses of Syd Barrett.
Apart from the Radegund, the only establishment that I remember clearly was a firmly old-school, CAMRA-listed pub called The Cow and Calf; sadly, it was demolished within two years of our visit.
The interior is clear in my memory. The landlord resided in an apartment visible through a partially opened door behind the bar, and he graciously allowed us to remain in our seats during the afternoon closing period so we could watch a cricket match on the telly, providing color commentary and even illegally serving us another round of ale.
Cricket was terribly hard to grasp, but it was ideal for draining pints of City of Cambridge Brewery’s True Blue, a 3.8% Ordinary since renamed Boathouse Bitter.
Conversely, my first cask-conditioned Mild was brewed by Batemans, to be consumed at the Live and Let Live pub off Mills Road. It captivated me from the get-go.
In its contemporary interpretation, Mild generally implies a session-strength malty dark ale of less than 4% abv. Nowadays Mild usually bears a brownish or mahogany color, stopping short of stout-like blackness. Brown ales are related to Mild, but constructed differently, and while Mild may sometimes appear to be Porter at a distance, there are no shared beer-family ties between the two.
Malt bills for Mild are simple: mostly two-row, with a small percentage of chocolate or black malt. British brewers freely deploy adjuncts, and dark invert sugar is a common ingredient in Mild. Maltiness is key, hop presence restrained, and fruitiness moderate. While balanced and subtle, the charm of Mild is greater than the sum of its parts.
Noteworthy examples of Mild will exhibit hints of coffee, molasses, raisins, licorice or chocolate. You’ll never mistake a pint of Mild for Ordinary Bitter, and this is the whole point of having sessionable choices that extend beyond watered-down “session” IPAs in the American context.
Considerations of national brewing traditions invariably become sticky wickets, lending themselves to seemingly simple categorizations that later prove unable to withstand intense scrutiny.
Nonetheless, it strikes me as axiomatic that American beer drinkers overall are less familiar with the heritage of brewing in the British Isles as opposed to Germany, Belgium and California (which ought to be its own country, anyway). That’s too bad. We’re missing out on so very many tasty styles of ale, several of which were sampled during that one day in Cambridge.
There are many reasons for this unfamiliarity, among them the scantily translatable brilliance of cask-conditioned “real” ale, and an accompanying panoply of low-gravity “Real Ale” styles which aren’t exactly inspiring to the ears of super-sized, hyperbole-ingrained Americans: the aforementioned Mild and Ordinary, as well as Oyster Stout and the once-profuse “Plain” Porter.
Matters are further complicated by evolution.
Consider that in the beginning, some 200 years ago, Mild was a comparative term used to describe a fresh “present use” ale of any sort, at any strength, as intended to draw a contrast between young ales and Stock Ale — or “Stale,” a descriptor for ales purposefully aged in barrels, not “past date” or degraded, as we think of the concept of staleness today. Whatever Mild’s strength back then, it would not have been heavily hopped like Stale/Stock ales, precisely because Mild wasn’t destined for aging.
By the late 1800s, Mild had supplanted Porter as the most popular style of ale in Great Britain, although most examples had become paler in color by then and were as yet brewed at a confusingly wide range of strengths. From the end of the Great War, heightened taxation regimes brought Mild’s strength down, and changing tastes drove its hues back to darker shades.
By then Mild had become the chosen restorative tipple of the working classes in the mills and down the mines, and at one point after World War II, it comprised 70% of Britain’s ale sales. As beer scholar Martyn Cornell notes, many pubs were divided physically into separate bar areas, one for the shop floor to consume Mild in simpler digs, and the other occupied by management, who drank Bitter in comparatively plusher surroundings.
But by the 1960s, owing to the decline of heavy industry, upwardly mobile social aspirations and shifting consumer whims, Mild fell out of favor and Bitter took command for two decades, before being itself supplanted by mass-market industrial golden lager, which today accounts for the lion’s share of the market, and must be regarded as an instructive, sad and infuriating story.
