Happiness Is a Warm Pie

Our trip to the United Kingdom wasn't simply a holiday, er, vacation. It was a last hurrah, of sorts. Well, not last, really, but, because my ladyfriend is to soon experience a profound alteration to her life, let's say, the trip was a last bit of fun before she has to deal with some trials and tribulations. And so I wanted to make sure she had the grandest time, that her every whim (more or less) was catered to.

Having noted some tough times ahead for her, I will confess that my ladyfriend is an addict. A meat pie addict. Madison has, perhaps, a few places where a chicken pot pie may be had, but that's about it. Have a hankering for a steak and ale pie? Forget it. So, being in a country that has a long tradition of putting tasty things in a pie shell, she was like a kid in a candy store. Thusly our first dinner was to be savory pies. She found a place called Pieminister in the Northern Quarter which fit the bill. Being close to a pub that I was keen on trying sealed the deal. Also handy was its proximity to a butcher's shop.

Our walk to the Northern Quarter revealed more wonderful Victorian architecture. Or maybe Edwardian. Or just neat buildings with pediments. Also prominent was public transit. The hotel was within spitting distance of the St. Peter's Square tram stop.

But there were buses everywhere as well. Yellow double-decker buses of the Bee Network with the city's mascot emblazoned on it.

I think fully half the buses had ads for the new Shaun the Sheep movie on them which isn't surprising as it is a UK production and involves sheep which are everywhere in the countryside. I don't recall when the industrious insect became the city's mascot but it surely was back in its industrial past when those dark satanic mills were running at full bore employing the unwashed masses and their children too.

Walking by Piccadilly Gardens I spied this bus.

Was The Who song of the same name about this very line of buses? I was always under the assumption that the title was just a fun, late 1960s thing and not named after a real company. Had I been wrong all these years?

The answer is no. I looked it up when I got home and found that these magic buses are a product of the 1990s.

The Northern Quarter seems to be the trendy, hip-hop-happenin' part of the city centre. While walking along Tib Street, I spied a bit of a poem in the pavement.

I saw bits elsewhere on the street too but surely missed more as I was often looking up to admire the wonderful architecture...in search of ghost signs. Investigating further, I see that it belongs to a poem called Flags by the British-Ethiopian author of verse, Lemn Sissay.

Our first stop was The Butcher's Quarter so we could get some real food for our hotel room, food that wasn't a biscuit or a salt & vinegar snack. Walking in, the air had the butcher shop smell, that aroma of fresh meat.

It was a bit weird to peer into a display case of sausage and not see any brats. Another display case held a myriad of pork pies, Scotch eggs, and other distinctly British delectables (and non-British ones too).

But, being from Wisconsin, it was the cheese case which drew my lady's attention. Upon seeing it, I proclaimed, "Cheese, Gromit!" and did Wallace's hand gesture.

I'd only heard of 3 or 4 of the varieties on offer but the gentleman behind the counter was quite knowledgeable about them all and quite generous with the samples. In addition, a hearty thanks must be given to the friendly Chinese Welshman who had come into the store shortly after we did and identified the name of the one of the cheeses as being Welsh and pronounced it for us.

After apologizing for the lake of drool on the floor, my lady bought some cheese and we quickly made our way to dinner.

The look on my ladyfriend's face when we approached Pieminister was of sheer, unadulterated joy. If she were to ever quit her job and pursue another line of work, it'd be as a piemonger. Her enthusiasm made me very happy, her eagerness to dig into a savory filled pastry would not be denied.

She ordered a steak and ale pie while I went with the steak and ale and Stilton pie. Pieminister is a casual, nouveau pie place and you could put add-ons onto your pie such as a skewer of small sausages or, as I did, Yorkshire pudding. I mean, they give you a small boat of gravy so I had to.

It was delicious! While I'd heard of Stilton before - likely from Monty's Python's cheese shop sketch - I don't think I'd ever eaten any. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was a blue cheese with a lovely sharp, moldy taste.

