Our travels through the UK were guided by a far bit of chance. While still in the US we emailed dozens of organic farms across the island hoping to string together a three month working holiday. We wanted specifically to learn about cheese and cider making. While hoping to learn these skills, the geography quickly become complicated. These farms were located all throughout the UK. While in the end we didn’t only work with cheese and cider, we met great people and saw a side of the UK not available to many tourists.
Our tourism was guided by where we could make a convenient stop between farms. While London and Edinburgh are musts for all tourists, we went as well to lesser known lovely places like Newcastle, Aberystwyth, Shrewsbury, Leicester, Norwich, Birmingham and Chester.
Chester, England is undeniably charming. It has beautiful historic buildings, Roman ruins, has an amazing cathedral where Lili saw the Royal Family, stone city walls and a canal system. For these and other reasons, Chester is not unlike Bruges. Also, it is economically prosperous, shuts down surprisingly early at night and has amazing pubs and breweries. While Lili and I both found the city charming during our first stay, after a weekend there, we never imagined we would return. Yet, when we were able to volunteer for a month at the Chester Christmas Market, as a farmer asked us to sell their spirits and cheese there, we couldn’t pass it up. By chance alone, we spent more time in Chester than in any other place in the UK.
At the market we would make the same sale pitches for eight to ten hours a day for 31 straight days. In order to not get jaded, we needed to behave as if we making these pitches for the first time, every time, for a month straight without respite. In effect, we were living in Groundhog’s Day, one of the greatest films ever made. That film asks a few fundamental questions, big questions for genuinely funny comedy: 1. What do we do with a reality that is singular and on endless repeat, a reality of which no one else can truly understand? 2. Is such endless repetition a cause for despair or a chance to finally better ourselves without having to worry about the progression of time? In the movie, Bill Murray copes with such questions in many different ways from cynically taking advantage of the situation to suicide to celebration. Our response to life in a Christmas-y Groundhog’s Day in Chester on repeat was not so varied.
Lili and I merely drank some of the best beer on the planet, ate food that made us rethink British cuisine and adapted a sales strategy that was as much about having fun as just trying to close the deal. Like Murray in the last third of Groundhog’s Day we tried to fit the perfect food and drink day together. Luckily Chester had enough places to do so. The real challenge was to combine visits to all the right places in a single day.
Near the market and city hall there is a hotel/restaurant/brewpub called the Pied Bull. The building has been there since at least 1533. Like any great British pub, and there are still many of them left, the place is immediately warm and welcoming. The Pied Bull not only supports quality locally breweries and UK “real cider” makers, they brew amazing, often pun-y beer, with names like “Sensibull”, “Gullable” and others. Their brewers, like many British brewers, are amazing at balance. Nothing is meant to blow you away, but instead to delight you and be easy drinking. Hops here are not used as a weapon like in many West Coast American IPAs, but instead like a spice that adds complex flavoring to their amazing malts and subtle yeasts. Rarely do their beers eclipse 6% ABV, which is common for traditional British beers. It means you can try more!
Another amazing Chester brewpub/restaurant not far from downtown, The Brewery Tap restaurant and the adjoining Spitting Feathers brewery, have an amazing ever-changing food and beer menu. The pub is so old that they have a brochure detailing its history. The food honors local recipes, while focusing on quality ingredients and good portions at a reasonable price. After a long day at the market, it was always welcoming, comforting food. While not a brewpub, the Harkers Arms also has amazing British food and a wide variety of cask ales, with a canal side location too. In Chester one did not have to choose between good beer or good food, but many pubs serve both. No one uses words like gastro-pub; many fine standard pubs have good food.
These aforementioned pubs focus on cask ales, which are not served from carbonated kegs, but instead are dispensed by a hand pump that produces an entirely different mouth feel than standard keg beer and is much less carbonated. While some British craft breweries do not produce cask ales, both these brewpubs do as well as curating a quickly rotating selection of guest cask beers. The cask ale one of Britian’s great gifts to the world. It is a different experience than keg beer. These brewpubs curate and brew them amazingly well.
Even if Chester only had the Pied Bull and the Brewery Tap, it would be a destination beer town. They also have two amazing Samuel Smith-run pubs, The Falcon and The Boot, which have both cask and non-cask ales. They have many of the brewery’s beers with a half pint of some beers costing less than a quid! These two pubs are dark, have amazing wood interiors and importantly no TVs, strobe lights or anything that gets in the way of polite conversation or relaxed sipping in silence. They are exceedingly pleasant places to be where you can strike up conversations with strangers and spend a long afternoon or evening.
Contrary to these pubs that are hundreds of years old, Chester has embraced craft beer as well. Not far from the Harker’s Arms, the Cellar has many cutting-edge British craft brewers like Beavertown or Siren as well as those from global brewers. Ironically we had a high ABV stout from Tampa’s own Cigar City there. Kash, located near the train station and dangerously close to our hotel, made us feel like we were back in any good American craft beer bar. They even have decent burgers and hot wings. They stock both English and many Welsh craft beers, which is nice as one can see the mountains of Wales in the distance from some vantage points in Chester.
After a month long search for the perfect day in Chester, I know that it includes a few half pints at the Pied Bull, dinner at the Brewery Tap with a few more cask ales, then a stop at the Falcon or the Boot before a trip to outside the historic center to either Kash or the Cellar. Again no matter what anyone says, there is nothing wrong with the half pint. You only get to try more of what is some of the greatest beer in the world. With each of these places having ever-rotating beer menus, you can keep trying to try to fit together the perfect beer day. If one place does not pull through, there’s always another day. Instead of hoping to finally escape Groundhog’s Day, in Chester you may hope for many for days to come.
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