If during its peak Mild was the worker’s choice as thirst quencher, it works just as well today after a bicycle ride, or during a day-long Cambridge pub crawl, as well as being an underrated accompaniment to food.
If a lager like Dos Equis complements Mexican cuisine, and I believe it does, Mild works just as well with greater character, even more so with pizza, where Mild joins Vienna and Märzen as ideal accompaniments.
Based in part on my Cambridge dalliance with cask-conditioned Mild in 1998, and reflecting my contrarian instincts in sniffing out under-valued notions, the very first New Albanian Brewing Company beer we brewed in 2002 was Community Dark, coming in at 3.7% abv.
I’ll always be proud that a Mild remained the top-selling NABC beer on the premises of the Pizzeria & Public House throughout the time I was co-owner of the company, although perhaps not as much lately. But it could be.
The coda goes to Cornell, because Orwell, of course: Meet the woman who served George Orwell pints of mild (2011).
Orwell regularly called in for a take-away jug of mild. Mrs Stacey also revealed that she used to put some of Orwell’s friends up at the Plough when they came to visit, where they paid the classic bed-and-breakfast charge of half-a-crown, two shillings and sixpence a night.
—
As of 2025, almost a quarter-century after my last experience at the St. Radegund Free House in 2001, the pub still ranks in the upper echelon of my favorite pubs anywhere, anytime.
It was THAT good.
This photo was taken in 2001; from left to right behind the bar are Mark Stewart, Terry Kavanagh, and me. I’d arranged to meet Mark at the Radegund when I was briefly quartering in London, coincidentally at a time when he was working near Cambridge. Of the four pictured here, counting the pub itself, I’m the only one still standing.
Kavanagh (1937 – 2012) ran the St. Radegund Free House from 1992 through 2009. He did not “own” it as we understand the term, but served as landlord (a contractual manager), albeit one with an uncommonly expansive allowance for his personal principles and preferences. This eccentricity is precisely what made Terry’s 17-year administration so very special.
St. Radegund survived Terry’s retirement in various configurations, apparently retaining little bits and pieces of his style and swagger, although contemporary remodeling projects did it no favors.
As of 2024 the pub seems permanently finished, another victim of the challenges facing traditional pubs in the UK during recent decades. As an old warhorse amid mounting stressors, Terry probably got out of the pub game at the right time (and I resemble this remark, too).
I’ve collected several on-line testimonials in an effort to convey the singular brilliance of St. Radegund during the period of our patronage, a quarter-century ago.
Many readers will fondly remember Terry Kavanagh who had the St. Radegund in King Street, Cambridge from 1992 until his retirement in 2009. “Bunter” compensated for the smallness of his pub with the size of his character…among Terry’s innovations were the Veil Ale (which involved taking bottles of beer all over the world), the Vera Lynn Appreciation Society (huge Gin &Tonics on a Friday night to the accompaniment of the wartime sweetheart), the Rain Check Tree, which enabled you to buy a pint for a friend to sup next time they came in, and the ceiling adorned with Eagle-style signatures. Terry himself was a great traveler, partly through his association with the Hash House Harriers, and loved nothing more than sharing memories of far-flung places with customers. I was there once when a chap came in and answered Terry’s usual “where are you from?” question with “the Falklands.” Turned out Terry had spent time there, so dissolve to tales of penguins, sheep, Port Stanley….
When Terry’s tenure ended in 2009, the testimonials were effusive. This being Cambridge, the also were uncommonly erudite.
Terry Kavanagh rang the bell last Saturday to call time on a fabulous 17 years as landlord of the St Radegund, King Street, Cambridge. The Rad may not have the fireplace, secret garden or pewter pots of Orwellian design, yet there is perfection in this Cantabrigian institution. Its locals are loyal but not jingoistic, often seen in other pubs. Despite a knowing cynicism, a faint whiff of the bear pit (one of Terry’s many taglines extolling the virtues of the pub being ‘St Radegund…a better class of insult’), its patrons will, and do, stand by each other.