Our final stop of the evening was one that I had scouted out before we crossed the ocean: Fell Northern Quarter.

Housed in an attractive older building, Fell NQ is a taproom of Fell Brewery in Cumbria which, I later learned, is an area north-northwest of Manchester. My attraction to the place stemmed from a post online stating that it had a nice selection of ciders. You see, in addition to the goal of drinking less coffee and more tea, it was also my intention to drink less beer and more cider.

I made my way to the bar and looked at the big board. It was disappointing to see so many American style IPAs - hazy, West Coast, blah blah blah. But there were other options and I immediately went back on my pledge to drink more cider by ordering a Gose for me and a ginger beer for my lady. The bartender was a young woman in her mid-20s. She was tall and thin with a beautiful warm, thin face. Clad in a halter top, I admired her willowy figure as she filled my order and thought that she must make good tips. Then I recalled that you don't tip at pubs over there.

The place had a smattering of fellow folks enjoying libation. One table off by the bar had several people at it chatting and laughing while a couple tables away from us were two guys having a more serious sounding conversation. In the other direction sat a young man and his dog in quiet contemplation.

While the Gose was quite tasty with a nice sourness to it that didn't taste lethal and just the right salinity, I felt guilty. And so my final nightcap was a perry.

This was a Ross-on-Wye Yellow Huffcap perry and it tasted quite dry and delicious. The yellow huffcap, as most people know, is a type of pear. (Ahem.) On each sip the tannin dryness would fade allowing a scrumptious pomaceous flavor to emerge.

Our trip was off to a fine start.

On the way home I noticed this restaurant.

What an odd name.

A pub close to our hotel (and next to another pub that gave a 10% discount to CAMRA members) advertised this:

Back in our room, we busted out the cheese and some cream crackers too.

Cheddar. (I don't know where the Isle of Mull is.) Not unexpected but a classic. A young cheese, it was mild and creamy.

This stuff was a soft cheese. Mild and creamy.

The Red Leicester proved to be the big hit.

Think of Colby. Then give it a nutty flavor. And to top it off, add very mild herbal overtones. We are going to seek this stuff out here in the States.

(Tits, winkle, and) vibraphone

We went to the North Side Farmers Market on Sunday and the vibraphone guy was rockin'.

It was nice to see chilies again as they were all but absent on our UK trip. I think Scoville units are an unknown concept there.

Heathrow and Beyond the Airport

A surprise to no one, the skies were cloudy and grey at London when we landed.

But Heathrow was alive with the bright lights of stores attempting to inveigle the constant flow of travelers making their way through the terminal as announcements blared through the overhead speakers into stepping inside. Some folks wended their way to their destination which may have been a restaurant or the toilets while others had looks of steeled determination on their faces as they tacked a course to their departure gate...or the toilets. Harried parents struggled to herd their young children while kids in their gap year ambled more casually.

Our layover was somewhere around 4 hours as we had taken an earlier flight and, once we cleared security - sadly my passport did not get stamped - we set out for a bite to eat. One of my goals for the trip was to drink less coffee and more tea. Truth be known, I had none of the UK's favorite/most iconic drink while in the country last year and felt guilty, like I had slighted my hosts. And so my first drink back on terra firma was tea.

It was delicious and perked me up for perusing the stores in my search for salt & vinegar snacks, another of my trip goals. I will admit that I had a list of the ones I sampled last year with me so as to avoid re-snacking. While I found many a sour tasting treat, I also found myself unable to resist Lucifer's biscuits as the combination of ginger & chilli was quite tempting. However, Lucifer is also known as The Great Deceiver...

I don't know how far it is from London to Manchester, but it's not a great distance as our flight was less than an hour in the puddle jumper. Sitting in a cramped seat with little leg room was a bit of a shock to me after the comparative luxury of being in World Traveller Plus.

