Beer Guide London Visits 1 – Paddington, Camden & Clerkenwell
After last weekends successful research trip I decided I was good to go again. Time to catch up with the bars that have been added during my enforced absence and also time to recommence my project to revisit all entries – purely for quality control purposes you understand!
The day didn’t start well when I go to my first new entry only to find that it was closed. After I tweeted about it they were kind enough to respond and give an explanation, they also updated their own Twitter with the information, but maybe this should have been done proactively rather than reactively. Luckily I was within staggering distance of BrewDog Paddington so I started my day there with another of their Collabfest beers, this time the one from Brussels and the excellent Brasserie Surréaliste.
From here I caught a bus up to Camden Market for my most wanted of the new additions, Baladin Camden. The London branch of the bars run by the Italian brewery Le Baladin. I have done a couple of the Italian ones and the Rome branch Open Bar Baladin is one of my favourite bars in the world. The Camden branch is on a much smaller scale but it didn’t disappoint with 5 beers and a cider on tap plus a number of bottles. They also maintain the tradition of having a number of their aged barleywines available in 100ml measures. I couldn’t resist and finished my visit with the 2010 edition of Terre and it was sublime!
Fighting through the usual Camden crowds I headed to the tube and plotted a route to Barbican where I was heading to my next most wanted of the new entries, Pivo, a Czech beer bar. It lived up to all of the rave reviews I had been seeing from my beer drinking acquaintances. An excellent selection of beers on tap, providing me with 3 new breweries. I completely forgot to look at the well stocked fridges! Next time. And the pickled sausage was as good as the arancini was at Baladin.
I believe that there is a local by-law in operation that states that if you are in this part of town then you have to visit the Sutton Arms one of the greatest back street pubs in London. Unfortunately my timing was off and I arrived after closing time. Fortunately I was recognised and was allowed to grab a half of the Cascade Brewing Kriek that they had advertised on Twitter the day before. It was good! They had another couple of US brews on tap too. In a back street pub. In London. Do yourselves a favour and make sure you visit, you will not regret it.
I finished my day by heading to my local, Brewery Market, in Twickenham in order to catch up with the meet brewer event with Middle Child brewery, and Andy Parker of Elusive Brewing. An excellent way to finish the day. Relatively gentle by my usual standards for one of these days with lots of bars I was close to missed out. But this was always going to be the case, I’m still finding my feet, and drinking head. Going forward the trips will be much more disciplined and structured. Maybe.