Atom Feed (xml)
One cooling summer dusk I found myself, energised by a sweet spicy dinner and a few kitchen ales, bundling into the Reform Inn, where yeasty pot-wallopers were stood on wooden chairs, screaming to the ends of their lungs through tobacco smoke.
It was almost 11pm and I wanted to look around my new "local". On that distant evening three years ago, I was unprepared.
An emotional and physical weakling would have fled, I told myself, so I shuffled through the blur to the bar, where I was greeted by a silver-haired gentleman bristling with a stripe of friendliness more usually reserved for the leprous thief. Yes, I was a thirsty stranger too close to closing time, who had neither the elbows for pool nor the eyebrows for darts...you know those special targeted brows...
But no matter. I got my pint of Barum Original above the yowling and through the haze I tried to analyse my amazing environment. Everything seemed somehow too luminous, too...yellow...orange...but worn in. This was unlike any public house I had ever visited.
I registered the pleasingly eccentric decor and the pleasingly indecorous eccentrics, some of whom were wobbling about on chairs, brow-furrowed with exertion. They were screaming sounds...words...song lyrics.
The song Livin' On A Prayer by 1980s permhead rockers Bon Jovi, was being screamed as, and acted out as, Standin' On A Chair. Not every night did this happen, I learned; that would be a bit much. But the singalong, a dead pleasure in most pubs, or a pleasure brutalised in to delusional carcrasheeokee, had not perished in the Reform.
Comfortable in my new tangerine/soft rock/real ale club for singing eccentrics, I drank my pint of Barum Original, which is made in a shed in a yard behind the pub. Original is superior home brew, perhaps not as light and sophisticated as some other Devon beers, but with an earthy personality and a certain puppyish moreishness. Some of my friends claim Barum is "rough as dogs", and I know what they mean, even if they are wrong. It is an acquired taste and I acquired it.
As I digested my first pint that evening, the evening dissolved in conversations. Three years after that first visit, and after 18 months away from North Devon, I went to the Reform and spent an hour talking to a man I had never met before. That doesn't happen everywhere.
The Reform is not a venue for cappucino, wi fi, student cocktails, designer lager, or brunch. But if you have a belly for beer, and a brain for conversation, the Reform is your man.
THE REFORM INN, PILTON STREET, BARNSTAPLE
ADAM'S ALE RATING: 4 out of 5
DRINK THIS BEER: BARUM ORIGINAL (4.4 %)
No comments:
Post a Comment