Category: Scotland

If This Is Monday Is That Longniddry?

 

scot2014kBy the second week, I’ve given up on most places listed in the guides like The Malt Shovel as there are rules against kids even in their mid-teens coming into some pubs that have me befuddled. I never inquired so I might be entirely wrong about the place. Some pubs like The Ship Inn in North Berwick are good for families until 8 pm. Others like The Abbotsford on Rose Street in Edinburgh are fine with the family upstairs in the restaurant but not downstairs in the bar. One Wetherspoons had so many rules (give the man your table number and your pint may arrive in twenty minutes… but only if you are in that room with the 14 year old) that I thanked them and left. Fortunately common sense reigns at the Old Clubhouse in Gullane where Timothy Taylor flows even if through a sparkler. Up there with The Holyrood 9A as best stops so far.

The Ship Inn was all sparklers, too. The pub sat in a dark red sandstone building on corner a few blocks back from the shore, tenament style, apartments upstairs, established 1895. Big windows and a few picnic tables out front under shady tree… well, shady when it’s not raining. Inside, dark wood and comfortable leather benches and arm chairs. Friendly service but they appeared to have never conceived of hot chocolate and Baileys. It was, you know, raining. It was remarked upon a few times by the staff. Said they would add it to the drinks list. Being Canadian seems a natural thing, having eight months of winter and all. Three hand pulls of local beers along with ten or so taps, mainly from larger breweries. Large selection of bottles, mirrored shelves. Open central space by bar. Tip jar. Tipping is interesting. Neither encouraged or refused. Asked in a few places and consensus is 10% is appreciated but not expected or demanded. Uncle and I both agreed upon the Broughton IPA – which came in at 5.5% even if on sparkler. Creamy mouthfeel, pronounced chewy hops.

That’s all for now. The train is approaching the sunny Clyde the noo.

Scotland: The Holyrood 9A, Edinburgh

image224Made it. Fourteen hours door to door to Uncle and Auntie’s. Next day? Children down to the pub. Well, a pub. The Holyrood 9A in Edinburgh’s Old Town. It’s warm. The warmest room so far. Williams Caesar Augustus is a tasty pint. Very full for what would be a light beer at home. Tropical hops, sure, but a good malt backbone balancing them out… well, almost. A venison burger is coming. Half the tables, like ours, have happy kids.

Great Grannie’s Favorite Pub Was A Boat

suez2

Great-grannie passed away in 1946. Tales have been told about her ways. If you click on the thumbnail you will see the house above the car where she lived on the second floor, stepping out on the second floor ledge to wash the windows in her 80s without tying on. Sending her grandson down to the pub for a half-pint of whisky after being barred – again – for life. Plenty of slack is given, however, seeing as she lived across the road from the shipyard before, during and after the blitzing.

2mack12She had issues, sure, but she also had a certain sense of style. Her favorite pub “The Suez Canal” was actually in a village down the Clyde. I had always been told she loved the portholes for windows. Classy. I recall seeing a few portholes still still up a back alley when lost while wandering around town in the 80s looking for cousins with beer. Found one at “The George” who called out “Ets ma cuzn frae Ganeeder!” Twelve hours later…

The picture above was posted today by the local newspaper on Facebook. The smiling barman in the picture in the wee boat is local lad and former world flyweignt boxing champ, Jackie Paterson. Worth the bus trip apparently.

Friday Bullets For The Week Of The Blackout

The power went out. From 3 pm to midnight yesterday. Sat around in one room for the evening and marveled at the power of the battery. I tweeted and listened to radio. Ice was to blame. Ice from the sky. Fortunately, it appears to have rained all night washing away the coating. A few trees in the neighbourhood fell. Now, there is good reason to have those ribs in the freezer:

♦ I like beer as much as the next guy. Probably more. But I am not sure why one of Ontario’s less interesting brewers deserved $1,000,000 in tax support annually.
♦ Really? I assume the PM does not know every implication of every Federal legal brief. And besides. If the brief was correct in relation to same sex marriage, it also means that the same is true for different sex marriage – if you don’t meet a foreign level of consanguinity in your home country, a Canadian marriage would not be valid. No one believes that.
♦ Let’s be clear, then. I am the guy who backed Harper this week, not the National Post. No Senate reform, please. No need to entirely lock up Federal governance, Steve.
♦ Scots apparently are not free to make up their minds. Time to revive the Declaration of Arbroath. “It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.” Makes you weepy just thinking about it.

There. Done. Gotta work one more day before the gorging of rib fest begins. Thanks, blackout, for reminding me to make time for ribs.