After collecting our luggage at Manchester Airport, we hastily made our way to The Station to catch a train to the city centre, a.k.a. - downtown, where an aparthotel room lay waiting for us. My ladyfriend quickly bought us tickets on her phone as we stood outside the gates to the platform. We had just a few minutes before the train departed. Since both tickets were on her device, we were unsure as to how we would each get through as you had to present the ticket to a scanner to get the gate to open. She flashed one ticket and we both ran through as if we were Schwarzfahrening.

The train was quite pleasant with seats plenty comfortable for the 20 minute ride to Manchester Picadilly station. Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath" popped into my head and I felt the excitement build inside me. I'd never been to Manchester nor ridden a train in the UK previously and my vacation with my sweetheart was to properly start soon.

My first sight of Manchester's streets was of London Road and, um, another street. Why Brits post street signs on the side of buildings instead of near traffic lights perplexes me. It's bad enough your street patterns were laid down a thousand years ago which makes wayfinding challenging but you make finding out where you are exactly something of a chore.

The temperature was much more to our liking than the 80+ temps in Madison as it was only in the low 60s. And it wasn't raining. Yet, anyway. The air smelled pleasant enough with all that coal burning having gone the way of the dodo. And no car exhaust either. It just smelled like old buildings, I guess you could say.

I would later discover that it was a routine street scene with modern and Victorian era buildings sitting side by side comfortably - or not.

Our aparthotel was in a newer building right by St. Peter's Square and our room was on the 18th floor facing east affording us a splendid view of the city.

We were in a fancy new joint, apparently, as there was this control panel right by the door.

It looked like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey with its slick black surface (I didn't measure to see if it had a 1:4:9 ratio) and backlit buttons. Plus the thermostat dial at the bottom gave off vague HAL eye vibes.

"Turn on the air conditioning, HAL."

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Skip."

"D'oh!"

One must insert their room keycard into the slot at the top in order to turn on the lights. Also note the Do Not Disturb button just beneath the card slot. Pushing that lit up a red light on the card reader panel outside the door. No more hanging signs. "WC" is surely deliberately retro for such a modern setup - water closet. The button to the right of WC turned on the bath towel bar drier thingy, something I didn't encounter on my last trip. But, in a place that rains all the time, I suppose it's the only way to ensure you have a dry towel.

It seems that the appliance company was started by a fan of Red Dwarf as they were all labeled "SMEG".

At least they weren't from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and endowed with Genuine People Personalities. Unlike my rooms last year, this one included a coffeemaker in addition to a kettle. But, just like most places last year, this brewer only made espresso. Combined with the SMEG kettle, I could whip up Americanos. Gah! At least I came to the UK this time knowing that "batch brew" = drip coffee.

I am unsure how England went down the espresso route. Lattes, flat whites, and so on. Coffee culture there revolves around espresso. This wasn't immediately apparent to me last year as the first coffeeshop I went to, the wonderful Leicester Coffee House, has pour overs. After that, I never saw those 2 words put next to one another nor was "drip" ever seen on a coffeehouse menu. I went into the Costa, their Starbucks, as far as I can tell, by the Clock Tower and tried to order a pour over which I was told they don't have. Drip coffee? The friendly young lady behind the counter stared back at me with a blank expression that no doubt belied her true feelings: effin' Americans.

One of the really nice things about Britain is that they have wonderfully soft water. I don't know where Manchester's water comes from but it ain't from limestone pour overs deep under ground like here in Madison. The tap water tasted, well, soft with a gentle mineral flavor and no chlorine. I bet this is one reason why their beer has that soft, mellow, doughy malt taste. I know just the person to ask.

The little refrigerator in our room came with two small bottles of semi-skim milk. This is the rough equivalent to our 2% milk as it has 1.8% milkfat. Their whole milk is, if I recall correctly, 3.7% milkfat while ours is 4%.

