The Enduring Millennial Aesthetic of White Rat

I sit in the farthest corner of The Swan With Two Necks in Pendleton, warming my chilly legs by the coal fire. During quiet times, which I’ve learned are mid-afternoon on Wednesday and Thursday, Christine lets me use my laptop to get some work done (normally a bit of a faux-pas) and the modernity of the screen and backlit keys look bizarre against the antique teapot collection and the classic pub carpet.

The pint in my hand is an Ossett Brewery White Rat. This pub always has it on, and perhaps it’s for that reason I forgot all about it for a little while. Like a photo in a frame of someone you love, it became a cherished ornament rather than something I paid clear attention to. What a foolish thing to do.

A good pint of White Rat is fresh, so fresh. It has the nostalgic joy of drinking juicy, grapefruit-pith-bitter IPAs when they were exciting. Its lemony, tangerine aroma sends a little shiver of happiness down my spine. I drink White Rat and I remember how good beer can be when it’s well made. Simple, but ideal. First brewed in September 2011, around about the time chevrons and HD brows were taking the world by storm, White Rat began its life as Lab Rat, a test brew and the first beer brewed at the Rat Brewery in Huddersfield. 

Originally the beer was brewed with Cascade and Amarillo, “…and a smidgen of Admiral for bitterness,” head brewer Paul Spencer tells me. Unfortunately in 2012 the bitterness boom saw Amarillo becoming something of a rare commodity, so Paul changed the recipe to share the load between Amarillo and Columbus. The recipe remains the same to this very day. That’s 12 years of perfection.

“I feel like it nods towards classic American pales with its bitterness,” says Paul.

“At the time, I was heavily into bitter, hoppy American pales and was probably drinking stuff like Oakham Bishop’s Farewell and Hawkshead Windermere Pale. White Rat was definitely a tribute to those sort of beers.”

I love it, as you can probably tell. It feels modern to me, but being 12 years old in its current form, it really isn’t. I suppose just like Koi No Yokan feels like a new Deftones album to me, my age has a lot to do with this warping of time. Drinking it in the setting of The Swan With Two Necks is a sort-of delightful culture shock, surrounded by Edwardian trinkets and classic pub décor, understanding that a very punchy pale ale in the key of Sierra Nevada is now as comfortable in this setting as a bitter. And White Rat has done that.

Other Stuff

• Remember the mead maker who was making Mountain Dew wine? It is done.

• Hot Cross Bun traditions, including hanging buns above the bar from The Folk Archive

• A truly excellent and fascinating feature about “meatheads”, steak fans on an infinite journey to find a new, more tasty cut of beef by Louis Ashworth for the FT. If you love learning about microsubcultures, this is for you.

• Robert Macfarlane, reading Liam Gallagher, on the power of nature’s softness

• I would hope that you’ve read this already, but if not, David Jesudason has spent the past year tirelessly researching an exposé on the awful working conditions within an (as yet) explicitly unnamed pub.

My Stuff

• This week my story about grief and picking apples at Nightingale Cider was published on Pellicle. I was very unsure about revealing so much of myself throughout the writing of this piece, and this week has been difficult since its publication—a lot of emotions resurfaced. I’m so, so proud of it though, and I’d really love you to read it. The title comes from the poem Apples, by Laurie Lee. Here’s the last stanza:

• If you are at the International Brewing and Cider Festival in Manchester this weekend, come and say hello to me. I will be helping man the Nightingale Cider stand.