Book Review: Edinburgh Pub Walks by Bob Steel

epw1I get cranky. Especially when I have had a cold since Thursday and couldn’t get out on the snowshoes this weekend as planned. Heck, I really could not maintain much of a level of consciousness given the fever here, the aches there and the surreal effect of cold medication. Not prime time for the beer fan. So, it’s a good thing we have books for these drier stretches. I got this one in the mail a few months ago. Been wondering when I would post about it. I really should post more reviews of CAMRA’s excellent books but when this rare review copy came, I noticed my street address was off by about 127 front doors. Some guy two tenths of a mile away must have a great collection.

Anyway, I love this book. Why? Well, for one thing I am familiar with some walks covered having family that live on a few of the streets named upon the maps. I have spent some time there. I even dodged an indignant but well emptied bottle flung from a terrace far far above one Saturday at Hibs when Georgie Best was a no show and my father decided to leave early. But those connections to the town aren’t what makes this book work for me. No, its the maps themselves that draw you in. Bright, well laid out and placed smartly on the page they offer clear instruction by the clever use of colour leaving no real need for a table explaining what means what. Then there are the photos which make you want to crawl right though into that place in Prestonpans or the other on Rose Street. [Sadly, it appears that the Rose Street Brewery, where I spent a few happy days in 1986, is not more or at least not worth mentioning.] And then there are the walking tours. I don’t know of any North American pub guide based on this idea but it is an excellent one. Implicitly moderate or perhaps otherwise sensible, the 25 routes provide more information than a traveler might ever require and maybe even enough to keep a local well occupied.

The book seems to have been backed by the combination of CAMRA and Caledonian Brewery which might lead one to worry that a fix was in. Not a chance as there is every indication of as ecumenical an approach to mentioning tap offerings as you might wish. Well worth the investment for anyone there in Edinburgh or planning to be.

Twenty Years Ago, A Christmas Eve In Scotland

One of my favorite Christmas Eves was twenty years ago tonight, in Gullane, East Lothian, Scotland. I was visiting my uncle, auntie and cousins and had settled into a week long stay. It didn’t take long for it to seem like to everyone in the village I was that “coosin frae Gan-ee-der.” People shouted hello to me from across the street, a colonial vestige of something, a bit of all their people who had gone away. I had been there a few years before by myself so was renewing old friendships but this time I had come there from a new direction – from Poland where I had been teaching English as a second language in a small city on the Baltic coast. And I’m still married to the guest I brought along, the one I had met only a few weeks before, back there well east of Germany where the Soviets still had tanks. All in all, a complex bit of culture shock going on: from the nutty affluence of North America to the balance of hard luck and new hope world of the land keeking out from behind the Iron Curtain and then on to somewhere in between, an old village in the old country in winter.

In that village there was a pub. The Golf Inn. Down the street and around the corner from the family home most evenings we played pool, drank a lot of Guinness and sat around and talked night after night with family and friends, greens keepers, university students back from college all curious about what we had seen in the East. We were there on Christmas Eve, too, dressed up a bit more and well fed by auntie, packed in with the neighbours likewise having a great old time when, at 11 pm, without any warning to we two Canadians in the corner, all moved as one across the road to the Church of Scotland, the Kirk, for the service. It was magic. Never been in a church before or since after a night filled with beer and friends. Before and after the dour sermon, there were great big men swaying in kilts, well oiled from the evening to that point. They sang in congregation and beefy harmony in great booming voices. Unlike this night, twenty years later in another church in another country, I am now not sure if they sang the Viking meets Italian carol “In the Bleak Midwinter” but they may well have:

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

After church, we were with the half that did not pour back into the pub to continue. We had to get back. There were plenty of guests in the house besides ourselves, generations of relatives that all had to get up in the morning as one. We walked together back round the corner and up the street in the cold still dark night full of the singing, the beer, the night.

Scotland: Paradox Islay #004, BrewDog, Aberdeenshire

bdpi1What a mess. I hadn’t realized the label was made of hard card stock stuck on with two-sided sticky tape. I might take it down to the lab and get James’ near teen DNA off of it. Bottle 131 of 200. By opening it, I probably just threw away the 100 bucks I could get from some guy in Kansas on eBay. Sent as a sample by the brewery when they were but boys a few years back. I decided to open it after watching a little Horatio Hornblower that was accompanied by a Bourbn County stout. No doubt you have known that moment, too.

As promised, it is all Islay on the nose, the beloved smoky low Islands Scots whisky. Land of my fathers. Because the stout sat in a barrel of the 1968. My mother’s cousin-in-law was a canny and, for the Clyde, stylish post-war whisky broker in the southwest so I am sure he would approve. He certainly would recognize it. Deep deep mahogany under mocha rim and froth. Aroma of the malt but in the mouth it is sharp. At first, a hammer of old Dutch man’s licorice with all the salt that goes along with seaweedy Islay – then something like a stout with something like a whisky. It isn’t really anything like “balanced” and I wonder, honestly, if it is more of an artifact than a beer. Dry and a little like something I would call harsh but on the lovely side of harsh. Descriptors like “whopping”, “foolish” and “two by four to the head” come to mind. Planky. Sae halp ma bob. That is all I can say.