I unpacked the bag with all the snacks to determine just how out of control I let my insatiable appetite for tangy tubers get at the airport.

Nine. Oof. One more than last year. I was pleasantly surprised to find one brand named after me. Ahem.

My ladyfriend also bought plenty at Heathrow including some heather honey biscuits so we were set on snacks.

The fairest, best builded, quickest, and most populous town of all Lancastershire

Our trip as originally planned wasn't going to include Manchester but the hotel rate there was just too good to pass up. And so we went from an itinerary that was a lot of London, a dash of Leicester, and a bit of York to one that was largely to be spent in England's third largest city. It would be my first time in the north and this made me think of the Ninth Doctor's quip where he sounds all defensive, "Lots of planets have a north!" It occurred to me that I didn't know where the north begins. Is it north of a motorway like here in Wisconsin?

As I discovered when pondering England's geography, Christopher Eccleston is from Salford, a city in the Greater Manchester area that abuts Manchester itself to the west/northwest. Hence the rebuttal to Rose. Whoo. It's difficult to get a grip on all the English regional accents. Last year a gentleman from Wolverhampton and my tour guide from Birmingham both agreed that there are Black Country accents that they can barely understand. This is akin to someone from Milwaukee being unable to understand the accent of someone from Washington country. I guess when you have a small country, things get squished together and regional variations exist cheek by jowl.

Despite York holding the promise of medieval goodies galore, I didn't mind the change of plans. My ex-Frau and I had planned on going to Manchester back in 2024 but a combination of her mental health issues and the severe deterioration of our marriage put paid to our vacation plans. Going there with my ladyfriend would close the circle on a real low point in my relationship with my ex-Frau and the missed opportunity that resulted from it.

In preparation for the trip, I picked up a book on the city.

I do not recall why I chose Hylton's tome but tend to think because it was on the shorter side and would simply give me a good overview of the city's history as opposed to a more lengthy, perhaps more definitive, text. Start small and move on from there. Because British Airways didn't load my suitcase onto our flight from Manchester to London, I do not have the book before me as I type. But here are some of the highlights for me.

Manchester started out as a Roman outpost. During the Middle Ages it was a market town and processed wool. Despite being Britain's third largest city today, it was a backwater town for most of its life which surprised me. We get some stories about the city taking the side of the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War but, generally speaking, things don't get moving until the industrial revolution.

As Hylton notes, Manchester became a, no the, powerhouse of England's cotton industry. The cool, damp air was good for spinning as it made the threads less prone to breakage. Growth was rapid and the factory work drew people from rural areas. A large section of the book is dedicated to describing the plight of these early factory workers.

They lived in slums and the owners of the means of production were proud to be putting rather young children to work in their dark satanic mills. The living conditions were appalling for many of them with cellars being particularly bleak as there was often no windows to be had and no way for fresh air to circulate. Rain accumulated on the dirt floors as did raw sewage from their neighbors above. I was thoroughly unsurprised to learn that Manchester is the subject of Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and Hylton provides some choice quotes that, alas, I cannot reproduce here.

In addition to factory workers (lots of them being Irish) living in squalor, all the coal being burnt turned the city's air into a nasty miasma. Manchester sits in a hollow so it's pollution was never in a hurry to go anywhere and so it was happy to infest people's lungs and cover the city in a layer of soot. If I had the book at hand, I would provide some colorful quotes that describe just how nasty the air was.

The city didn't get a Minister of Parliament until 1654 when Cromwell and pals were in power. However, as soon as the king was restored, the seat went away and Mancunians didn't get a representative again until the 1830s, a fact that really bolstered the backwater image in my mind. The Peterloo Massacre was described and this brought the Doctor Who story of the same name to life now that I had the backstory.

One thing I didn't know was that the American Civil War affected Manchester greatly as the city's cotton industry got a lot of its raw material from the South. The North's blockade really put a spanner in the works for Manchester.

