Ale houses

There are three kinds of drinking establishments in Britain:

1) Pubs

2) Gastropubs, and

3) Ale houses, authentic old skool pubs that haven’t “gone all pretentious-like.”

Pubs serve traditional pub foods like ploughman’s lunches, or scotch eggs, or gammon (ham), cheese and pickle sandwiches with the menus scrawled illegibly on a piece of slate. It doesn’t matter whether you can read it, as they probably haven’t changed the menu since 1763.

Gastropubs are located in posh neighbourhoods and have chefs imported from Majorca  and menus printed on expensive handmade Italian papers with foreign sounding dishes printed in italics.

Ale houses if they had a menu, which they don’t, would have 3 items on it:

• Ale
• Cider
• Liquor

Ask the barkeep for a cocktail and he’ll fix you with his good eye, snarl and, if he’s in an exceptionally good mood, tell you to “Feck off.”

If he’s in a bad mood, he’ll first tell you to “Feck off.” and then have a gang of customers throw you out in the alley.

If his football team has lost that day………you’re taking your life in your hands.

The Seven Stars Ale House is in a little cobblestoned laneway around the corner from my flat, jammed in next to St. Thomas Church and beside the 1828 Wool Hall which was completed just as wool prices collapsed and the wool business in England went into a long downturn from which it never recovered.

The area around The Seven Stars became equally depressed, and that’s one reason why the neighbourhood, rather than being redeveloped, just stayed the same, year after decade after century.

The Seven Stars is about drinking: the unfinished wooden floors are made from hard white oak, the same wood the British used to build the ships that defeated the Spanish armada, the front entrance is off Thomas Lane, an alleyway just wide enough to accommodate the width of a picnic table, and there are small tables scattered inside throughout an L-shaped room embracing the bar.

At that bar there are over a dozen pulls, ancient brass levers topped with white porcelain handles, that are used to draw up a pint of brew from a basement keg and into your glass.

A good barkeep knows just how to evenly and slowly pull on that lever, to fill your glass without creating a big head of foam.

The publican at The Seven Stars is a very good bartender.

Behind the bar, glass shelves hold bottle after bottle of hard liquor: amber scotches, golden ryes, rich rums, soft sourmash bourbons, aromatic gins, crystalline vodkas.

Want a pint of ale or lager, with a rum chaser?

No problem.

Want a martini?

Feck off.