Brand new guide to beer and travel

Beer Breaks in Britain, Phil Mellows  & Kate Simon (Bloomsbury, £20)

This is a brilliant idea that was waiting to happen. Phil and Kate are seasoned journalists who have used their well-honed skills, along with a love of good pubs and beer, to tour the country in search of the finest hostelries.

Their mission statement is “30 places to explore and drink good beer”. They begin by crossing a minefield, extolling the joys of cask ale but stating there are many good new craft beers.

I don’t have a problem with that. There are some excellent “craft keg” beers today a long way removed from the likes of Watney’s Red and Worthington E. If you are too young to have drunk those fizzy pops, be glad, very glad.

The intrepid duo have divided the country into regions and then descended on chosen towns and cities to choose the best pubs. York is a good place to begin. On my many visits I have found it difficult to tear myself away from the York Tap at the train station, an Art Nouveau treasure with 20 pumps dispensing cask ales in superb Edwardian grandeur.

Phil and Kate rightly give it pride of place but they move on to the fine pubs in The Shamble and other historic areas. They also pinpoint an outlet new to me with the remarkable name of the House of the Trembling Madness, which strikes me as a good place for a soothing beer in these troubled times.

The overall style of the book is laid out in this first section: a selection of fine York pubs and then details of places of interest to see such as museums, including the Jorvik Viking Centre, and the National Railway Museum, along with places to stay.

The authors are lucky to have found a publisher with money to spend and the book is illustrated by a series of gorgeous photographs that set the taste buds tingling for a visit and a pint.

From York the writers take us on a dazzling tour of Leeds, with a useful list of brewery taprooms as well as pubs, Keighley, home to Timothy Taylor, and on to Sheffield via Saltaire and Shipley.

Across the Pennines, Kendal in the Lake District is a town in urgent need of a visit. As well as traditional pubs there is now a sizeable number of new small craft breweries and their taprooms. Is the name of the Handsome Snuff Bar a welcome or a warning?

And it’s good to find old friends still dispensing fine ale, such as the Drunken Duck at Barngates and the Kirkstile Inn at Loweswater. The authors recommend staying at the Black Bull, an old coaching inn in Coniston: who could disagree, as it brews Bluebird, a former Champion Beer of Britain, named after Donald Campbell’s hydroplane that broke several world records. He stayed in the Black Bull, which is decked out with Bluebird memorabilia.

The great North-west cities of Manchester and Liverpool draw beer lovers like a magnet. Manchester still has a clutch of old family brewers – Hydes, Holts and Lees with Robinson’s nearby in Stockport – and a vast number of new small craft breweries. Cloudwater has pride of place in the book and deservedly so as it has put quality craft beer on the map in the region. I’m pleased to find an entry for Bundobust, an Indian street food restaurant with taps serving its own beer.

Among the many places to see and visit, the authors choose the statue of Alan Turing, the war time code breaker, the site of the Peterloo Massacre, and the People’s History Museum that celebrates the struggle of working people from the Chartists to the miners.

Liverpool also has a myriad of places to see, including naturally the Cavern Club and the Beatles Story Museum. But the pubs come first and the list includes such not-to-missed hostelries as the Baltic Fleet, the Dispensary and the Roscoe Head that has graced every edition of the Good Beer Guide since the early 1970s.

The great swathe of the Midlands takes in important brewing centres in Burton, with such historic pubs as the Coopers and Burton Bridge, and Derby with Derby Brewing and Dancing Duck, along with the triangular Brunswick Tavern with its house brewery, originally a pub designed in Victorian times for railway workers.

Birmingham, the mighty Second City, has many pubby treasures, including the Post Office Vaults, the Wellington with 16 pumps, and the Craven Arms. One new outlet for me, and well worth a visit, is the Indian Brewery at Snow Hill Station that brews pale ale, IPA and lager to enjoy with authentic curry dishes.

Beer lovers will need no encouragement to head for Bakewell to visit the taproom at Thornbridge Brewery, one of the most successful independent breweries in the country. It’s now home to a Burton Union fermenting system, rescued from Marston’s in Burton: it’s fascinating to watch brewing taking place in this historic Victorian kit that enabled the first star-bright pale ales to be produced.

The London section of the book is odd: there are certainly excellent small breweries and taprooms in Hackney and Bermondsey but the centre of the capital is missing. I would have thought that two experienced journos would have visited Fleet Street – the Street of Shame -- once the heart of the newspaper industry and still offering such fine outlets as the Punch Tavern and the Olde Cheshire Cheese, the last named beloved of Charles Dickens, who started his writing career as a newspaper reporter.

Further south our writers journey to Lewes, home to Harvey’s handsome old brewery, and to Shepherd Neame in Faversham, the country’s oldest brewery dating from 1698. Both have a clutch of fine ale houses, including Harvey’s the Rights of Man that celebrates the life and work of Tom Paine, who hailed from Lewes.

I was amused by the new name Harvey’s has given to a pub and hotel in Brighton and Hove: the Maris & Otter, celebrating Britain’s finest malting barley.

Further south still we can read of the excellent pubs of St Austell Brewery in Cornwall before we head north for Scotland. Scottish readers may feel there are top-quality pubs beyond just Glasgow and Edinburgh but the country’s two major cities have a wealth of quality outlets.

They include the opulent Guildford Arms close to Waverley Station where Phil and I have enjoyed each other’s company while supping the superb beer from Fyne Brewery,

Innis & Gunn, famous for their oak-aged beers, have bars in both cities while the highly experimental Campervan Brewery has a cellar bar in Leith that is well worth a visit.

A few grumbles aside – such as the exclusion of St Albans with 50 pubs and a lot of history – this is an illuminating guide to great dispensers of liquid gold. With pubs under the hammer from the Covid pandemic and now heavy-handed government imposts, Phil and Kate have stressed the importance of pubs to our communities and to our way of life.

This book, I’m sure, will run to many editions. Don’t miss it.