Readers will understand the communal bonds between disparate men and women forged in the best of pubs. The St Radegund is the best of pubs. Several met wives or husbands there for the first time. When I wanted my wife, then girlfriend, to understand what I was about, taking her to the Rad seemed the finest possible shorthand.
…The pub is a maelstrom of variety, in no small part courtesy of its patrons. But getting the pub to this point, holding it together, providing the glue, setting the tone, arguing the toss and belligerently ruling the roost has been Terry. He’s seen B52s fly over Cambodia. He’s done Bali and the Falklands. He’s ushered countless students through evenings of unbridled alcoholic vice. And he’s pissed in each barrel to make sure it was up to scratch.
Where else but Radegund would you find a cricket ball blessed by the Pope?
I ask barman Timothy Haire who those men (‘Hash House Harriers’) were. “A drinking club with a running problem” is his reply. He tells me of evening runs through Cambridge, following a flour trail which eventually leads to the St. Radegund. The pub also boasts a rowing club and a cricket team, both founded by the late, much-loved landlord Kavanagh. (1)
In fact, The Ascent of Mount Hum: A Croatian Cricketing Odyssey (2) is a book written by Steve Haslemere that documents a cricket tour to the Croatian island of Vis that was sponsored by the St. Radegund.
When I mentioned to Terry in passing that I tremendously admired Duke Ellington, within minutes he’d popped in a cassette of the exact compilation album I owned. This quote must be rendered in bold (the original source website no longer exists).
The reason I look back on the pub with such fondness is not the beer (which was great), nor the spirits (also well chosen), but Terry’s presence and the way he forged a community of regulars through sheer force of his personality. This approach is becoming rarer and rarer – and is something I miss from the pub experience.
It should be easy to see that while Terry and I were different people, our attitude about pub administration jibed remarkably well.
At the time of my stay in Cambridge in 1998, little thought had been given to NABC become a brewery someday. I knew only that the idea was enticing. The reason we began brewing in 2002 was the availability of the brewing system from Tucker, a defunct operation in Salem, Indiana.
As noted, Cambridge was my first lesson in Mild, leading to NABC Community Dark. The St. Radegund Free House also inspired a lesser known NABC ale in 2006 and 2007, naturally called St. Radegund Bitter.
The pub’s name derived from a 12-century Benedictine nunnery in Cambridge dedicated to both St. Mary and St. Radegund; Jesus College later was constructed at the site of the nunnery.
Radegund was born a princess in Thuringia, a region in Germany directly north of Bamberg, around 520 AD. At the age of 11 or 12, she was seized by an invader, the Frankish King Chlothar I. Eventually she was forced to marry Chlothar, a brutal and abusive man, and became his queen. However, Radegund fled Chlothar and petitioned for the protection of the church, which provided it.
Chlothar soon died, and in the early 550s Radegund founded a monastery at Poitiers in France, assembling a notable collection of relics, included a purported sliver of the “True Cross”; interestingly, she also required nuns and monks to be literate, and to spend time each day reading the Bible and copying manuscripts. Radegund lived simply as a nun until her death in 587, and was canonized soon afterward.
I felt an otherworldly sense of kinship with the pub and its landlord. Auld Lang syne to them both.
—
Flights to America from Europe typically depart after lunch and into the early afternoon. This timing allowed us ample opportunity to rise early in Cambridge and catch a train back into London before splitting up.
Don was returning home via Heathrow, while I caught another train to the seaside resort of Brighton to spend my last two nights of the summer’s journey. For one, it seemed less stressful to hop a bus in Brighton for the 40-minute commute to Gatwick than fight the congestion in London.
Besides, there was deep personal history for me in Brighton despite never once having been there: Quadrophenia, the 1974 concept album written by Pete Townshend and performed by The Who, which is my favorite album of all time. This was more than a bucket list item. It was a rock and roll pilgrimage.
Let me flow into the ocean
Let me get back to the sea
Let me be stormy and let me be calm
Let the tide in, and set me free
Having established a perimeter at a B & B near the beach and boardwalk, I proceeded to the Sussex Yeoman pub, where the neighborhood drunk promptly attached himself to me like a terminally ill barnacle.