One sole BAer went mad for this early Holy Grail like example of experimental 21st century UK brewing.

Hooray – I Love Being Told I Am Stupid – So Should You

Update: To be fair, when I heard about their tattoo promotion I immediately thought “damn, you have to be at the pub on opening night….”

Am I supposed to cheer along with the giving of the finger to 99.998% of customers for the sake of marketing? Or is this supposed to be Dada beer? Who cares. All I know is I am far less inclined to buy any BrewDog beer. Why? Because of this short sentence:

A response to the haters.

“Haters”? Good Lord. Are you twelve? This has to be the stupidest new usage of a word that has been imposed upon the language and there is far too much use of it in craft beer circles. It denies the right to disagree. It tells us to stop thinking and start following. You call in to question my freedom from being your sycophant, I call into question your business model.

Not that there is anything wrong with the beer. BrewDog is quite good at making beer. As good as a lot of other great brewers. What makes it different is how it seems to be that it is brewed by pushy dullards with an over active interest in getting our money while letting us know we don’t “get it.” No thanks me thinks. This brewery has gotten too boring.

Has An Unacceptable Level Of Drinking Been Described?

Pete Brown has run a series of posts this week and last that delve into stats being issued by various government agencies and health lobby groups in the UK. It is important work that Pete is doing as there is no stat worse than the unexamined stat. Today’s post was called “More Hilarity with Statistics” which examined claims about the level of drinking in Scotland. I made a comment over there but did some more rooting around to make sure I agreed with what I was seeing and, to avoid looking like a totally rude idiot being all finger pointy in the comments, thought I would set it out here instead. I also got thinking because even if a stat can be discredited it does not mean that the underlying facts necessarily do not exists, only that they are not well described. But, as I said in the comments, I am really bad at math so I am happy to be corrected.

The BBC story Pete began with was titled “Scots ‘Drink 46 Bottles of Vodka‘” by which they mean per person per year on average. Pete suggested that this was not particularly well researched as tourism trade taking the booze away was not figured in – but then when I ran the numbers I saw this pattern:

  • Scotland has about 8% of the UK population
  • total UK booze sales in 2007 were worth over 41 billion pounds
  • and therefore, Scotland’s booze sales can be approximated at around 4 billion pounds.

I took the numbers from this soul suckingly slow .pdf source. I read them to meaning that if every penny of the 25 million pounds spent at distillery shops was non-Scots resident alcohol sales, removing it entirely from Scottish consumption, it only represents well under 1% of total Scottish sales? If that is the case, the variation is under a bottle of vodka a year. I said that even if I was off by a whole decimal point and the distillery sales represent 10% of sales isn’t it still a little bit alarming that every Scots adult averages 41 or 42 bottles of vodka a year? By which I mean I had a gut feeling it was in fact pretty high. But is it?

A little more looking around further, found information stating that 30% of Scots adults say they do not drink – which means the drinking Scot averages 58 or so bottle a year working off the conservative 41 bottles a week stat. It is more like 65 a year if you go by the BBC’s number of 46. I got the “did not drink” percentage from this pdf. So you have 30% of Scots not drinking, 35% drinking up to the average and 35% drinking over the average.

What does that mean? 58 bottles a year on average means 1.12 x 700 ml bottles a week at 40% that means 313 ml of pure alcohol a week. By comparison, a standard Canadian 12 oz 5% beer has 341 ml. Which means that average Scots drinker’s booze consumption is the equivalent of 19 standard 5% Canadian beers a week. Sounds like a bit more than you might think is a good idea, week after week day after day. But not fatal. It’s maybe what we expect the average healthy working Joe would drink in a week. Similarly, a US 22 oz bomber has 650 ml. At 8% that is 65 ml of pure alcohol. Which means that the Scot’s drinker’s booze consumption is the equivalent of 4.8 bombers of 8% US craft beer a week. Is that going to scare off a craft beer fan? Hardly.

But it is an average and that is what I think is the real concern. It means 35% of Scots drinkers adults drink more… because 65% drinkers there drink less including the 30% who abstain. I think those numbers are troubling. They may well be wrong so please do your own a arithmetic. But if they are not wrong – is there not a valid public health concern where 35% of your population is doing that level of drinking. I don’t really care if you think there is no such thing as a public health concern from a libertarian point of view as that is not the point here. Nor does someone called “Alan Campbell McLeod” care if you think this is only a Scottish problem. I think we can all agree that there is a point beyond which alcohol is unhealthy. Is that point been identified by the BBC report?