Get your drinking glasses on, it's a Pub of the Year preview!

So, there are just six short days left for the fine pubs of London to wow me with their beertastic awesomeness.

OK, technically they're six of the longest days of the year, but who gives a fuckpig for such pedantry when the fourth BV Pub of the Year contest is lurking just around the corner!

You know the drill by now. Last years finalists go head to head, toe to toe and cask to cask against five spanking new contenders and we'll see if anyone can wrest the shiny trophy away from the Craft Beer Company in Clerkenwell.

Importantly, I will be making a few adjustments to the rules this year, following feedback from readers, co-drinkers and an important missive from the Iranian embassy. (OK, so, one of those didn't actually inform the decision all that much.)

London's best shawarma is BACK!!!

Late night takeaways are a fact of life.

We've all eaten our share of dodgy fried chicken and toilet-grade kebabs when stricken with ferocious hunger pangs shortly after leaving the pub. Beer can do that to you.

Got a much better takeaway than the man on the bus

Perhaps the only real downside of the longer opening hours we've enjoyed for some years now is that most of the food options available at chucking-out time are invariably dire.

Well, almost invariably dire. There are, believe it or not, a few very special places where you can actually get something decent to eat at 12:37 AM. 

Stock Cupboard Essentials - Pancetta and Chorizo Risotto

Somebody asked me the other day about my stock cupboard essentials, with the qualifier 'I suppose you get asked this all the time'. Which was interesting because I can't actually remember ever being asked before.

I suppose it's one of those things that people take for granted. We all have the same sort of shit in our kitchens, and the bigger the kitchen, the more of it we have.

But I'm not wholly convinced that this is true.

Mild mannered thoughts

It's perhaps a tad unfortunate that this years Mild Month is coterminous with the announcement of (and scurrilious conclusion-drawing from!) the cessation of Robinson's 1892 Mild, which some are proclaiming as the final death knell of the style.

A quick check of my personal records reveals that I've tried 33 different Robinson's beers, none of which were this particular mild. That in itself says quite a bit.


I'm a ticker. So given that I will always try a beer I haven't had before - subject to limits of capacity, which are probably greater than the average persons - this suggests that I've never been anywhere that Robbies Mild has been available, apart from possibly a beer festival where it would've been lost amongst hundreds of other, largely more exciting brews.

This in turn indicates that Robinson's have been astonishingly crap at distributing their mild and probably had little interest in the product. Compare it to their heavily-promoted Trooper, a fairly bland beer which appears to be available absolutely fucking everywhere.

I've had two other Milds brewed at Robinson's - Young Tom and Hartley's Mild - and I've even been to Stockport once (first game after City were relegated from the Premiership, won 2-0) so if I've never had the opportunity to try the beer, it's a fair bet that your average drinker hasn't either.

Food fit for Commoners

You probably haven't failed to notice that there's an Election coming up this week.

Who are you voting for?

Actually, if you live round here, you might very well have failed to notice. In this ultra-safe Labour seat they could, and often do, stick a red rosette on a steaming dogturd and it would still romp home with a huge majority, so nobody is bothering to make much of an effort.
 

As far as the wider electoral picture goes I shall, of course, be rooting for the Tories and hoping for the best, but I'm not at all confident now. We're almost certainly heading for abject constitutional carnage for various regrettable reasons that I won't go into here - I'm well aware that the stuff that fascinates politicos like myself is more of a turn-off to most people than the sight and aroma of a steaming dogturd with a red rosette on it.

Anyway, one of the advantages of an Election campaign is that the house isn't sitting, and that means that ordinary folk like you and I get a rare opportunity to see a bit more of the innards of our parliament than we normally would.

Places like the Members' Dining Room, which I visited last week, fulfilling a long-held wish.

Tying myself in Windsor (& Eton) knots

If you haven't done so already, I suggest you pick yourself up a copy of the April/May edition of London Drinker magazine.

There's lots of good stuff in there with the latest news on the London (and wider) pub scene, and I've written a piece about cask Altbier in Dusseldorf and an emotional farewell to the gone-but-not-forgotten Brew Wharf.

Oh, and there's an advert that really fucking wound me up something rotten.

I know. I know I should probably be thinking about the victims of the earthquake in Nepal or the grieving relatives of Keith Harris, but it's always the little annoyances that get to me. Partly because I know most people aren't going to be bothered about it.

Bodeans, Bodeans, Bodeans, Bodeans, I'm begging of you please do cook me meat!

I wrote the other day about Masterchef contestants not getting much of an opportunity to slow-cook, and it got me thinking:

What would John and Greg make of Bodeans? A place that smokes and slow-braises meat over many, many hours, if not days. If not years.

'You've got one hour and 15 minutes?' I suspect not, somehow.