Phil's beer blog
In the course of this year s Mild Magic, I had 25 different milds from 22 breweries; Brightside, Holt s and Thornbridge were the breweries offering more than one. Only Thornbridge had both a dark and a light mild on offer; there were sightings of Timothy Taylor s Dark Mild, but I only saw Golden Best. In fact [ ]
I haven t read Martyn Cornell s Porter and Stout, but I wanted to join this Session anyway, largely to pay my respects to Martyn. He was the first beer blogger I ever read, back in the mid-00s; the second and third were The Pub Curmudgeon (RIP) and Tandleman. (Peter, if you re reading this, look after yourself!) Mudge [ ]
Imagine a pub. It s a single rectangular room, but considerably bigger than that makes it sound. The ceiling, supported by iron pillars, is high; the long side of the pub is long enough for the two ends of the room to feel like completely different areas, even though there are no dividers in between and [ ]
This is the fifth in a series of five posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild, covering a few separate trips out: Macclesfield, Urmston, Burnage and, er, Fallowfield. (My MM trips out have not been the most ambitious this year, it s fair to say.) A pleasant (as in, [ ]
This is the fourth in a series of five posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild, covering Wellington Road, the Wilmslow Road and the last few town centre pubs. One of the pleasures of these crawls is putting together pubs in unexpected combinations, generally determined by public transport [ ]
This is the third of a few posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild, covering Droylsden, Stalybridge and yet more town centre pubs. At the Angel Inn in Manchester there lives the girl for me, or so an old folk song says. But it probably wasn t the Angel, [ ]
This is the second of a few posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild, covering Sale, Altrincham and some more town centre pubs. I walked into the Ford Madox Brown around lunchtime and nearly walked straight out again. Brightside s stouty dark mild Sup was in good nick, but the [ ]
(Well, my questions answered; also, answered by me. But I m sure these questions have occurred to other people, and my attempts at answering them may be of some use.) Q: Aren t CAMRA about to change the scoring system, replacing numerical scores with categories like Acceptable and Excellent ? Doesn t that make it a bit pointless to [ ]
This is the first of a few posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild. Last year I wrote: I visited 48 pubs during MM so I won’t comment on every single one, just note down what comes to mind as I go along. But what if I did [ ]
1. In search of Monsters I don t know how I missed this, but miss it – dammit! – I did. Readers outside Stockport and environs may be unaware of the Monsters Weekends which have been periodically put on at the Petersgate Tap. As events go, they re fairly unstructured: you turn up any time from opening [ ]