Oakham Ales Bishops Farewell

After leaving The Bridge House, we decided to ditch the Maida Vale and Canalside walk and head around past Sheldon Square, through Paddington to The Victoria. From there we could pick up the around Hyde Park walk. Anyhow we made it to The Victoria no dramas. The beer festival was still running and the most sensible option seemed to be Bishop's Farewell (4.6% abv) from Oakham Ales. Two Oakham beers in two days!

Anyhow the Bishop's Farewell was in very good condition. It's a pale fruity bitter with spicy hop character and was smashed down quite rapidly. At this stage we considered dumping the pub crawl and heading out to the Guy Fawkes display at Alexander Palace - which was supposed to have a German Beer Festival going on. A quick call on my handy to Rich (who was there) and the idea was off. The beer festival was a few trestle tables and a keg of Paulaner which is kind of lame. And it was pissing down raining. We decided to move on and try and find The Archery Tavern the next stop on our crawl, but after a good 15 minutes of searching we discovered that it had closed down and a pretentious French restaurant now stands in its skeleton. Faced with a serious thirst and with the gates at Hyde Park being locked, we decided to cut crawls again and head towards Edgeware Rd and pick up the Marylebone walk. A ten minute walk saw us in The Wargrave Arms - a dive of a Young's pub. We had a pint of ordinary there. Then headed to a BYO Persian restaurant just around the corner for a recharge. A couple of pint bottles of Budvar sorted us out with our special bread, hummus and lamb koftis with rice. This place got pretty busy as we went to leave and some ethnic looking guy tried to pick a fight with me as I was walking out. Luckily for the other guy, Chris noticed what was happening and pulled me away and said that beer was more important - which it was! We walked down a street a bit to the next pub from the book - The Windsor Castle. A quick look around this odd pub and we walked out again. It is full of collectibles and was patronised by weird looking locals - not my bag to drink with a bunch of stamp collectors. We powered on through to the next pub which was The Beehive. This place was a little scary too, although I managed to have a pint of past its best TT Landlord. There were a bunch of soccer lads drinking Fosters at the bar - and a Polish girl behind the bar who was making me feel increasingly more uncomfortable by giving me the seductive eye. We walked on to the next pub which the name of escapes me - it had been converted into a Gastro anyway so we gave it a miss. Powering through the rest of the walk the rest of the pubs had either closed down or were closed for the night. Slightly disappointing, but I guess that life!

Oakham website