Offering respite to weary Christmas Shoppers is the Old Cannon Brewery, set ten minutes away from the market square of old Bury St Edmunds.

We had visited the town for the famed Christmas Fayre held there every year, where the streets are lined with stalls of every description, all selling presents to make your nearest and dearest gasp with gratitude, before committing their gift to the cupboard for all eternity. We got there at just before mid-day, and within seconds found ourselves needing something to eat; but more importantly; to drink.

It was on the recommendation of a work colleague that we sought the establishment out. He was a more frequent visitor to the town than we are, and had eaten and drank their in the past. Great bloke that he is, though, he’s not the most verbose of people and described the place simply as being “really nice”. We really didn’t know what to expect.

Approaching the building didn’t tell us much, either. Tidy enough, large, even imposing even, but the only external clues to what it is are the swinging sign and name above the doorway. We arrived fifteen minutes before the twelve o’clock opening time and stood outside eying up the menus, and then a kindly lady passed us and offered us inside to sit until they opened. She worked there, of course, and we were grateful.

Once inside there are more clues than this is much more than a simple pub. It could be described as a gastrobrewery, but somehow it seems that banal catergorisation is inappropriate. It’s like nowhere else I’ve ever been; your eyes are drawn to the two big brewing vessels to the right of the bar. These are the actual vessels in which the beers of the house are fermented; more of which anon, and are available for drinkers to gaze upon at their leisure. The thermometer of one was registering twenty degrees, evidence that they’re not just there for their ornamental value.

The inside is generally extremely well tended, and as soon as opening time came around it was clear that clientele isn’t thin on the ground. There are several tables in the raised section of the pub, all of which wore reserved signs. Turning up when we did was evidently the right thing to do, since we had every intention of eating.

Fish and chips. We weren’t going to push the edge of the culinary envelope; it’s a shame in a way, considering the rich variety of dishes on the menu, but the quality of fish and chips still stands as something of a datum point for establishing how much we like a pub or restaurant.

And we liked them a whole lot, as it happens. The peas were crisp and flavoursome, the chips were crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside, and plentiful, and the fish was substantial, moist and delicately fried, to some tastes it might have been a little too succulent; if for instance you live in Luton and you’re used to fish from the local chippy that’s had the hell fried out of it. The fish literally falls apart as soon as it touches your tongue, with a light, rewarding beer batter that encapsulates the taste, before releasing it when it cracks.

In some ways I was hoping that the first venue I wrote about would have something substantially wrong with it, that I could get my journalistic teeth into and really have a field day belittling, but no such luck with the Old Cannon Brewery. In the hour that I spent there I found nothing to carp about, from the exemplary presentation and the courteous, informed and enthusiastic staff to the “Brewing bollocks” sign on the mezzanine floor where ingredients for their next brew are on display. There was some ingenuity in action, too, one of the downlighters was fashioned from an empty pin of beer.

And then you had the drinks, and this is where things got really impressive.

Nicola opted for a pint of Old Cannon Brewery Hornblower, the drink on the left in the above photo. This is a glowing, golden preparation of 4% abv. Old Cannon Brewery say of it:

 “……… Hornblower (ABV 4%)

(Silver Award winner, East Anglian Beer Festival 2011)

A light coloured ale with a hoppy, citrusy over tone and a hint of blackberry……..”

I’m looking at the tasting notes 24hours after my sampling, and must say I didn’t really find that blackberry hint. But it certainly was quite strongly citrusy, with slightly metallic notes that really cut through. It’s probably at its best as a summer drink; as an agent for pure refreshment it really hits the spot.

Being a little too easily influenced by evocative names, I went for a pint of Gunners Daughter; on the right in the above photo. This is also a house brew, a dark, brooding beast of a beer, and I was delighted to find that it swims with many of the tastes I relish in a beer. They declare:

“………Gunner’s Daughter (ABV 5.5%)

(Silver Award winner, East Anglian Beer Festival 2010)

A well-balanced strong ale with a complexity of hop, fruit, sweetness and

bitterness in the flavour, and a lingering, pleasant after taste…………”

I could scarcely agree more. It started off confidently with a rich, caramel sweetness met with a woody, substantial body. It felt like it had almost as much nutritional value as the meal in front of us. And then, when you gulp it down leaving its memory on the palate, it subsides into an incredibly long, three dimensional finish, leaving a final smoky note that you remember. It was one of those pints that are so good you drink it slightly dewy eyed.

That one pint was enough for me to declare that I will definitely make a return visit to the Old Cannon Brewery, possibly several. In the new year I certainly intend to take in one of their brewery tours.

The Old Cannon Brewery comes thoroughly recommended.

Their website is http://www.oldcannonbrewery.co.uk/

You can visit them at.

The Old Cannon Brewery
86 Cannon Street
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP33 1JR

Welcome to the inaugural post on BeerJacket. Brought to you by Andrew Downs and Chris Haining, two chaps, united in a common appreciation of alcoholic beverages that typically come served in 568ml jars. He’s Andy, I’m Chris, he’s a computer programmer, I’m a reformed car salesman who’s now going nowhere fast as he tries to make it in the field of journalism. We live about half a mile from each other and I’m in a relationship with his sister. Despite this, we get on well.

So, how did we get into beer? Well, I can only vouch for myself.

