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The Beers at the Birch Hall Inn |
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Home Birch Hall Inn Inspirational Beck Hole |
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When we first came to the Birch Hall Inn. way back in 1981, there was one pump - at the farthest end of the little bar. Out of it came Youngers Tartan Keg beer...the locals and regular visitors were used to it .so we stuck with that, though we did put a second pump in to serve the other bar. All the other beers and lagers were bottled - in busy times we nearly disappeared beneath a mountain of empties. We changed eventually to John Smiths Magnet, still keg, and put in a draught lager. We had such a small cellar and trade was so variable that it seemed cask conditioned beers were not an option. A few good summers, a bit of bravado and a cellar training course at the Theakstons Brewery in Masham put us on the road to real ale in 1989. Our first
two 'nines' of bitter went down a treat, and since then we've enjoyed trying
beers from far and near alongside our regulars which include Black Sheep Bitter
We're very lucky
to have some brilliant independent breweries nearby to give a local flavour
to our selection on draught, and most of them do a good range of bottled ales
that make ideal gifts to take home for whoever is looking after the cat or
watering the plants.
Too many lovely beers .. so little cellar-space There are still lots that we haven't
had chance to try ..but we must be doing something right.'cos our local CAMRA
branch checked out over 200 real ale pubs in its area and voted us
Pub of the Season
Pub of the Year 2007 Pub of the season for Summer 2009 and then on May 8th we celebrated being chosen as Pub of the Year 2010 Thanks to everyone for their support and encouragement ! and for making it a really memorable afternoon !!!!
HERE ARE SOME OF OUR LOCAL BREWERIES Cropton Brewery - between Pickering
and Helmsley
York Brewery - City of York at the top of Micklegate
Daleside Brewery - Starbeck, near Harrogate
Hambleton Brewery - Near Thirsk North Yorkshire Brewery - Pinchinthorpe Hall, Guisborough
Captain Cooks Brewery, The White Swan, Stokesley
Find out more about them and their brews at beermad.org.uk
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Beers in the pipeline not neccessarily in this order ! since July 2009 we've had our very own Beck Hole bitter..and it's on most of the time.. we called it 'BECKWATTER' what else...?
it's a mellow malty ale brewed by the organic North Yorkshire Brewing Company... come and try some ( now in bottles too ) NEW BREW ON THE WAY ( or ' What the Butler saw ... ' ) ...for the first 100 years the Birch Hall Inn was licensed to retail only ale, cider, porter and perry ... we have beer, cider and a lovely traditional ( and not too strong ) perry so what we neednow is a PORTER... I thought I might just have a chat to Matthew who brews our Beckwatter to see how he felt about adding a dark porter-style ale to their repertoire... in the meantime this Spring we were shuffling the gardens around and my polytunnel ended up in the sunshine instead of tucked away under the trees... so I no longer needed to grow my tomatoes in the redundant phone box at the front of the pub... I was challenged by Colin, our neighbour over the bridge, to find a new use for it and we hit upon the idea a full time occcupant !!! Colin's firm, Paragon, supplies figures for set pieces in Museums and Exhibitions (such as the Jorvik Centre in York) and as it happened they had a few ex-display characters for me to look at. . From a selection of knaves, kings, clowns and clerics I fell for a sweet be-whiskered old man looking a bit bewildered and clutching a teapot ...he just seemed to fit the bill...
When I asked Colin about his history it turned out he was created 20 years ago to appear in The Oxford Story ..a visitor attraction telling the 900 year history of Oxford University. He featured as the venerable butler in a reconstuction of a typical students study and had been seen by over 2 million visitors in his time there... so would be perfectly at home on view in our Phone Box . and what a coincidence... his name was Peter Porter !!! no prizes for guessing what the name of our new beer might be... or who appears on the pumplclip... in the meantime here are this months beers..
Durham Black Velvet Daleside Blonde Brunswick Brewery Railway Porter Captain Cook Brewery Sunset and of course Black Sheep Bitter i in it's permanent spot !
if you have any requests or suggestions for
beers to try, or would like to leave feedback on any you've been here and
sampled, please drop me a line .... click on the picture
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