Selling hippy wigs in Woolworth’s

Hydes Brewery have recently carried out a major refurbishment of one of their pubs, the Old Star on Cheadle High Street (the Cheshire one, not the Staffordshire one) and renamed it the James Watts. “Who?” you may well ask. Well, it’s not the steam engine pioneer, and it’s not the outspoken founder of BrewDog. No, it’s named after a local worthy who was Mayor of Manchester from 1855 to 1857.

And, according to the sign on the front, he was also a “Master of Craft”. Yes, that’s right, Hydes have decided to revamp an old-fashioned local as a trendy craft beer bar. Changing a long-established and familiar pub name always strikes me as a bit of a desperate attempt to appear “with it”. In the real ale boom of around 1990, I recall Whitbread rebranding some of their pubs as “Tut’n’Shive” alehouses, including the long-closed Chapel House in Heaton Chapel which couldn’t even prosper as a Tesco Express. That came across as an exercise in bandwagon-jumping at the tail end of a trend, and is this really any different?

I wasn’t taking detailed notes, but there were maybe six handpumps featuring a range of different beers, but, significantly, nothing whatsoever from the Hydes range, not even their Beer Studio “craft” range. The two I spotted were Ilkley Mary Jane (which I’d seen in Wetherspoons the other day) and a beer from Three Bs Brewery of Blackburn that I think was called Bee’s Knees. The latter, at £3.10, was a pleasant but unremarkable pale bitter. There were eight keg taps including Kozel and Jaipur. I didn’t spot any mainstream lagers, but there was a “Vier” variant of one of the well-known German brands which I suppose would have to satisfy the cooking lager enthusiast. On each table was a beer menu listing an exhaustive selection of bottled beers.

It’s years since I’d last been in the Old Star, so I’m not entirely sure what it was like before, but it can be said with total certainly that Hydes have made the interior far worse. It is dominated by barrels being used as posing tables, with a long row opposite the bar and some more in what was once the vault at the front right. There’s just a small oasis of bench seating for older customers at the front left, plus a few loose tables right at the back. There was a group who presumably were survivors from the old pub who were saying “Well, I suppose if you try all the beers, you might find one you like”. It was also, on my visit, extremely dimly lit.

No doubt the neophytes and Year Zero enthusiasts will be creaming their pants over it, but to my mind it offers a profoundly uncongenial pub environment where I wouldn’t want to linger any longer than I had to. It’s also puzzling why Hydes feel so ashamed of their own beers that they dare not show their face. If you want a decent pint in comfortable surroundings in Cheadle, you would be much better advised to choose Hydes’ other pub, the Crown, even though it is a shop conversion from a few decades ago. And it seems that some of the locals aren’t too impressed, as the pub has already been the subject of a machete attack. Hopefully not from a disillusioned Carling drinker.

At the same time, Punch Taverns have recently refurbished the Dog & Partridge in Heaton Mersey. It’s a big improvement, with plenty of comfortable seating, even including some benches, and relatively little at posing height. The décor makes extensive use of wood, etched glass and warm colours. They’ve also reintroduced cask beer, but as it’s only Doom Bar, Abbot and Dizzy Blonde, there’s nothing for the beards to get excited about. But I know which pub I think provides the nicer drinking environment.