Mild Magic – Out of town

This is the fourth in a series of five posts about 2026’s Mild Magic, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA‘s annual celebration of mild, covering Wellington Road, the Wilmslow Road and the last few town centre pubs. One of the pleasures of these crawls is putting together pubs in unexpected combinations, generally determined by public transport routes. Most years I file the Crown under “Stockport” and tick it off on the same day as the Baker’s Vaults and the Angel, but this year I did a “Wellington Road” route. (I didn’t say it was a large pleasure.) We started at the Station Hop (surprisingly easy to get to from Chorlton), where they were between milds; I had Blackjack Drinking Beer #1. I’m not crazy about the name – what else are you going to do with it? – but I guess it’s a heritage recipe of some sort. It’s a sweetish, light-bodied, mid-brown old-school bitter; if somebody well-actually’d you and explained that this is what mild used to taste like, you could believe it. On a sunny…