View from the bar…

Its hardly news that running a pub in these Isles is not the lucrative money-raking life long pension plan that it used to be, but a report in The Independant simply confirms that today.

Off-sales are usually the scapegoat, publicans blame cheap booze in supermarkets and cling to the belief that millions of bottles of cheap French beer are imported every day and distributed around housing estates with an efficiency only matched by the Co-op milkman – strange that I’ve never been offered any, or found booze to be cheaper in France than here, but still, if “they” say its so then it must be.

Of course I may be the wrong one to comment here as the sniff of alcohol throws me into puking mode, but I can occasionally sneak one pint under the radar and I actually enjoy drinking beer, its my head that doesn’t enjoy it, so let me comment on a recent night out in Otley and we’ll see if this offers any explanation for the pub owners current dire straits …

Otley is a market town just to the north of Leeds, an archetypal market town with, yes, a market place and everything. 200 year old stone houses surround the market place and make up most of the handful of streets that count as its “centre” and in the days when I could drink beer with the rest of them Otley was a beer drinkers Nirvana.

In my memory of things past Otley had a pub at every second doorway, the marketplace had several, all of them old, stone-built, low timbered ceilings, but not in that Disney theme park “Ye Olde England” stylee, just naturally old pubs that smelled like old pubs and served beer that you actually wanted to buy and more importantly, could actually afford to buy.

In short they were damn good pubs and we frequented the small market town regularly, particularly as closing time was 1030pm in Leeds but 11pm in Otley, that half an hour meant at least three more pints, and Otley was heaving of a weekend evening, heaving with punters supporting their local owner-operated pubs.

We spent a Friday night in Otley a couple of weeks ago.

Started in The Junction which boasts of being a “real ale” pub, always has since the day it opened, yes its a fairly new incomer on the block of twenty-something years vintage, a long time to be in business but compared to the couple of hundred years that The Bay Horse has been there for instance, its a newcomer.

The Junction serves very decent beer, the landlord obviously takes pride in his ales and there are always several cask beers to choose from with a half dozen more chalked up on a board as “coming soon to this pub”. A stone flagged floor, no music at all, an open fire and standing room only most Fridays from its crowd of faithful followers give this pub a “proper pub” feeling, the beer is a bonus, although everything seems to be priced at £2.50, I suppose it makes it easier for the staff.

So a good place to start then, and we always start and finish at The Junction.

We should really just stay in The Junction but we don’t for every time we’re in Otley we persist in “trying somewhere else” just to see if all the other pubs are still dreadful, and they rarely let us down.

(A quick honourable mention for The Bay Horse here, its still a fine pub, if shunned by us for some inexplicable reason)

Our first visit away from The Junction was a few doors down at The Rose and Crown.

You know that its not going to be a good experience when you can see the disco lights flashing out on the pavement and there is a bouncer on the door. We entered this old building that could actually be a fine old traditional pub in the same stylee as The Junction, to find four old people sat around a table, three people behind the bar, the bouncer on the door who looked like he’d last stopped someone coming in during the 1970′s, and a miserable old bloke stood behind a “Dave Double-Decks” disco turntable thingy, playing 1980′s pop music, he couldn’t have picked a worse decade for pop music but it looked like he didn’t care anyway.

I purchased a pint of Stella lager in there, heresy I know in a pub that sold a couple of “real ales” but I was sneaking my second under the beer radar and wanted to stick to something “safe”, £3.20 for a pint of cooking lager, a pint that I couldn’t finish because it tasted like the stuff that they use to clean out the beer pipes, maybe they’d just cleaned out the beer pipes before I arrived.

It was a dreadful pub, so we left shortly afterwards, but it wasn’t the worst pub in Otley.

We walked past two pubs of yesteryear that were now closed, The Woolpack and The Bowling Green (a pub that is rumoured to be open for business again but not on the Friday night that we visited – strange)  and then arrived at The Ring o’Bells – again the warning signs were there, bouncer on the door (at least this one looked like he could probably throw you out if required), disco lights flashing on the pavement outside and very loud music issuing forth, we entered.

We entered to find a pub in which four square yards of floor were being used by a handful of screaming teenage girls to do what they call “dancing”, while a lot of old men watched them. It felt very uncomfortable being in there and so we left immediately, mark that one up as a shit pub then and walk on down towards the market square.

The Whitakers was next on our list and after the pint of beer pipe cleaner that I had consumed in The Rose and Crown I was on pints of coke – maybe it was my sobriety that tainted my view of Whitakers, or maybe it was the pint of beer cleaner that tainted my view of everything afterwards, but Whitakers does itself no favours by simply trying to act the part of being another shit pub in a town where most of the pub compete to see just how shit they can really be.

Its another very old building in which the public house has every chance of being a “traditional” pub but in which the landlord has decided that if the lowest common denominator of the town is the only customer he can attract then he may as well cater to that lowest common denominator – so he has installed a karaoke DJ, complete with flashing disco lights and drunk 18 year old girls who want to scream into a microphone because they saw some other idiot doing the same on “Britains Got Talent” the other night.

We’d only walked in the door (bouncer present) a matter of second before said young drunk girl started screaming the words to (I think) Queens “We Are The Champions” with some of her equally drunken friends joining in, this was going to be another shit pub, I could tell instinctively, but we stayed for half an hour and it got no better.

So we went back to The Junction, an oasis of good beer in a good atmosphere, in short, a good pub, plain and simple, its true that it does not attract drunk 18 year olds who want to dance around handbags and scream into karaoke microphones but then again The Junction doesn’t need bouncers on the door either, maybe The Junction has attracted the entire genuine beer drinking population of Otley, leaving all of the other pubs to pick amongst the dross, flotsam and jetsam of the rest of the public who believe that “four cans for a pound”, a puke and a fight is a good night out ?