A trip to Northumberland for beer expert from King’s Lynn
In his weekly The Bar Man column, Jeff Hoyle talks about birthdays… and beer…
Who would have a birthday in January? Amelia for one. A research scientist based in London, she was a regular visitor to Lynn for many years giving talks to the local support group of the Royal Osteoporosis Society, but it wasn’t in London where she chose to celebrate her milestone birthday.
Her family are farmers in Northumberland, close to Kielder Forest, and it was here that we had been invited to gather for the big day. Fortunately, it wasn’t the time of the snow and wind when we made our way north, though the temperatures were close to freezing and snow lay on the ground for much of our journey.
Darkness was falling as we reached the Holly Bush, the Good Beer Guide pub where we had booked a room for the weekend. We were greeted with the news that the chef was ill and there would be no food. No matter, a phone call had established that the Cheviot Hotel in the nearby town of Bellingham would feed us, and so we rocked up in a smart hotel bar with a roaring fire and excellent beer from local breweries, including Double Maxim, now brewed by the Maxim brewery and billed as the only brown ale produced in the North East, as the famous Newcastle Brown now comes from the John Smiths brewery in Tadcaster.
We made sure we were back at the Holly Bush in time to try a couple of pints from their range of five handpumps on the bar while warming ourselves in front of another roaring fire. Most of the other half a dozen or so customers were locals, and we were soon entertained by a discussion between a farmer and a girl who had come up from Liverpool to stay at a nearby Buddhist retreat who was making a passionate defence of veganism.
Next day we had a tour of Amelia’s family farm, 1,100 acres with seven hundred sheep and one hundred cattle run by her brother with just the occasional help at busy times. The calves elicited a few approving coos, but the star was the dog up from Harpenden going absolutely crazy at being allowed out in the countryside rather than her normal park.
The evening event was in a smart restaurant and bar converted from a cattle shed where I was seated next to one of the farmers from the previous evening who, judging by his menu choice, had not been converted to veganism. To my right was another farmer who had around 1,400 acres and was excited as one of her horses had won a race at Ayr earlier in the week. Opposite was Helen who it turned out was a shepherd just over the border in Scotland running a flock of about 700 sheep.
I came away with a real insight into a very different way of life as well as being well fed and delighted to find a superb pale ale on the bar from a local brewery. Who would have a birthday in January? I have. We travelled home the next day, and I had worked out a treat for the big occasion, a pre-season Rugby League friendly at Doncaster followed by a night in a decent hotel to break the journey. Alas, like most of the sport over the weekend, it fell victim to the weather, as did plan B, Halifax Panthers. I did manage a crawl of sorts with a coffee at Leeming Bar followed by a coffee and sandwich at Blyth Services. Not the celebration I had envisaged, but maybe it will be my turn next year.
bar.man@btinternet.com
