Andy Morton’s 50k

I have recently had my 50,000th different UK cask beer and thought that warranted having a few special beers brewed to mark the milestone, but first I thought I would take a look back over the last four decades.

It is almost 40 years since I started keeping a record of the different beers I drank. My earliest notes relate to attending the University of Sheffield Students’ Union Beer Festival in May 1985, where I sampled Wadworth 6X, Courage Directors, Simpkiss Bitter, Jennings Mild, Gales HSB and Adnams Bitter, all priced at around 80p a half. Before that my staple diet was Brains Dark whilst at university in Cardiff in the late 1970s and Wards, Stones and Tetley’s whilst living back in Sheffield. 

For the next few years my records only relate to beer festivals attended. The year 1985 was also the first year I attended The Great British Beer Festival with my friend Paul, initially in Brighton but now settled in London. We continued to make this in to a holiday every year until 2000, although I have continued to visit this event for a day each year ever since. My records show that I visited three festivals in both 1985 and 1986, eight in 1987 and 13 in 1988. You can tell which way the trend was going and the number of beer festivals I attended peaked at 109 in 2004.

My first record of drinking in a pub in Sheffield is in the Fat Cat on 21 April 1987, although I must have visited it many times before as it opened in 1981, but I never recorded my beers on those earlier visits.

Two early large festivals stand out for me as these specifically marketed themselves as having new beers and new breweries. The first Frodsham Beer Festival in May 1993 with thanks going to Dave Brown for the beer order and the Glastonwick Beer, Music & More Beer Festival, organised by Alex Hall and Attila The Stockbroker at Southwick near Brighton, which started in 1996 and is still going strong.

In the early days I think it was fair to say that most of the festivals I attended were run by CAMRA, but as time went on there were more and more very enjoyable pub festivals in the calendar. Two particularly memorable ones occurred over the weekend of the 50th anniversary of VE Day in June 1995. The festivals were at the Red Lion in Aldershot and the Prince Albert at Stow-cum-Quy near Cambridge. Both these featured a plethora of VE Day celebration beers and of course attracted a good number of beer tickers.

There was a period of about ten years from the mid 1990s when the Greater Manchester area provided five pubs which ran very popular and well attended festivals. These were the Beer House and Smithfield in Manchester, the Crescent in Salford, the Station in Ashton and Stalybridge Buffet Bar. Between them they had many festivals over this period and provided a wide range of new beers for tickers to enjoy.

The nineties and noughties saw me and Brian Moore spend many Saturdays traveling around the UK to visit beer festivals, be they CAMRA events or pub festivals. If festivals were too difficult to get to or we wanted to visit several in a day, then we would take my car. I would drive there and then Brian would take over as he would bottle his beers for consumption later, while I drank mine. To fill the car we would take a couple of guests – Alastair, PJ, Darren and others have accompanied us on these trips. One of the most memorable trips was in June 2002 on the weekend of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations. Our destination was the Cow & Plough in Oadby, Leicestershire as they were having a Jubilee festival with loads of appropriately named and required beers. After leaving there and driving through the Leicestershire countryside we passed through Ashby-de-la-Zouch and saw a sign advertising a beer festival at the Ashby Court Hotel. We knew nothing about this but on entering we discovered a large marquee full of more Jubilee themed beers. Needless to say I didn’t recall much (nothing!) of the journey home.

When travelling up and down the country, as well as seeing all the different beers, it is always pleasant to meet many fellow beer tickers. Some of these have acquired very unusual and amusing pseudonyms and here are a few examples:  Alefinder General, Aston (to whom I attribute my beer ticking interests), Badger, Beige, Chief, Crimewatch, Desperate Dave, Dicko, Ding Ding, Father Christmas, Gazza, Jimmy Hill, Jingling Geordie, Lord Mayor of Croydon, Meatloaf, Mick The Tick, Molly, Mr & Mrs Ler, Mr Wild To You, Planey Wayne, Pogo, Rockin Robin, Roly, Sleeping Scooper, Sooty, Spoon, Swaaan, The Vicar, Trolley Gary and Unpro. This list is by no means complete, but sadly some of those mentioned are no longer with us.  

During the tenure of previous owners, Neil & Sheila Clarke at the Cask & Cutler (now having reverted back to its previous name of the Wellington) held many successful beer festivals which were very popular with beer tickers. It was to one of these festivals that I first took my future wife to be, Philippa, to meet Sheila. Much to Philippa’s horror I introduced her as a work colleague, which was totally untrue, but fortunately it did have a happy ending as we got married in September 2008. In the May of that year as a precursor to our wedding and to celebrate Philippa’s birthday we arranged, with the help of Mike Knowles and various breweries and pubs, a beer festival around the Fat Cat, Harlequin, Kelham Island Tavern and Wellington featuring amongst other things about 12 special birthday/wedding beers for us.

These days many festivals publish their beer lists in advance so that they can be studied for new beers before we get there, but in the early days this was not possible so we had to wait until we got there before discovering what delights awaited us.

When I first started recording my beers everything had be done with pen and paper. I made the decision some years ago to continue with this method rather than digitising all my records, as obviously this would waste valuable drinking time. To this end I am indebted to Alan Douglas who for many years (at least since 2002 when I bought my first copy) has produced the G.O.B.B.S (Guild of British Beer Samplers) book. This is a list of all current British breweries and their beers that Alan is aware of and in my view is an invaluable guide to the beer ticker. This is available in hard copy only. Also worthy of recognition is the Quaffale directory of UK based breweries, which is available online.

Since Covid I do not travel as much as I used to which in part is due to trains becoming increasingly unreliable and much more expensive. However, the excellent beer ticking pubs of Sheffield are well supplemented by those in Derby which is only 30 minutes away by train. In particular I frequent the Alexandra, Brunswick, Smithfield, Flowerpot, Furnace and Victoria.

Bringing things right up to date now and the beers I had done to celebrate my 50,000th beer. These were grouped under the Morton’s Milestone banner (thanks to John Chapman for this catchy title). The brewers involved were Abbeydale, Big Trip, Blue Bee, Lost Industry, Tigertops and White Rose and the pubs they featured in were the Fat Cat, Kelham Island Tavern, Lost in West Bar, Shakespeares and Two & Six Micropub. Hopefully a Steel City beer will feature in the series soon. Many thanks to all those pubs and breweries who helped me celebrate this milestone and I hope that some of you got to try and least some of the beers.

Cheers, Andy Morton