The bar fly’s antics were amusing for a moment, at least for so long as he remained semi-coherent and the helpful barmaid hovered protectively nearby to provide support, but then she finished her shift and disappeared, and my new friend’s disposition began to sour.
A fellow from Hong Kong who was studying at Cambridge amiably distracted the drunk, and I winked acknowledgment to him before slipping away to the Evening Star brewpub and free house (3).
Almost immediately the bar man paused to chat, and I observed to him that one reason for my coming to Brighton was the city’s prominent place in Quadrophenia. He was delighted, and this is when I learned that my server was none other than publican and owner Peter Skinner, who affirmed his own love for the Who, adding that many pub regulars also were fans, including the one standing next to me.
This man excitedly explained that they’d recently heard a 17-year-old local drummer who was the second coming of Keith Moon; it was a shame that I wouldn’t be around town long enough to hear the drummer’s band play live.
I ordered the pub’s own Dark Star cask ale. Peter described it as a cross between an Old Ale and a Bitter; the ale was dark, slightly sweet, hoppy and poundable, with the light carbonation from the secondary fermentation in the cask suited wonderfully for leisurely drinking and scholarship pertaining to The Who.
All this led to an invitation to tour the brewery in the company of two pleasant senior citizens, one of whom conceded to homebrewing now and then. We descended a short flight of stairs into the cellar, where a cleverly designed combo mash tun/brew kettle and three fermenters were stuffed into a corridor barely the size of a walk-in closet.
The three fermenters were filled with ale, as was another in a nook nearby, and to the left was the portion of the cellar where the casks of real ale were tapped and drawn up to the bar with hand pumps.
The pub’s basement-brewed house ales were excellent, but hardly the only ones available. Four or five “guest ales,” always cask-conditioned, were subject to rotation on an astoundingly frequent basis, as attested by a chalkboard behind the bar that recorded the tally of different cask ales served at the Evening Star Pub between March 8, 1992 and my session in late July, 1998: 2,545.
That’s more than the number of days (roughly 2,062) that had elapsed between the two dates. CAMRA took note of this impressive score, declaring that the pub should be designated as Brighton’s “permanent beer festival.”
Back upstairs, I turned to order my final pint of Bitter and became engaged in conversation with two leather-clad laborers. Within minutes they were politely criticizing me for the inadequacies of American beer (although I made a strong case for the burgeoning microbrewery scene), then began more aggressively questioning me about America’s policies during the Vietnam War, which ended when I was 15.
The younger of the two didn’t seem to notice that I was agreeing with him about Vietnam, suddenly announcing he was thoroughly “pissed” (meaning intoxicated, not angry), prompting the older of the two to apologize for their degraded conditions. They both shook my hand and excused themselves to go to an after-hours club nearby for the express purpose of “bothering some birds.”
By this time the 11.00 p.m. bell had sounded last call, and already we were closing in on the 11.20 finishing time, when all pints must be drained. I spoke again with Peter, finished my pint and hit the street to walk back down the hill to my hotel.
The seagulls squawked and the delightful smell of salt water was interspersed with aromas of meat and grease emanating from the late-night, deep-fried eateries that are a staple of evening life in merry old England.
I was a tad pissed myself, to be honest. Britannia may or may not have been “cool,” but the ale certainly met with my approval.
Next: The inception of NABC’s Gravity Head, 1999.
(1) This passage appeared in The Cambridge Student; the link to it is broken.
(2) In 2024 prior to our trip to Split, I read Under a Croatian Sun: From Grey Britain to a Sunny Isle: One Couple’s Dream Comes True by Anthony Stancomb, a London art dealer who cashed in his business and moved to the island of Vis. In the book, Stancomb describes his efforts to launch cricket on the island, almost surely including the visit chronicled by Haslemere.
(3) The Evening Star pub is still in business, purportedly dating to 1854 and presently operating as a free house (i.e., no contractual ties to breweries). In 2001, the Dark Star Brewery left the pub’s basement for bigger and supposedly better things; the subsequent record is quite mixed, and can be contemplated here.
