A Wetherspoons Fry Up...

...could save your life.

For £3.99 you can get a large fry up which consists of two sausages, two rashers of bacon, three hash browns, two fried eggs, mushrooms/black pudding, beans, half a tomato and two slices of toast. Pay an extra pound and you get a pot of tea. That’s a lot of bite for your buck. Wetherspoons aren’t alone in offering massive breakfasts but they do stand ahead of many others, and why? Quality.

The beans are Heinz. The eggs are free range. The sausages are clearly pretty good, meaty and actually tasty (not just pink-brown tubes of porcine pulp). It’d be easy for a chain of over 700 pubs, serving 400,000 breakfasts a week, to skimp on the quality, but they don’t. Sure, it’s not gourmet and it’s still piled high and dropped on the plate, but it’s a real feast for under a fiver and it’s good.

It’s also saved me on many occasions. Leaving the flat with red eyes, unsettled gut and a hazy head, it’s a three-minute walk to get to my local ‘Spoons where I can guarantee a stomach liner and a helping hand of recovery. Ordering without looking, less than 10-minutes later I’m splaying yolk and bean juice over the table as I dig in.

I’ve had breakfasts in other places nearby and nowhere compares. The sausages are terrible, the yolks aren’t runny (runny yolk is an essential part of a fry up) and the hash browns are as greasy as the people serving it. It also costs more than £3.99, which in turn is as cheap as you could make for yourself as home, but everyone knows that making your own fry up is nowhere near as good as buying one somewhere (I think this is because your house smells of ‘fried’ for hours after, plus I always feel dirty cooking it myself as if I should’ve resisted and had the cereal instead, but going out is altogether different and more acceptable).

A lot of people have bad things to say about Wetherspoons in general but I’m not one of them. In fact, I’ll say this proudly: I love Wetherspoons. And their large breakfast is a life saver for those occasions when the only thing that will do is a massive fry up.

NOTE: I've just looked on the Wetherspoons website and seen that the large fry up consists of over 1500 calories. If you are interested in counting the kcals then this represents a substantial chunk of your day's eating. Maybe next time I'll just order the regular...

Hangover: Prevention or Cure

It’s the strange void before the discomfort which strikes first. An eyes-closed where am I, what time is it? Swallow and your tongue feels like your last meal was a sandcastle. Eyes stinging as the beer goggles linger like left-in contact lenses. A sea-sick stomach, a sudden flashback of something from the night before, an internal groan, the possibility that someone is actually in your brain and trying to break out by punching through your skull.

Sadly it’s something that most of us have had the displeasure of experiencing, not through intentioned design, of course, more a product of a good time, a bit like the sluggish lethargy following Christmas dinner. But how do you approach this unwelcome inevitability? Can you stave it off using preventative measures or do you wake up and then deal with it? (Abstinence doesn’t count)

Pre-university, as a fledgling drinker from the ages 18-20, my cure was simple: a pint of water and a packet of salt and vinegar squares. This would work for all but the fiercest of evenings (when meat and chips was required). During university it was dealt with by volume: a full meal at 3am, often cold leftovers (the most memorable being a five-day-old ‘bread and butter pudding’ made from a reduced-to-10p pack of eight jam doughnuts eaten straight from the fridge as I swayed bleary-eyed) or a mass panic-buy from the 24 hour Budgens. Post-university and the method is in a strange limbo: drink water, eat lots, eat whatever, hope for the best, sleep.

Some say have a glass of milk before you drink. Some champion eating a booze-soaking meal. Some say to order light-coloured drinks over dark. Some call for a glass of water between alcoholic drinks. Most go for the pint of water before bed… These all aim to prevent, but do they actually work?

Then the morning after… Stepping shaky-legged across splayed trousers, pizza boxes and borrowed street signs, what feast can guarantee to pick you up? Is it bacon? A full fry up? Black coffee, paracetamol and a cigarette? A bottle of sports drink. A head-clearing walk? Hair of the dog? Or do you mourn under the covers until indecently late?

Drink responsibly. Deal with the after-effects tactically. Are you a preventer or a curer or do you need a bit of both?

Trapped/Pissed

The air is sharp. Not as in clean and crisp, refreshing. It's razor-like. It hurts. The usual walk is different today. It's a sensory overload. It's louder, busier, worse. A Hitchcockian zoom-in/track back. Vertigo. Everyone looks like someone else, someone vaguely famous, someone I've never met. Eyes are sore. Saw. Like forgotten contact lenses, like beer goggles, the morning after. The morning after. The morning now. A too-familiar daily routine isn’t the same. It's warped. It's like a movie, a bad movie, one not worth watching, one I don't want to be in. This ungodly feeling caused by those godly beers. Forgive me father, or something like that.