The city built a completely man-made canal to hasten the process of getting goods to and from the port of Liverpool. An early railway was built to take on the canal industry. In addition to goods, it found success (eventually) in hauling passengers as one of the very first passenger rail services.

The book is a bit light on the 20th and 21st centuries but it read a lot like the sorry tales of so many American Rust Belt cities with deindustrialization hitting it hard. I don't recall the book mentioning population totals during this period but I found a website indicating it went from a high of around 725,000 people around 1930 down to around 400,000 in 2000. It has since rebounded to somewhere in the vicinity of 590,000.

At first, the text along with some commentary from my tour guide in Birmingham last year gave the impression that Manchester is a very blue collar city, rough around the edges, and perhaps not quite as friendly as England's second largest city. (Although I've not yet written about it, I found Birmingham to have a surfeit of Midwest nice.) I got the impression that it would have a Milwaukee-like vibe to it. But, as the book notes, the city went from a manufacturing powerhouse to an economy largely based on commerce and business services which sounded very much like Chicago's transformation.

Hylton includes Mark Twain wry comment, "I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable." Would the city be dull and lethargic? Was it still the Naptown of Britain? If so, would a bargain hotel rate be worth it?

********

A couple days before my ladyfriend and I were set to leave, I got an email saying that British Airways was looking for people to take a different flight than the one we booked as they had overbooked it something fierce. With approval from my travel companion, I chatted with an agent got us onto a flight that left O'Hare a couple hours earlier and got us upgraded to World Traveller Plus (pronounced ploos) which is luxury economy class.

Never having flown in anything other than a seat for the impecunious proles, I was looking forward to the upgraded amenities, whatever those ended up being.

First and foremost among them was lots more legroom. My knees would not have to be pressed against the seat in front of me as they had about 6" of clearance. Ooh la la!

Each seat had a remote control for the screens that were a mere foot or so away from our noses. The ultimate in economy class luxury. We would truly have a flight of ease.

We got hot towels which were handed to us from a pair of tongs.

We also got a little kit for the flight which included a pen, lip balm, compression socks, a toothbrush & toothpaste, and a sleep mask.

The food was an upgrade over what the saps behind us got. Oh, and I believe the flight started with the option of wine or orange juice. Our flight attendants were very nice and the 8 hour trek across the Atlantic Ocean went smoothly and fairly quickly for me as I was able to get 2-3 hours of sleep and lose myself for long stretches playing Mahjong.

We landed in London and Heathrow was, as expected, a zoo, a zoo we were to contend with for almost 3 hours. After watching security test my ladyfriend's shampoo (or was it body wash?) for explosives, we grabbed a bite to eat and went shopping.

Wrong turns were taken

From my vacation:

More prep work for the UK

With my trip to the UK looming, I got some more prep work in recently. This time it was a bottle of HP Sauce.

It smelled almost exactly like Heinz 57, just a tad less potent, less vinegary. It tasted, as my friend noted, like brown -  a mellower, less spicy Heinz 57. More tomatoy. Not bad, just a bit on the bland side. We shall see if I find this on tables across the ocean. Maybe I could buy a bottle at Tesco and see if the OG HP tastes different than the stuff we get here.

A Trip Is in the Cards

Today I am hoping for Covid to go away soon and wishing I could travel. The Frau and I were supposed to have spent some time last summer in London but Fate worked against us and it was just not to be. So I recently busted out the City Walk cards a friend lent me for the great metropolis.

There are 50 cards in the deck each showing a walk around some part of London. The descriptions begin with the nearest tube station and then note the highlights to be seen as you stroll around. I think I could spent a month there just wandering around areas referenced in rock songs. Perhaps start off with seeing the hogweed at Kew Gardens before visiting some Muswell hillbillies, joining the rush along the Fulham Road on the way.

Got a feeling '21 is gonna be a good year.

St. Louis: Final Thoughts

Some final thoughts on my weekend in St. Louis...

