The Ballad of Reading Ale

On Saturday we had a research trip to Reading, something I've been meaning to do for some time. We started at The Ale House, a pub which lived up to its name with plenty of hand pumps. It's a small place, but we managed to find some seats in a cosy little alcove and settled in with pints of Mr Chubb's Lunchtime Bitter, an old favourite. We were waiting for another friend here so we had time for two. The lovely Lisa stuck with Mr Chubb, but as I used to work with Mr Bingham I moved on to his Twyford Tipple, which rather surprisingly had a touch of the Harvey's about it.

Zerodegrees was the next stop, it's part of a small chain of brewpubs. Though having said that it's more a bar than a pub and had loud beepy music playing so it wasn't to my taste. The beer's are some sort of CAMRA kosher keg but my hazy pale ale was fine and the smoked beer and wheat beer seemed to go down well too.

For some strange reason above the urinals they have pictures of women mocking  your manhood, not sure what that's all about.

It was time for a pie after that so we called in at Sweeney and Todd's, a restaurant with four beers on hand pump which mightily impressed me, even if the beer range was on the unexciting side. The food was very reasonably priced too.

Ready for more research after dinner I was delighted to discover another protestant sect as we waddled towards the last pub. This lot were homophobic Anglicans. I've never looked into C of E splits before but I've now got a whole new series of schisms to read up on. 

Our last stop was the Nag's Head, which had an impressive 12 cask beers on.

 
I spied Gadd's Old School Mild, which made the choice easy. Surprisingly hoppy for a dark mild I still enjoyed it even if I didn't get what was Old School about it. The pub was one big room with bare floor boards, which isn't really to my taste but I wasn't fussy by this stage of the proceedings. All that was left after that was to wend our way home, with refreshment from the M&S at the station sustaining us for the train journey.