The Party That Never Sleeps

The party that never sleeps is still bubbling along nicely and there are a multitude of early morning trips out to the local shops to produce breakfast pizza, pot noodles and sausages, good teenage acne top ups all round. No one offers me a sausage sandwich, not that I’m bitter.

I take the dogs out for a walk and by the time I get back some sort of clean-up operation has started. After the last function we ended up with some mysterious powder stuff down our toilet... which needed shifting with a brush so I’m assuming that it wasn’t that sort of substance. Rumour has it, that it may have been make-up... why would you flush make-up down the toilet... whatever. So, just the etchings on the garden path to shift this time.

It’s a lunchtime kick-off for the Forest v Derby game. I had considered going but was convinced that Forest were sure to break their appalling recent record against us, due to the obvious fact that they have a better team that us at the moment. When Derby are three down by half time it’s clear I made the right decision. However we have a much better second half and it finishes 3-2. We gave them a two goal head start in the cup last year and still beat them but seemingly giving them a three goal head start is a bit too much. Funny game though, no less than three of the goals have been accredited as own goals, it’s not often that happens, if at all.

In the evening we get the bus over to Burton where we intend to reattempt our pub crawl of a couple of months ago. On that occasion, we discovered that the first pub on our list, the Devonshire Arms on Station Street, was just so wonderful it wasn’t worth moving. We again intended to start there, so the prospect of a ‘crawl’ again seemed unlikely unless it was shut, but as we’re only over here for the beer, it’s not a problem and their Burton Bridge brews were wonderful.

Then L suggests that we have one in the little pub around the corner in Cross Street before we hit the Devonshire. Well, what a mistake, for the ‘crawl’ that is. The Cooper’s Arms was simply one of the best pubs ever and one of the coolest (and not as in cold). As you walk in it’s like being in someone’s front room and there’s no bar to be seen. So you head through to the back, through a narrow door, where it’s like being in someone’s kitchen and that’s where you’ll find the beer. The ‘bar’ consists of a row of casks on a shelf at the back of the room; most if not all of the beers are served straight from the cask, no hand pulls. This includes two traditional Ciders and two Perry’s (that’s Pear Cider to anyone who’s under 21), as well as a multitude of fruit wines. Thankfully we are early enough to get a seat in the ‘kitchen’ which is bit cramped but it means we’ve got a close eye on the beer.

The pub is simply a classic from an era that I thought had past, a real traditionalist’s establishment and the sort of thing they had on display in the ‘Museum of Nottingham Life’ that we went to the other week.



Apparently the place was once Bass’s bottle store and shop before becoming the brewery tap for the brewery. The Coopers is just across the road from the former Bass brewery which is now owned by Coors. After that it had a spell as a Hardys And Hansons pub but it seems it must have offloaded by them, either just before or after the takeover by Greene King. This is a relief because Greene King would probably have turned it into another gastro-pub. It’s now owned by Nottingham’s own Tynemill, owners of the Castle Rock brewery, and presumably the reason for Harvest Pale being the house beer. It will be safe in their hands but also credit to them for not serving too many of their own beers and having such a creative guest range, which on our visit included three dark ales, our favourite type. The strongest of which Sarah Hughes’ Dark Ruby at 6%, which had to be drunk in moderation. No matter the 4.7% dark stuff they had was excellent too. This if my memory serves me correctly was Milestone Black Imp.

We get an early-ish bus back home to save our heads and finish off with a curry.