Wells (hot fuzz and moosehead green)
I came to Wells England to attend a technical course for work. The course worked out really well and I wound up having two days to explore Wells. Of course by the second day of the course I, and my colleagues had explore all of Wells we needed to see: the gin bar in our hotel and the pub serving the cheapest dirties cider. Of course that's what this region of England (Somerset) is known for, it's greasy fucking cider and derivitives. The place with the most shitty cider course turned out to be the Quarter Jack..which is a Witherspoons. Witherspoons is a big fuck-off chain of cheap generic pubs across England. They typically cater to students, but wherever there is a geriatric or tourism base, these swill shacks tend to pop up.
I had two Scottish fellows I work with talking about "scrumpy". I had no idea what it was but it sounded gross. Turns out "scrumpy" is just slang for "dirty old stale fucking cider". Or in the case of the Quarter Jack pub: cider in a box, for three shillings a glass. JEEEEEESUS that stuff is gross. It tastes like warm gasoline. There is NO WAY a regular human could drink that piss without having a few solid pints in him first. Regardless, I managed to drink about four pints of the stuff before the boys dragged me out of the place. In retrospect it was probably a little irresponsible to get dummied on the scrumpy the night before our last day of the course. Could have just waited the 16 hours and then got blotto with no early commitments but heeeeeyyyy that's not how we roll. We drinks the scrumpy when we's wants to drinks the scrumpy.
Lesson learned from the scrumpy hangover? Easy: scrumpy gets ya a hilarious kind of drunk with little effort needed. Two or three scrumpy's and it's like you're smoking opium. Just giggling and skanking around like a worm on rollerskates.
When the course ended the boys all got piled up on pints at the Thatched Cottage pub in Shepton Mallet. After the UK boys took off for home, I still had a day and a half. Thus with the decent volume of booze I was already carrying in my system I set off on foot to get the down-low on Wells. Mostly though I hung out in the cathedral and caught an evening mass. I was kind of drunk and winded so I caught myself falling asleep throughout the whole mass. All the same after mass I managed to pull up my bootstraps and put in a solid shift of drinking Moosehead Green at the Inn where they filmed Hot Fuzz. The Inn they portray in the film is actually the Swan Hotel, where I was staying. Where they filmed the pub scenes is “The Crown”. This is where I spent my last night in Wells, drinking eastern Canadian beer and ranting about Glastonbury Festival.
