A Year Of Beer 14 : The Oak Wheel, Burniston

The Oak Wheel, Coastal Road, Burniston, Scarborough

Tuesday 30 June 2015

Pleasant village pub in Burniston, which is a few miles north of Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast. At one time there were pubs like this in most villages but they are increasingly becoming a rarity. It survives by doing what such pubs need to do these days - a few rooms, a lot of food, a quiz or two - and doing it rather well. We ate there and the food was excellent. We drank there and the drink was well kept and reasonably varied. I washed my steak down with a pint of Timothy Taylors' Landlord - always a safe pair of hands in foreign parts.

A Year Of Beer 13 : The Black Horse, Whitby

The Black Horse, Church Street, Whitby

Tuesday 30th June 2015

This is the kind of pub an old beer-head like me dreams about when he goes to sleep at night. Dripping with history band real ale, preserved but not picked in aspic, as dark as a Whitby Goth and a shining beacon of what an old English pub can be like. There has probably been a pub here for 800 years or so and there is a good deal of the structure of the current building than can take you back four or five hundred years. There is some fascinating history associated with the place - I particularly love the story of the scan of having two inns with similar names in the same street - but there is little fun in reading such things in the sterility of an on-line context. Go there, get a pint, and soak it all in. I did and the pint in question was a pint of Flipside Brewery's Farthing Mild. Pub, drink, location .... the stuff of dreams.

A Year Of Beer 12 : The Feathers / Pickwick Bar, Helmsley, North Yorkshire

The Feathers Hotel / The Pickwick Bar. Market Place, Helmsley, North Yorkshire

Monday 29th June 2015

These are two adjacent buildings now united as the Feathers Hotel and the Pickwick Bar. The hotel was originally a private house before becoming a coaching inn whilst its neighbour is an old cottage, supposedly one of the oldest domestic buildings in this small North Yorkshire town. Some of the panelling is said to have come from Helmsley Castle and both the bar and the hotel are full of work by Robert Thompson, the famous Mouseman of Kilburn. An internal door allows you to move from the more formal hotel to the more drink-friendly bar without having to leave the building. I carried through a pint of the locally brewed Howardian Gold, and having drunk it, I'm glad I did.