I suppose I must have been a pre-teen. I remember a summer afternoon at my grandparents house. It was probably the best part of twenty years ago and Nan and Pops were still as mobile as I always remembered them being. They also had the biggest garden out of everybody in my family, so theirs was the venue of choice for balmy summer barbeqeues. They even had their own brick-built barbecue grille built into the garden wall.

The burgers flowed freely, and so did the beers. Now, as if to show themselves as connoisseurs, Nan and Pops would make sure they had bitter and lager available for guests. Typically it would have been whatever was on special offer at the supermarket at the time, usually something like Stones or McEwans, Fosters or Carling. Hardly ground-breaking stuff; we didn’t really do ground-breaking in Frinton-On-Sea.

And anyway, I was 11; what did I know? Well, the truth is, even less than I know now. I was much happier with an endless supply of coke or a cold glass of orange squash with an ice cube. Yet, somehow, I ended up with a glass of beer in my hand. I can’t say I liked it, in fact I can’t say I understood, at that point, why anybody would like it. The important thing, though, was that I was drinking the same stuff as the grown-ups.

Don’t fear, that wasn’t the first step on the slippery slope of alcoholism, in fact I’m still not quite on that slope yet at the age of 30. Nor did it herald my descent into a teenage life of petty theft, joyriding and promiscuity. No, all it meant was that, on what were deemed as special occasions, I would be allowed a beer. The following Christmases I would help the adults with their drinks, and then ended up with one of my own. That I didn’t particularly like it was neither here nor there.

Soon enough, though, there came a time that I did like it, and for me it started with Lager. My first memory of drinking beer in anything more than parental-discretion servings was when I was on holiday in Cornwall, in 1994. I would have been thirteen by now, and was staying in a static caravan in Polzeath. My second cousins came to visit us (it was their caravan) and they brought with them several cases of what I would soon come to know as “stumpies”.

These little bottles, way less than half a pint in each, were an unexpected high-point in my holiday. Typically filled with some kind of obscure French lager, and coming either from the local supermarket or from some “early days of the tunnel” trip to France, I don’t imagine that they’d be up to much if I were to try one again today. Coincidentally, too, there was almost always a barbecue smoking away nearby whenever the stumpies were out. Perhaps this should have been a serving suggestion.

As a middle-aged teenager, I had progressed to a point where lager was my tipple of choice. I will now guiltily reveal, and I only did this once, that I remember coming home from school on the bus one afternoon, getting home and immediately stealing a can of Fosters from the garage. I wasn’t addicted; far from it. I just had a craving for that cold, sweet liquid and the tangible feeling of light-headed relaxation it provides. The perfect antidote to a day of trigonometry and bullying.

My relationship with lager ended abruptly when I was at university. I remember the exact night, in fact; we had all gone around to Colins house and were playing Risk; the strategy game. Only we were playing it as a drinking game. Well, clearly the turn of the cards was against me, and I ended up consuming a good deal more lager than the others. It was Fosters again, and this time it got its own back for my teenage indiscretions. The horrible, pale fizzy liquid proved too much for me after the ⁿ th can, and I was noisily and copiously sick.

Truth be told I had been off lager for a little while before then, it just so happened that it was Fosters or nothing that evening; the corner shop had been none-to-well stocked. I had moved away from the watered-down excesses of the student union, to the overpriced imports and licenced replicas of imports that we found in Coventrys many bars and clubs. Budvar, Tiger, Peroni, Corona, Asahi, Miller, the list went on, and yet I never acquired any great appreciation of them. They were just drinks, just something to do with my right hand while I stood around the dance floor trying to avoid drawing attention to myself for the wrong reasons.

In 2005 I took a trip to Holland to meet my best mate; he had sailed his yacht over a week earlier (when I had been in Jersey) and invited me to join him and add to the crew for the passage home. I will never forget the short ferry trip we took from Vlissingen in Holland to Niewpoort in Belgium, it was a ridiculously hot day where the sun felt like it was prodding you with forks. We had little refreshment on board, that beer we did have in the lockers had become superheated and would have tasted poisonous had we balls enough to try. No, we went ashore and visited the first bar we found. We knew not what they served, asking; in pigeon French, for trois bières . Duly, three ice cold glasses arrived, whitened with condensation and with a brief, alluring head. We sipped and savoured them. Up to that point it was unlikely that either of us had ever been so refreshed. As the beers warmed up in the onslaught of the sun, the condensation thinned revealing a name on the glass. It read Hoegaarden.

I was receiving education, there and then. I had discovered that there was more variety out there than I was ever going to be exposed to in urban bars and corner shops. It was a godsend that supermarkets would soon begin to stock beers from brewers I had never heard of, but which were soon to have considerable impact on my life. Names like Badger, Skinners, Shepherds Neame. Names that I had seen on beer pumps in pubs but had never really paid attention to before.

I’m now thirty, and a confirmed fan of real ale. I’m almost ashamed that I only attended my first beer festival just over a year ago; I joined CAMRA that very day, so impressed was I by the rich variety and sheer quality of beers available. I know far less than I want to, but am already developing a specific taste and can imagine, quite tangibly, what my dream pint would taste like.

I invite you to join Andrew and I in celebrating the complex, changing world of beer. Whatever your experience before, whether you’re a seasoned drinker or only now waking up and looking around, bleary-eyed and in wonderment.