Castle Rock Brewery & Nottingham

Castle Rock Harvest Pale exemplifies the adventurous spirit shown by British small brewers; it is Real Ale brewed using lager ingredients. The full-bodied and fruity blond beer, brewed using 100% lager malt and American hops, was justifiably voted Beer of the Festival at last year's 11th Watford Beer Festival. In April, several branch members made the trip to Nottingham to present Castle Rock Brewery with their winner's certificate.

Image Caption:Colin Wilde (left) and Adrian Redgrove (centre) accept Harvest Pale's Beer of the Festival award from Watford & District branch chair Andrew Vaughan

The brewery is rather fortunately located almost opposite Nottingham's mainline railway station and is housed in what seems to be an old warehouse building right next door to the Vat & Fiddle pub. Head Brewer Adrian Redgrove and Castle Rock Director Colin Wilde showed us around the brewery, which is undergoing work at the moment to convert part of the building into a visitors' centre for such tourists as us. Adrian showed us into the brewery through its upstairs storeroom; which was lined with pallets of hop and malt sacks, the air filled with the smell of cereal. We wandered down some steps, out of the agricultural world of barley and hops and into the small factory that is a modern brewery, taking in the steel vessels, pipe work and cool humidity that typify such places.

Despite such modern equipment, there is much heavy work to be done in a brewery. The giant breweries that produce today's most popular beer brands may be almost fully automated, but small brewers still have to do a lot of the work manually. There are no machines to fill the tun with malt and liquor in preparation for the mash - that's all done by hard work, like everything else. Even after a brew the work continues, as the tuns and fermenters must be scrubbed out largely by hand. It's like having to clean a giant kettle after every pot of tea.

The hard work is paying off though. Colin is pleased with the progress Castle Rock has been making since Adrian took over as brewer. Their beers have won numerous awards over the last two years, including several from the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA). Elsie Mo, another golden beer, is perhaps their best-known brew, and after picking up a SIBA Midlands Supreme Champion award it's now available in bottled form, which is a first for the brewery and will hopefully lead to wider exposure for their excellent beers.

Taking a look out at the back yard, Colin and Adrian showed us their primitive but effective cask-washing apparatus, and the new tower that's been built to house the offices of the Tynemill pub company, which has a 100% stake in the brewery. Tynemill owns several pubs in and out of the Nottingham area and was started by former CAMRA national chairman Chris Holmes. Chris is still chair of the company, and his pedigree will warm the heart of anyone wanting to see pub owning companies and breweries in the hands of those who really care for them.

Image Caption:Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem

After the tour we all headed next door to the Vat & Fiddle (a Tynemill pub, of course) for a couple of pints of the winning beer and the certificate presentation. One of the gratifying parts of being in CAMRA is seeing the obvious pride brewers take in winning such awards as ours. The bottom line may be all that matters to the global brewers, but craft brewers know they're producing a quality product, and relish the recognition of that. Awards don't hurt their sales either. See Castle Rock's website for a Hall of Fame of their recent achievements.

After making the presentation we headed off into town to visit some of the local pubs, all present in the Good Beer Guide 2006. No beer-oriented visit to Nottingham would be complete without a look at Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem. Allegedly the oldest pub in Britain, the Olde Trip is partially made up of caves excavated from the rock that once supported Nottingham Castle. The pub is owned by Kimberly based brewer Hardy's & Hanson's, who are so proud of the legendary pub that they named two beers after it, the 4.3% ABV Olde Trip and the 5% dark mild Cursed Galleon. The latter references the dusty, glass encased ship that sits atop the bar in the Rock Lounge. Legend has it that the last three people who tried to clean it met mysterious deaths, although the barman reckoned that just touching it would do the trick. Maybe if you used a vacuum cleaner you could get all the dust and cobwebs off without touching it, thereby allowing modern technology to overcome the curse. I wouldn't like to try it myself, though.

Image Caption:The Victoria Hotel, Beeston

We took the bus to another must-visit pub in the area: The Victoria Hotel in Beeston. This used to be another Tynemill pub but is now independently owned. The establishment still has a close relationship with Tynemill though, and the upstairs rooms currently serve as offices for the pub company, as well as hosting the AGM of the CAMRA Investment Club. The pub itself is a bit of a classic. It's a 19th century building with multiple rooms and two bars serving a changing range of top quality beers and ciders. We were pretty hungry when we got there, but fortunately the Victoria Hotel has a very impressive menu of freshly cooked food on its chalkboard, including an interesting variety of vegetarian dishes. The attraction of good quality food means that the clientele are split between earnest drinkers and foodie families, but there's plenty of room for everyone in the three bars and large covered patio.

Image Caption:The Old Moot Hall Inn

On the way back into town we popped into the Johnson Arms in West Nottingham, in which a traditional tile facade fronts a more familiar kind of modern pub - open plan and with sport on the big screen. The pub stocks up to five changing guest ales and apparently has a large, tranquil garden that, sadly, we had no time to see before heading up to Radford to visit the Plough. This is a small, traditional two-bar pub serving beers from the Nottingham Brewery, which can be found to the rear. Saturday was a quiet afternoon, but the pub has plenty of attractions during the weekday evenings, including a curry night on Tuesday and free chilli on Thursdays.

Our final port of call was the Old Moot Hall Inn on Carlton Road. Easily missed in a terraced row of shops, the pub used be a chapel but has been converted into a two-storey bar with open-plan but comfortable rooms and eight hand pumps serving 30 real ales a week. I couldn't help but wonder what its original religious inhabitants would have made of the conversion, but it's a bit of a temple for real ale now and well worth visiting on any trip to Nottingham.

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