Pint to Pint by The Telegraph

Author:The Telegraph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

62 Russell Street, Sheffield S3 8RW (0114 272 2482); kelhamtavern.co.uk

The Rat and Ratchet

Huddersfield

The lunchtime menu is hardly extensive. You can have pork pie, pork pie, crisps or pork pie. Proper Yorkshire pork pie, mind you, made by a local butcher with a penetrable crust, a minimum of jelly and meat that is pink rather than grey in the middle. This is Huddersfield, not Melton Mowbray.

There will be bread and dripping on the bar later, a treat for the taste buds, if not the arteries.

‘I put out two plates of it, piled high, during the interval on quiz night and it’s all gone before we start the next round,’ says the landlord Richard Prest, who seems glad to be back in his native Yorkshire after years of exile in the south.

The Rat and Ratchet is a no-nonsense alehouse with several drinking areas, a dart board, a high-backed settle or two, exposed floorboards and a central island of impressive black-and-white tiles topped by a vintage jukebox and the sort of pinball machine that I last saw in a students’ union in the days before decimal currency.

Beyond the window are distant hills and redundant mills with soot-encrusted chimneys. And between here and there are several lanes of traffic.

While waiting for the lights to change, some drivers have been alarmed to see steam rising from the grate on the pavement outside. Whence the sign on the outside wall of local stone: ‘We are brewing. The building is not on fire.’ The fire brigade once came close to breaking down the door when the pub was closed, having been alerted by the hoppy clouds rising from the mash tuns in the cellar below. Vegetarians may find the Rat and Ratchet not to their taste, but for connoisseurs of fine beer it’s worth truffling out.

This is one of three micro-outposts of the Ossett Brewery, and its impressive range is well represented. The biggest seller by far is White Rat, pale yet heavily hopped, and 4% ABV. Brewed on the premises, it’s yours for £2.40 a pint. Despite its name, the Pure Gold is more of an amber ale, beautifully balanced, slightly lower on alcohol (3.8%) yet just as flavoursome.

There’s a powerful porter, a stout given depth and intensity by black treacle, a German Weissbier and much more.

A solitary pump serves cider, but many more varieties are fetched up those well-worn cellar steps on request. Udders Orchard is made by the previous landlord who collects his raw materials from gardens in the locality like a Tyke-ish Eddie Grundy.

Let’s face it, alcoholic apple juice is as close as you’re going to get to fruit and veg in this place.

Chris Arnot, 1 March 2014

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