What I did on the Pub Crawl

I decided that if you were interested in what I wrote
yesterday, you’d want to know what it was like, so here are some
remarks and some pictures.

We started at the Cambridge
brewing company, which is an American brewpub with a lot of
interesting beers brewed on site. Like most eating places that
used to be factories, it can be pretty loud when it gets full, but
that wasn’t a problem yesterday at lunch time. I had their
imitation Berliner Weisse, straight, although I concluded as I
have the other times I’ve tried it straight that I like it better
with the woodruff syrup. I also had the Mediterranean platter.
I’d been there for lunch on Thursday, so people asked for my
recommendations, and many of them ordered the Hefeweizen, which
I’ve been buying in growlers and drinking at home all summer, and
a Russian Imperial Stout which was a guest beef from the Stone
Brewery in San Diego.

Then we moved to the Elephant and Castle downtown, where
everyone ordered either Fullers London Porter or Fullers London
Pride. They have similar hop profiles; I was glad I had the
porter because I liked the extra taste of the roasted malts.

The next stop was Jacob Wirth’s, which is
known for its selection of German beers and food. But they’ve
recently started having a cask ale on tap, and I believe in
encouraging that, so that’s what I ordered. It was something from
Dogfish Head. It’s a nice setting for drinking, with lots of wood
and old posters and signs. I’d planned to have the cherry
strudel, but I wasn’t hungry yet.

After that I got tired of taking pictures, although the next
place, The Other Side, is an interesting space that
could have made a good picture. We were upstairs under the
seemingly improvised
vaulted skylight. I had a red beer with a French name, and a
piece of cherry pie.

Everyone else had the same reaction I did to the idea of
Cornwall’s, and nobody was drinking their beers very fast by now
and most people wanted some food, so we decided to skip the
Cornwall’s stop and go straight to The Publicke
House in Brookline. I had something from the Scillie
Brewery in Belgium. When it was time to move on, a few of us
decided we’d be better off having food where we were than at the
next stop, so I had something called The Publicke House Platter,
with bread and cheese and salad and cold cuts, and a Framboise to
go with it.

The food and beer were all good. Of the 10 or 11 people who came, most of them were people I
wanted to talk to. So I enjoyed myself, but it was too bad that
it’s a dwindling institution. We used to get a couple of dozen
people, including people from out of town who liked the idea of
drinking with people who already knew their way around Boston.