On the whole I liked St. Louis. But there was one scene which summed up the city for me. As we were driving west over to The Cellar, I spied a new or newly remodeled apartment building. Lovely red brick dotted with black iron balconies. Next to it was a vacant lot overgrown with weeds and ringed by a fence topped with barbed wire. That juxtaposition really encapsulated the city for me. Signs of life and prosperity sitting uneasily next to abandonment and decay. (It was easy to see where all the melancholy in Jay Farrar's songs comes from.) At its peak in the 1950s St. Louis was home to 850,000 people while the most recent census estimate places that figure at just over 312,000. So vacant lots and boarded up buildings are to be expected.

As a public transit advocate I looked for buses but didn't see many. Before I knew where we were going to be staying I gave the Metro Transit site a perusal in case I had time to wander on my own. Bus service was a lot like Madison's in that headway dropped to 30-40 minutes, generally, outside of rush hour. I did see one of the MetroLink trains over in East St. Louis heading across the river. (Parts of East St. Louis seen from the interstate look almost like war zones with abandoned and burned out buildings.) But we didn't spend much time near the train's route.

The lack of public transit and the near absence of bicyclists and pedestrians that I mentioned in a previous post meant that St. Louis lacked that vital pulse that makes cities what they are. Most folks got in their cars, drove, parked, and went inside, it seemed. A week before going to St. Louis I was in Chicago to see "Hamilton" and the contrast between the downtowns is remarkable.

Comparing St. Louis and Chicago comes with a lot of caveats – size, population, and so on. Still, St. Louis' downtown was indeed eerily quiet. It just didn't seem to have a great density of shops and whatnot to keep drawing people. I mean, if you're a St. Louisan, how many times can you go see the Arch? I don't recall seeing any theatres and the City Museum is west of the CBD. I'll note that we only covered a limited area. However, it appears that most of the touristy attractions in St. Louis are outside of downtown and really rather dispersed around the city.

I've already written two posts about the St. Louis beer scene so I won't say too much here besides that I was mightily impressed. A good variety of new and old. Sour beers, English milds, German lagers, eyepahs heavy on fruity American hops – it was all there. And that $2.50 half pints at Civil Life were a real treat.

The food was great. Plenty of pork. Smoked salmon was rather common which surprised me. Next time I'm down there I must try out the unique culinary treats on offer though I reserve the right to be patently offended by Provel.

I consider St. Louis to be part of the South though everyone I ran into spoke with a Midwestern accent. People were also uniformly friendly.

So that's my take on St. Louis. There was a palpable sense of decline though there certainly were bright spots. Not only was there was great contrast to The Loop but even to Madison. Despite all of its problems, its small townness, and envy of larger cities, Madison is a city on the make and growing. Two very different vibes.

I have only scratched the surface of St. Louis, though. The city may only be 312,000 people but the metro area, depending on your definition, is somewhere between 2.2-2.8 million. Not insignificant. There's still much of the area to see and experience.

Beer Me in St. Louis: First Impression Part Two

Our hotel was way out west, next to an I270 off ramp. I don't think it was actually in the city of St. Louis proper. Before making the trek out there for check-in, we decided to stop for one more beer. This time it would be Side Project Brewing's The Cellar out in Maplewood.

Stepping out of our vehicle we saw this in one direction.



And in the other…



We had to stop in at Strange Donuts. Each of us bought a pastry for breakfast the following morning. (They were tasty.) There were also t-shirts on offer such as this hoopy one.



Donuts safely stowed in the car, it was off to The Cellar.



Side Project brews "Belgian-inspired" beers. Although I am not unfamiliar with Belgian styles, I really don't know a whole lot about them beyond some basics. The menu wasn't exactly Greek to me but it sure highlighted my ignorance. I ordered a grisette and when my friend asked what I was drinking, the conversation went thusly:

Friend: What did you get?
Me: A grisette.
Friend: What's that?
Me (looking at menu): A brett-fermented farmhouse ale aged in oak.

