Review - The Phoenix Inn ****
New review now online, here’s the summary:
Nestled right up against the south side of the City Walls the Phoenix is very much removed from the City centre but definitely worth the extra distance as you are rewarded with a very pleasant traditional and well-kept pub. It feels a lot like an upmarket local and the décor is all gleaming brass and ambient candle light. They have a good selection of real ales which are regularly changed although the prices are average. As is traditional with this type of Victorian pub the front snug is warm and welcoming with the bar and an open fire, the back room has plenty of seating tucked away, including a bar billiards table, which they regularly use as part of the pub team. The yard to the back is peaceful and airy, looking directly onto the City Walls, a real treasure of an outside space in warmer times. You can clearly see why The Phoenix keeps winning CAMRA awards, especially with its quite isolate location they really have put their heart and soul into a proper community pub that is still well presented and welcoming to all.
For further details and full scores see the main page.
Still Here…
We’ve been a little slow over the last few months at working on reviewing the remaining pubs, this is mainly due to lack of funds after Christmas and the general weather of Winter. I will be aiming over the next few weeks to work through my backlog of reviews getting them ready to publish, but I also need to get some nice shots of the pubs for those reviews too and obviously said Winter weather isn’t all that reliable.
So in the mean time you can keep up to date with all the York pub scene info I can gather via Twitter and Facebook, not forgetting our new Weekly Online Newspaper as well as my progress in brewing my own Beer, a great hobby to undertake when you can’t get out to the pub, although waiting over 6 weeks to drink it takes real patience. More reviews to follow soonish, I promise.
www.twitter.com/withinthewalls_
Review - Yates’s **
New review now online, here’s the summary:
Now don’t get me wrong, during the days Yates’s is a reasonably pleasant venue with a wonderful riverside location and standard generic pub chain décor. It’s very cheap too and does a good selection of pub grub which with their spacious interior is great for a bit of lunch with the family. It’s just as evening approaches that the rough, rude and occasionally violet clientèle begin to swarm in to buy buckets of crap cheap cocktails and swill generic larger. It’s this that really drags Yates’s down, especially with it being so visible on Ouse Bridge and with a chain reputation it attracts lots of booze tourists, hen/stag parties and race-goers, not really the place you’d want to visit on a night out and there’s little reason to with regards to beer choice and quality. Although riverside they don’t actually have any outdoor space at that side of the building either, just a large but pretty unattractive courtyard to the rear.
For further details and full scores see the main page.
Well the York Beer & Cider Festival is well and truly in session. We had a great time judging the best beer of the festival before the trade session started on Wednesday. It’s tougher than you think to taste so many beers with a clean pallet each time, which is why I think the stouts did better in the scores. It was also great to put a few faces to the names of York’s infamous twitterers, hopefully we’ll see a few more of you back at the festival when we return for a good session on Friday.
For your information to maybe help you choose out of the 350+ beers here are the winning beers in each catagory and the overall LocAle winners as judged by us and the specialist panel:
- Knaresborough American Style Milk Stout
- Brass Castle Burnout
- Rudgate York Chocolate Stout
- Standard Bitters: Hop Studio White Rose
- Best Bitters: Collingham Artisan’s Choice
- Premium Bitters: Kirkstall Dissolution IPA
- Porters & Stouts: Brass Castle Burnout
- Strong Beers: Knaresborough American Style Milk Stout
- Speciality Beers: Rudgate York Chocolate Stout
York CAMRA Beer & Cider Festival is running from Wed 18th to Sat 22nd on the Knavesmire (Racecourse) off Tadcaster Road, I fully recommend you get down and sample some of the superb real ales on offer from our region!
The York Beer Census 2012
Well I’m a little late to the party, I’ll call it fashionably late, but been so busy over the last few weeks didn’t get time to write up a little blog entry about The Beer Census, that is until today!
Our mission that we undertook was to cover all 7 of the establishments on Goodramgate, clearly one of the best streets in York for pubs and real ale as it contains 2 of our 5 star pubs.
We met up for a preparatory meal in The Cross Keys kids in-tow and forthwith took over half the bar area. I was pleased to see that they knew we were coming and had pulled out all the stops, or 4 extra pumps and a draught cider at least. So we started well with 12 pumps there, and the meal was very pleasent, quality pub grub at reasonable prices. Seren would like to report that Blackcurrant Fruit Shoots were there too, so she was very happy.
It took us a bit longer than planned to get the crew moving so we headed to The Golden Slipper next a little behind schedule. There was a reasonable selection on there, mostly your run of the mill ales, and the bar-lady was a little bit scary. It was at this point our good ladies took the little ones off home and we swapped a few mate for a couple of others and made the massive journey nextdoor to The Royal Oak, who had a good selection and even a Treboom. As ever the staff were very friendly and we took stock of how long we had to cover the rest of the pubs, not as long as we’d like. We thought it rude not to try a pint in each.
So we picked up the pace a little more heading to Vahe Bar, that although exibiting a huge range of international beers like Leffe on tap unfortunatly only had 2 real ales on, great shame we couldn’t include such craft beers, maybe next year? Vahe Bar is deffinitly one of our favorites in York and I highly recomend popping in, lovely owners and great building.
A this point the heavens opened and boy did it tip it down, our mate James was very concerned that the run across the road to The Habit would ruin his fancy hair, haha. Now The Habit is the only pub on Goodramgate that we haven’t reviewed yet, so we were very pleased to visit (review will be online soon), just a few ales on here and we even managed to grab a moment on their Minster facing terrace after the rain passed. But we were really running out of time now, (maybe next year we can make it closing time to get the forms in CAMRA?) So we decided, shock horror, to just take down the ales in The Snickleway Inn and not stop for a drink. The place was rammed either way and had about 6 ales on if I remember rightly. Deffinitly a boozer type pub though, not really our scene.
So finally, and rather drunkly we took on the massive mission of writing down all 16, yes 16, count them, real ales that The Old White Swan had on, our final port of call… luckily! It was a swift drink and a taxi booked to return our form to The Waggon & Horses. Would have like to stay a little longer as The Old White Swan is another of our favourites, especially with their 1am closing!
So that was our mission complete, although with the final results of 241 unique real ales on throughout York we didn’t quite pip Norwich, we had a great time and hope next year to well and truly trounce them. Official figures do show though that there were 157 pubs in the Greater York Area with real ale and a staggering 548 beers available, 54 of which pubs were within the walls hosting 245 beers, many of them brewed within 25 miles of York! All in all it’s mighty impressive and you can see why York has such a good and ever increasing reputation as one of the best Cities for pubs in the UK. It also makes the Within the Walls mission all the more challengingly pleasurable. Till the next one, be proud York!
