Which Witch was a winner?

The Bull & Royal atop Church Street wears its past – as a coaching house – more obviously than any Preston pub I can readily name.
The Bull & RoyalThe Bull & Royal
The Bull & Royal

Through the old arch one still must gallop to access refreshment, past Dickens on the tunnel wall – he stayed here, in the early 1850s – into an old courtyard where horses once clopped about and smokers now congregate in some comfort.

A pleasant place to be it was too, this Tuesday evening just past, a spacious softly illuminated pub with smiling staff, amiable clientele and two fine casks on offer for the discerning palate.

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Blond Witch and White Witch, both out of Burnley’s Moorhouse Brewery and both well-established favourites hereabouts.

The Blond would be my pick, packing a 4.5% wallop alongside lager-coloured hazy drop with pineapple and orange fruit sweetness and a bitter finish. Drinks easy as mother’s milk too, this witch’s brew.

A White Witch chaser went down okay, but it was hard to escape the notion this was just a slightly weaker (3.9%) session version of its Blond sibling. A further half of Blond Witch did little to convince me otherwise.

Dickens, incidentally, left The Old Bull, as the hotel was then known, not overly impressed.

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“An old grubby, smoky, mean, intensely formal red brick house,” he opined.

Not any more. How times, even hard ones, change.

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