The Pub Curmudgeon - Many unhappy returns

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Following my post last week about the pitfalls of returning beer to the bar, I thought I would run a poll on how often people actually did it.
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The answer, clearly, was “not very much”, with 78% only needing to return 1 in 50 pints, or less, and 95% only returning 1 in 20. The four people who said “More than 1 in 10” must either be unusually fastidious, or unlucky in their choice of pub. It would be interesting to know what reception they got when they did it.
My experience is, if you take a bit of care as to which pubs you visit, it’s something that is only rarely necessary, and in general, when it does happen, pubs are apologetic and replace the beer without demur.
The last time I did it was in the Coach & Horses, the “other” Hook Norton pub in Banbury. As I wrote, it looks traditional from outside, but inside has received a stark, modernistic makeover. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I thought to myself “Well, I’ll be lucky to get a decent pint here.” There were two seasonal beers on the bar but, oddly, neither Hooky Bitter nor Old Hooky. I chose the weaker of the two, but it was distinctly cloudy. There was no problem in getting it changed for the other one, but that, while not returnable as such, wasn’t very brilliant either. It was a classic case of having a pint and thinking that you don’t really fancy drinking it all.
Since then, I was in a Sam Smith’s pub one day where the bitter was sufficiently hazy as to be in my view borderline returnable. In another pub, where there was an alternative on offer, I might have taken it back, but in this case, as it didn’t taste too bad, I didn’t bother, as the alternatives would either have been a pint of stout or lager, or getting a refund, which obviously would have brought my visit to an abrupt end. This underlines my point about needing to be clear as to what your objective is when taking beer back, and looking at the whole experience, not the beer in isolation.


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