(In Praise Of) Wetherspoons

This may come as a shocking admission but I used to ‘collect’ Wetherspoons. You see, when you are a student you drink a lot and go to the pub a lot, but no one has the money to be lavish and open the finest bottles in the most lovely establishments; you have to make do. With Wetherspoons we could more than happily make do.

Wetherspoons are berated for their lack of atmosphere, the salubrious clientele (hideous drunks, hideously drunken girls, hideous girls, old boggle-eyed chaps and their boggle-eyed mates with their carrier bags), dodgy carpets, a general all-round cheapness, that smell (what is it?), the marauding binge drinkers in fancy dress every Friday and Saturday from 9pm… but as a student none of the above bothered me, in fact, I went there specifically for those reasons (there’s nothing like fitting in). The people in the pub generally make it what it is, which means that the value-shoppers of Wetherspoons (if Tesco only sold their value range would you go in there? Who else would be in there?) and the disinterested staff create the pub atmosphere and this is probably why there are so many haters. Look beyond this and see what you are actually getting and it’s really not that bad (open those value baked beans and they taste the same as all the others).

Some of the pubs are really interesting, too. They aren’t just soulless, silent, smelly holes, there are also interesting, silent, smelly holes. Old cinemas, old banks, old opera houses, all of them different - unique in their shape and size, if not their content. And the beer – I rarely have impeccably kept pints in there but it’s rarer that I get a too-bad-to-drink pint. A lot are Cask Marqued too (if this means anything) and they feature heavily in the Good Beer Guide (if this means anything).

I’m guessing the ‘collecting’ thing come about one afternoon/evening when we were half-cut and looking at a listing of all the pubs around the UK and the lightbulb turned on – we could go to them all! This developed into a little bit of an obsession and we never left the house without ‘the bible’, otherwise known as the Wetherspoons Directory. One day, now affectionately known as W11, we visited 11 pubs in the chain, starting in Staines and on the train in to Waterloo and then halfway around London. That was quite a day. We planned a W15 but it never happened. Or, perhaps I should say, it hasn’t happened yet…

I have some great memories of Wetherspoonses (I can't get my head around the plural...): an Old Peculiar in Reading (I didn’t order it but wish I had), a few holes of pub golf which deteriorated drastically, playing the IT box every time, shots of stupid-strong rum, an in-and-out shot of tequila on the way to a Blink 182 gig just to scoop the pub, bottles of Kopparberg after beer festivals. I ate there a lot too. I know the food is far from gourmet but it ain’t all that bad either: the value menu is superb for the prices; curry night is £6 well spent (one time, I ordered my curry and it arrived before I had even sat back down at the table!!) and beer and a burger is a regular pit-stop on a pub crawl.

I’m not a student anymore but that hasn't affected the rose-tinted vision I have of the chain and I think Wetherspoons get a bad rap. Sure I can see why, but I think they equally deserve a lot of praise – they promote real ale and, more specifically, they very often feature local ales. And it’s not just one or two rotating casks, most of them have eight-plus handpumps with over half changing as regularly as they are drunk. That’s good. It’s a shame that in the last few years their fridges have changed from interesting bottles of world beer to Eastern European lager and super-sweet fruit ciders, but so what, I go there for a choice in real ale, I go there for ‘value’, I go because I’m strangely drawn to them every time I see one (habitually/fly-shit) and I go because I almost always know what I’m going to get. The rest is part of the ‘charm’.