Poltergeists, Oakham unfiltered and insider information

Mar 21, 2021

Monthly update for March 2021

The Fellowship (again)
The Bristol pub poltergeist
Oakham citra two ways
A brewer writes...

Writing about The Fellowship

We don’t take many paid writing jobs these days but couldn’t resist an invitation to contribute to a collection of essays about London pubs.

We batted around some ideas with the editors – our recent post about The Festival was a product of that conversation – before settling on The Fellowship at Bellingham.

It’s not one of the usual suspects such as Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, The Grenadier or The Flask, which pop up in book after book after book. It’s also not in Westminster, or even central London, but down south, out on the edge. It’s also tremendously significant, as you’ll know if you’ve read 20th Century Pub. (Pages 61-62 and 208-209, if you want to look it up.)

That’s because it was the first pub the London County Council (LCC) agreed to permit on one of its new housing estates. Before the 1920s, estates were purposely kept ‘dry’ to save the former slum-dwellers who lived there from temptation.

In addition, its story encapsulates the whole arc of the 20th and 21st centuries. A big pub built on modern lines, with dining facilities and a dance hall, it steadily lost its lustre. When we first visited in 2016, it was all but a ruin. After just avoiding demolition through listing, it was instead restored and reinvented as a combination of community centre and community pub. You can read our report on this incarnation of The Fellowship in this post from 2019.

We’re working on our essay now, about halfway through, and expect it to submit it in the next week or two. It should appear in print later this year, we think – we’ll let you know when the book is out.

The Bristol pub poltergeist

Danny Robins’s brilliant BBC podcast The Battersea Poltergeist concluded a couple of weeks ago, telling the story of a supposed haunting in South London in the 1950s. If he wants another story to tell, he could do worse than look into the wonderfully gothic tale of Bristol’s long-lost Lamb Inn in the 18th century.

We were reminded of this by a Tweet from @dave_ja which prompted us to dig out some research we did on this a while ago but never got round to doing anything with it. (Though it has inspired some of Ray’s recent ghost stories.) The recognised authority on the case is the scholar Jonathan Barry who has edited an edition of the key source documents as well as producing in-depth papers on the story and its place in the history of witchcraft.

Here’s the short version: in 1761-62, an inn at Lawford’s Gate on the Gloucestershire side of Bristol became famous as the centre of an early poltergeist case. Thirteen-year-old Molly Giles and her 8-year-old sister Dobby were supposedly possessed, being thrown around in their beds, having fits, seeing visions and speaking in the voice of a demon or witch. They were also bitten and pricked with needles during the night. Their father, innkeeper Richard Giles, fell ill and died, which was also attributed to the evil spirit – ‘Malachi’. It was exorcised not by a priest but by a local cunning woman.

The inn itself stood from around 1651 to 1905, about where you’ll now find a shop called Bristol Vintage on West Street (Old Market).

Incidentally, while nosing around on the old maps trying to work this out, we spotted something else of interest around the corner: the site of the Redcross Brewery. We had an inkling of this from the name of the modern development on the site – ‘The Old Brewery’. This is the problem, you see – so many interesting threads, so little time to pull on them. We’ll add it to the list of topics to explore and hopefully get round to it at some point.

If you want to know more about the Lamb Inn case – much, much more! – then check out the Bristol Record Society’s edition of The Diary of William Dyer: Bristol in 1762, edited by Jonathan Barry. It’s available as a PDF via the University of Bristol website and the introduction provides a great summary of the case, before you dig into the incredibly creepy contemporary accounts.

Oakham Citra two ways

It’s always interesting to taste two takes on the same beer. In this case, it’s bottled Oakham Citra – a stone cold classic – and the same brewery’s Citra T90 in a well proper craft can. The latter not only uses “powerful T90 hop pellets” but is also unfiltered.

We’ve written before about the magic power of Citra. It feels as if you have to try really hard to brew a boring beer using this American hop variety; it adds that extra poppy punch every time. But Oakham, as the original champions of Citra in the UK, really know what they’re doing, using it to take already great beers to the next level.

The cask version (4.2%) is feather light, with tight bitterness and powerful perfume. The bottled version (4.6%) feels heavier and sweeter but is still a well-engineered, clean and gleaming beer. T90 (also 4.6%) is hazy with soft, fuzzy edges. It looks like a generic craft brewery session IPA but, fortunately, and perhaps unexpectedly, is more bitter than many of the examples we encounter in Bristol. The lack of filtering seems to restore some of the character of the cask version, too, smoothing off the bottles hard, crisp edges.

On balance, we think we preferred the bottled version of the classic to the unfiltered can but… It was close.

A brewer writes…

Last week, we posted about our suspicion that some brewers had found 2020 less challenging than others, thanks to the work they’d done building warm feelings and a good reputation in the years preceding.

Off the back of that, we heard from the owner of a small brewery who gave us permission to quote from their message, lightly edited for clarity and anonymity:

“As a business, we're in a stronger position now than we were exactly a year ago at the start of lockdown. More cash in the bank and more revenue streams. There have been ups and downs along the way – and I've never worked harder, which has certainly taken its toll – but August to November were superb and all record months for us.”

How did they achieve this?

“First, by taking some risks. I’m very risk averse generally and my initial instinct was to mothball… [But] I took a gamble and started contract canning, then spent our grant money and a rates rebate on a canning line. This enabled a 200-300% growth in small pack sales and when we emerged from lockdown in August opened up wholesale and export options that simply weren't there before.

“Secondly, by engaging with people who supported the brewery. At the start of lockdown, after a period of upset, anger and reflection, I made a conscious choice to get back to sharing information, joining Zoom tastings, running virtual meet the brewer events and so on. The community absolutely dug in for us and helped get us through.

“Finally, by diversifying. We created an online shop, kept supplying trade where there was demand and stayed in touch. Those really good months in summer and autumn were good because those streams came together: online shop, tap room (trading where permitted), direct trade and wholesale. We brewed at full capacity during that period and could have sold more than we produced.”

This chimes with what we saw as outsiders – that businesses which gave themselves more options and avoided the eggs-in-one-basket problem were better able to adapt to constant changes in Government policy and continue trading.

We hope that there are other breweries out there with similar stories, even if they’re keeping their heads down for now out of consideration for less fortunate peers.

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Well, that's it until April. Hopefully the next newsletter will have a touch of spring about it.

Ray & Jess