Young’s brewery: the penultimate trip

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The people that provide my blogging software, WordPress, have just added a slideshow capability, so I though I would try it out with some pictures from what was the second-to-last ever trip round Young’s brewery in Wandsworth, South London, in September 2006. The following week brewing ceased on the Ram Brewery site after, probably, at least 450 years of continuous ale and beer making. Sadly, two days after our trip, John Young, the chairman of Young’s, died of cancer, aged 85.

I am, unfortunately, a rubbish photographer with no particular idea what I’m doing (I remember the “doh!” feeling after my ex-brother-in-law, who, to be fair, is a well-known and award-winning sculptor, took a photograph on my camera that was vastly superior to anything I had ever achieved with it). But there are a few interesting pics here among the vaguely all right ones.

As a bonus, at the very end there’s a photograph from the air of the brewery site in 1930: note the trolleybuses in the bottom right hand corner, going up Garrett Lane (off which I used to live, in the 1980s: you could tell which way the wind was blowing, at that time, by sniffing the air, since the Kenco coffee factory was to the south, a gin distillery stood to the east and Young’s rose to the north, each giving their own distinctive aroma to the Wandsworth funk. All, alas, are now closed.)

Come-back for the Burtons

One of the particularly interesting facts to emerge from the papers prepared for last week’s BGBW seminar on wood-aged beers was that Greene King has been giving everyone, including our leading beer writers entirely the wrong tale about the name of BPA, the beer that is blended with two-year-old 5X to make Strong Suffolk.

The initials BPA do not, in fact, stand for Best Pale Ale, as writers from Michael Jackson to Roger Protz have been misled by the brewery into saying. They stand for Burton Pale Ale – and if you read the recipe for BPA, which included dark sugars and crystal malt, this makes perfect sense.

The trouble is that nobody today can remember what Burton Pale Ale used to be, and everybody now thinks it’s a synonym for India Pale Ale. It isn’t, at all – they are two totally different beers, in colour and flavour, and united only in being associated with the same brewing town.

Burton Pale Ale, also known as Burton Ale is the original dark, rather sweet beer the brewers of Burton upon Trent made and exported to Russia before they started brewing even paler, bitterer India Pale Ales in the 1820s.

Young’s makes me feel you so

There are not many pleasures as fine as good, real, live beer, but one of them is good, real, live jazz.

Luckily, for the 25 years I’ve lived back in London, in eight homes and four different boroughs, I’ve never been more than about 15 minutes’ drive from the Bull’s Head at Barnes. Young’s beer on handpump in the music room itself, almost invariably great performances from the stage by terrific musicians: it’s one of the regularly available delights of the capital that make up for the hassle, the noise and the expense of living in London.

Last Saturday, for example, the band at the Bull’s Head was a quintet led by the piano player Stan Tracey, a man justly called by the BBC “the godfather of British jazz”, with Stan’s long-time collaborator, the Glaswegian tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins, Stan’s son Clark on drums, Andy Cleyndert on bass and Guy Barker on trumpet. Terrific modern jazz, played with panache and passion – and all for £12 at the door. Frankly, I feel guilty paying so little for something so good – it would cost you more for a not-very-good bottle of wine in the restaurant next door.

Seeing Guy Barker reminded me that I have an LP (remember those?) released exactly 30 years ago by the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, called In Camra, and featuring tunes “inspired” by real ale and real ale breweries. Guy was in the trumpet section, and I’ve been trying to spot him on the cover, which shows the entire NYJO in the brewery yard at Young’s Ram brewery, with Ramrod the sheep front and centre and a fully loaded horse-drawn dray in the background.

Waggle-and-Special

My third-nearest Young’s pub (which is named after the unpleasant, and unreadable, poisoned dwarf Alexander Pope, but I try not to let that damage my enjoyment of it) is currently selling draught Waggledance, the honey beer now, since all brewing of Young’s beers moved to Bedford, on its third brewery. This is not a beer I drink at home, but as I was in a pub I thought I’d experiment with Waggledance as a mixed beer. Young’s ales, since they have plenty of individual character, make excellent mixes, the best being a classic, Winter Warmer and Ordinary. This is the traditional “Mother-in-Law”, or old-and-bitter (no reference is intended here to any of my mothers-in-law, living or dead, and certainly not to you, Kate, as if …).