Beer writer’s Yorkshire pilgrimage on trail of craft ale
HE CALLS it ‘The Yorkshire Beer Bible’, which might seem sacrilegious coming from a writer with a staunch Protestant upbringing. But Simon Jenkins is nothing if not contradictory.
“My grandmother was a tea-totaller who was a leading light in the British Women’s Temperance Association,” he tells me over a beer in the brooding, history-laden main bar at Whitelock’s in Leeds. “She was dedicated to closing pubs down – and I’ve spent most of my career trying to keep them open.”
Simon began his journey into beer writing when he joined the
in the early 1990s and inherited the Tavener column, which introduces readers to a different pub each week, from a colleague. It has become a labour of love, one which he is continuing with
an A-Z guide of the county’s breweries.
“Leigh Linley wrote a book a few years ago called but when he didn’t have the time to update it, he recommended me for the job.”
While Linley had focused on a dozen or so breweries, writing about each of them in depth, Simon took the opposite route and included as many as possible. It was a bigger task than he’d imagined.
“I knew there were lots of breweries in Yorkshire, but I was amazed at the actual numbers. I’d be visiting a brewery and they’d say, ‘Have you heard about that little microbrewery up the road and that brewpub round the corner?’ It was one step forward and two steps back.”
He eventually found more than 170 and, en route, found a host of interesting characters to talk to, like at Atom in Hull where brewer Allan Rice allows disenfranchised young people to get involved in the brewing process.
“It’s a brilliant idea,” says Simon. “It’s showing these students that the science they learn in school can be really useful in the workplace.”
The book introduces us to former cheesemaker Leigh Terry, who sold her house to establish Baildon Brewing; engineer Tony Rogers who salvaged tanks from a shampoo factory to create Half Moon brewery in Ellerton; and former firearms commander Mike Quirk whose industrial estate brewpub has changed the dynamic of Garforth’s social scene.
“My wife and I spent a lot of time travelling around Yorkshire,” says Simon. “We met some amazing people – each different, but all driven by a passion for beer. It was a real eyeopener to see how the drinking culture has been absolutely transformed, with new brewers making fascinating, crafted, well thought-out beers. Just 10 years ago plenty of these breweries simply didn’t exist. It’s a wonderful time to be writing about beer.”
As a long-serving pub writer, it’s little surprise that Simon also took the chance to visit some of Yorkshire’s fabulous licensed premises like the foody Angel at Hetton, the haunted Fleece in Haworth, Holmfirth’s lively brewpub The Nook – and Leeds favourites such as Friends of Ham and the Victoria.
“Deciding which to include and which to leave out was the hardest aspect of the whole book,” he says. “Inevitably there are lots of really great bars and pubs which didn’t make the cut, but pressure of space made it impossible.”
Among my favourite passages is his wide-eyed visit to Bradford’s Record Café, whose vinyl record racks and amazing craft beers are absolutely emblematic of how our drinking habits have changed.
“They were selling an eight per cent Double Sour ale – and it absolutely flew out,” he writes. “And this is in Bradford, remember.”
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