What didn't make the final edit, in no particular order: At the same time acutely focused and blurry… A loose grip of dignity... Stomach is in limbo between here and there. I don't want to go there... Greggs is an oasis… There's a drumming noise inside my head, sings Florence, it feels like her Machine... There were some revelations, too many temptations.

@Sheffield, #twissup was awesome

Well that was fun. The pictures say it all (especially this one, although this is my favourite thanks to the hilarious caption). Take 30 people, a combination of bloggers, brewers and drinkers, mix them up inside three breweries and lots of pubs, soak in beer for up to 12 hours and it’s a good recipe for a cracking day.

Thornbridge and BrewDog lined the bar in the Sheffield Tap at midday (Black Dog is the best looking beer I’ve seen in ages); a pit stop in the Harlequin which broke up the long walk; a Kelham Island brewery tour where everyone was drinking Marble Brew No.14; to the current CAMRA Pub of the Year, the Kelham Island Tavern, for a Thornbridge Samhain; to the Sheffield Brewing Co, another tour, a couple of beers; to The Hillsborough Hotel, to a bar lined with Crown Brewery beers, a Marble, Thornbridge and a Pictish; the most to-the-point-brewery tour ever (that’s the mash tun, thanks); Ring of Fire 2009 being tapped; a tram and a bus to a sandwich eating competition and a pint of something from Abbeydale; back on the bus to the Devonshire Cat and a pub full of drunk people drinking Ruination and heading straight for just that; and onwards still, back to the Sheffield Tap, for more, and more; and then food, the missing ingredient of the night, some chicken things, chips and potatoes cooked in southern fried chicken batter; a taxi; a broken key; a shared bed; too-little sleep; the worst hangover ever experienced; a delicious breakfast that couldn’t be eaten as all focus was on controlling the body functions; and then to Leeds; a round of juice and tea in Wetherspoons; taxi to Avery at Beer Ritz; Rooster’s fantastic American IPA on cask got me back on track; a dizzying selection of bottles; bye to Zak, hi to North Bar, for cask, keg and bottles, for bread and fantastic cheese, for a Raging Bitch; then the best pint of Sam Smith’s OBB I’ve ever had; a quick Old Peculiar; another train; a couple of half pints in the Sheffield Tap; Burger King; a four hour train journey made into a five hour train journey by missing the connection by one minute; finally getting in and realising the text I sent to Lauren to tell her I’d be late didn’t actually send; unpack, sit down, pass out.

Damn it was a good time. I felt like hell all day yesterday but who cares, it was worth it. Sheffield is a seriously good place to drink seriously good beer (and if you go then stay at The Hillsborough Hotel, it’s a great place). Jaipur was my first and last of the weekend and just delicious; the Marble Brew No.14 was fantastic; Crown Pale Ale and Stannington Stout show how good a brewer Stu is and then his Ring of Fire blew me away with its green-chilli fruitiness (that was beer of the day); Ruination IPA was a glass of peaches and apricots that kicked my arse; bottles of Orval and geueze ended one day and left their wrath on the next.

A day spent drinking, talking about beer and enjoying it is always fun. Thank you to everyone who came, it was great to meet you or to see you again – I hope everyone had a brilliant day. Special thanks to Alex from All Beer for sorting us out a lot of extra treats and brewery tours and hurrying us along when we floundered. Now we just need to sort out the next one! So far we’ve had suggestions for Manchester (Tandleman, we’ll need a guide!), Oxford or Cambridge, Norwich, Derby, Newcastle (Jeff Pickthall offered to guide us around there), or even Belgium. Plus there’s GBBF, but that one’s a gimme. Where do you fancy going?!

Thanks to Matt for the photos. Check out the #twissup timeline too, it makes for fun and interesting reading! 

If you had to...

An If you had to… of sorts this week, asking what you eat when you are hungover? It’s not asking you to choose just the one this time, I just want to know what you eat post-beer.

This comes the morning after the night before. Last night I was at a preview of the Best of the Best beer festival at The Bull with Brad and James from Ale Affinity and Pete from Pete’s Food Blog and I am thoroughly hungover and feel like hell (the beer was shit hot though!). I've got to go to work soon but might as well not bother because I pretty much won’t get anything done except for a lot of staring out the window (into a bush) mournfully, hoping the headache and swirling gut will bugger off before I’m back at the pub to later. (Oh the things I do for this blog!)

But here’s the thing, what do I want to eat? What’s the one thing that will sort me out in this time of need? What disgusting trashy feast will lift my spirits? And what do you eat? Are you a coffee and fry up? Bacon sandwich? Tea and toast? Cold pizza? Hair of the dog?

What is the one thing guaranteed to sort you out when you are hungover?

Yes, I am aware that I just used the term ‘shit hot’ to describe the beer last night. While I like to adopt a generally colloquial tone in this blog I feel this may be a step too far. Maybe I am still drunk?