Behind closed doors; a pub crawl with a difference

You would think that being a fan of modern, interesting, well-made beer, if I found my drinking spectrum suddenly and dramatically narrowed, I would struggle to cope. But the truth is, cutting off the imperials and kegged saisons doesn’t really lead to big sadface. Why? Well, transplant me from my overly-complicated comfort niche to one of more simplistic an outlook, and the spectre of looking like a fish out of water means I fairly instantly order the first thing I see, even if the choice is limited only to base cooking lagers. The “Err, pint of that” attitude does reduce the perceived glances from other pub-goers (whether real or imagined), and can get you out of a tight spot, if needed.*

* Unlike the oft-doomed bar-approach, the “Oh, sorry, I was just looking in the fridges”, which then results in an uncomfortable silence as the staff and barstooled regulars watch you perusing the forest of Miller Genuine Draft bottles and cans of Rubicon.

The whole point of going to a pub, after all, is to extend your sphere of comfort; to transplant your relaxed feelings somewhere other than home, in a slightly more social context. Like caravanning. Static caravans of booze, Where Everybody Knows Your Name. But, what if you chucked all that out the window, just for one crazy night? Decided to roll the dice, and mix things up a little? For some reason, the other day a vague memory popped into my head, of a time when just exactly that happened. Preston. 1996. The night we livened up our drinking experience by going in every pub we’d never been in.

We had only one rule; if any of us had ever set foot in a pub, as we wandered around the town centre – even just for a single previous visit – we’d walk on by to the next one. After thinking, as I got off the number 33 at the (now World Heritage status) bus station, that it could be a very short night indeed, it turned out to be anything but. Preston had a lot of pubs. Half of the ones we’d never gone in before were within half a mile of the bus station, it seemed. Old Victorian boozers with crumbling signs, and faded PNE or Preston Guild ’92 stickers in the windows. I can’t even remember most of their names – I guess now, twenty years on, many of them will have disappeared.

So, why did we actually want to do this in the first place? That question – which admittedly I asked myself more than a few times that night (not least when a middle-aged woman made an inebriated grab for my balls), started with our regular haunt – the Sherwood. A friendly Sky Sports and Sunday roast kind of place, ensconced in a seventies-housing-estate, we started going there as it was near college and they would actually serve us (like the pub in that great post-exam episode of the Inbetweeners). The beers revolved around Carling and Worthington’s, the former of which I drank a fair bit of, back in the day; the latter, I thought too bitter.

I think the reason we departed from this, if only for one night, was just that – a break from weeks – months, even – of going to the same place, drinking the same thing. Of course, that was before the CRAFT BEER revolution, and all its associated mystery and variety. Nowadays, only having three high-gravity US IPA’s on draught is cause to do the modern equivalent of tapping the watch and looking at the streetlamps, to gauge the severity of the rain. How times have changed.* So, we ploughed our hesitant furrow around the streets of Preston, instantly and consistently breaking the number one rule of middle-class pubgoing – beware of those you can’t see inside.

*We just dial up our weather apps, for one thing.

Of course, in actual fact what really happened is that we had a pretty good night. Even in pubs we’d stood on the stoop of, quietly wishing for one of us to lie and say they’d already had a drink there previously, the most we got (testicle-dip aside) was swathes of ambivalence. Lots of cheap rounds, pints of Stones Bitter and Fosters, darts and 20p pool. Being committed lagerboys at the time, I suppose it was easier to fit in than if we’d doffed our Craft top hats on entry and enquired as to their barrel-aged menu, but at the end of the night I did wonder why the heck I’d been so frightened, and exactly what it was I was I’d expected.

Having said that, I do wish I could say there was a legacy; that we discovered a pub gem we returned to, time after time. In truth, none of us went in any of them ever again; the next night out, we were back in the Sherwood, drinking Carling. Oh well. Our loss, I guess.