I'd heard of the grisette but had no idea what it was. And nobody else really knows either as descriptions of it prior to its recent revival here in the States have apparently all been lost. There is general agreement that it was a low-alcohol brew made for miners in the Hainaut region of Belgium at some point in the dim and distant past. Having had some, I can imagine those miners quaffing this stuff by the gallon.



It was light, slightly funky-tart, a little oaky, and just all-around tasty. However, the irony of me drinking a less than 12oz pour of a beer originally made for working stiffs costing about as much as the minimum wage in this country was not lost on me.

The Cellar was definitely a place for craft beer aficionados and fairly well-heeled ones at that. Look at the menu. Notice the serving temperatures listed as well as the level of toasting of the foedre used for aging the Foedre Fermier. Not quite the place for hoi polloi like myself.

Still, I really enjoyed my grisette as well as the rye my friend James ordered. There were two ice cubes in the glass and they were nearly flawless. You'd need some kind of laser to detect the imperfections.

The room itself was bright and had some nice rustic charm to it. The Cellar was also the second place in a row whose men's room had but one single solitary toilet.



We made it to the hotel, which was located in a light industrial area, only to find that not enough rooms had been booked and that most of those that were were not yet ready. A real charley foxtrot but also not really that big of a deal. The food, drink, and company more than made up for it.

Once things were sorted, we hit the road back into the city for dinner at Iron Barley Eating Establishment. We had a short wait for a table and so we settled at the bar. I ordered a Zwickel from Urban Chestnut although I was impressed that there was a beer engine back there and it foreshadowed our last stop of the night. Someone else who was waiting struck up a conversation with my friend Randy. He told the gentleman that we were from out of town and looking forward to hitting Pappy's Smokehouse the next day. Randy's interlocutor remarked that there was a new barbecue place in town, a pretender to Pappy's throne, and that their smoked salmon was fantastic.



For dinner I had about an entire pig's worth of ribs perched atop a bed of braised sauerkraut. Quite tasty. I noticed that the menu also offered smoked salmon. A pattern was developing here. Smoked salmon was seemingly quite common. I sampled some toasted barley and it too was delicious. The place reminded me of The Weary Traveler here in Madison though the tavern side of things was smaller. And it was more ragged but not in a forced or kitschy way. I will add that the waitress was wonderful and managed to rattle off a list of what seemed like a dozen specials with ease. Very impressive. The water closet had but one commode. I don't know how much a "Jethro sized" vessel holds, but you could get one of soup.


The neighborhood that Iron Barley is located in was...distressed? It wasn't bad in the sense of there being drug dealers and prostitutes on every corner but there were a lot of vacant buildings in the area. The street was lined with these two-story apartments and just about every other one was boarded up. I didn't see any broken windows nor graffiti, though.

For a nightcap it was off to Civil Life Brewing. It was tucked away off of an arterial street and had a nice old-time tavern look about it.



My comrade Charles was especially keen on Civil Life as they specialize in beers of the British Isles. He had lived in England for a spell where he acquired a taste for milds and ESBs and has a hard time finding versions of these beers here in the States that match the taste of those he had in their homeland. According to him Civil Life gets as close as you can this side of the Atlantic.

Full English pints were available but also half pints for $2.50. It was a steal especially considering how tasty the beer was. I had a British Bitter.



Cracker and caramel on the malt side with herbal, almost medicinal, hoppiness. Simply tasty. I sampled Charles' ESB and it to was great.

And, yes, the restroom had but a lone toilet. St. Louis regulations must stipulate 1 toilet per 300 people because Civil Life is not small. There's the main bar area with a dart area in back and more room upstairs. Plus there's seating outside to boot. There must be long lines during the summer.

Civil Life closed at 11:00 and we were on the road back to the hotel by then.