Unique and beautiful things rarely come from boring places.

In the industrial glow of lower North East England, along the banks of the River Tees, a tiny handful of pubs still serve beer the way my grandad, and his dad used to drink.

“Two pints of Strongarm please.”

Half-full glasses are pulled from the bar-back fridge, topped up feverishly from the hand-pull. Placed in front of me are two ridiculous looking pints of ruby-red cask beer. Foam cartoonishly mounded a full four inches higher than the brim of the glass. Wobbling and bubbling, alpine peaks and whips of pure white.

Beer foam is beautiful, I’m obsessed with it. No other beverage has something so unique and magical about it. It’s textural and creamy, a fleeting sign of freshness and a robust indication of quality. There's a reason cartoons of beer are often mushroomed with thick, cloud-like dollops of foam. You wouldn't exactly see a flat, foamless iceman pour in a Studio Ghibli film.

As with the rest of our rich food and drink culture here in the UK, the attitude to beer foam is almost tribal. In Yorkshire for example, you’ll enjoy a small dense disk of it. In Bristol, some bartenders pour beer to avoid it completely. But in Teesside—the area where I was born and raised—it’s created in frothy abundance. The answer to why is entrenched in local, working class culture.

Entire towns in the North East were built to provide labour for the steelworks, building bridges from the Tyne to the Sydney harbour. The luminous industrial skyline that inspired Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner put bread on the table of the local people, my family included. When shift-changes occurred, hordes of thirsty workers headed straight to the pub.

Born from this was banked beer. Pints of cask would be poured en masse, the beer crashing into glasses, extra foamy through a tight sparkler, and ‘banked’ under the bar. These pints would sit, ready to be topped up for the shift change rush. When ordered, they'd be topped up to the brim from a separate handpull without a sparkler. The stable, settled foam creates a huge mounded head on top of a full pint. A ‘Hartlepool Head’ some call it, with the beer looking fresh, alive and truly glorious.

When the steelworks closed their doors in 2015, my Dad, his brother, and a lot of the town were put out of work. As I'm writing this, the works are currently in the process of being demolished. Concrete monoliths stripped of their listed status and bulldozed down. Yet the skyline of Teesside is still permanently ablaze with the bright festoon of industry; and, if you know where to look, and if you can squeeze past the old boys at the bar, a few glowing pubs still serve glorious foamy bankers.

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Surrounded on three sides by the North Sea, The Globe on Hartlepool’s headland peninsula is an old, well-worn pub, with old blokes playing cribbage for coins, and muttering nonsense about football. The landlady cracks hilarious jokes and throws darts over a group of drinkers.

On every table sits marshmallowy tufts of foam, poking out of banked pints of Camerons Strongarm; a delicious ruby red ale with rich rounded flavours, reminiscent of raspberries and bready yeast. The eggshell coloured mound of foam rounds out the beer's malty body, making an already delicious beer even more quaffable.

I order a pint, and before receiving it, I'm asked if I'm staying for another, so my next one can be banked in the fridge. I sit down with my beautiful banked pint, nestle my face in the cold foam, and drink eagerly. As you drink deep, the head maintains its huge volume, and follows the beer down your glass, like a thick soft pillow, until all you end up with is a glass a third filled with foam, like a bucket of fresh snow.

Meanwhile, nestled between the neon alcopops and bottles of fruity cider, my next beer sits banked, settling, cooling, and ready to be topped up.

As they finish their game of cribbage, I ask the old boy on the table next to me if they ever pour it regularly. “Well the new owners tried that down the road, I stopped going, the beer just looked all flat, like,” he tells me.

Every person I ask says the same thing: bankers aren't unusual or impractical, but look more alive, fresh and special. Without its fluffy head the beer just seems a bit lifeless and dull.

““You wouldn’t exactly see a flat, foamless iceman pour in a Studio Ghibli film.””

A few miles away in Stockton-on-Tees, The Sun Inn sits perched on (reportedly) the widest high street in the UK; a Craft Union chain pub with a karaoke machine and more television screens than I can count. If I'm brutally honest, it's not my favourite pub. But, if you look past the offerings of Strongbow Dark Fruit and Guinness, you'll see a now rare sight of two Bass hand-pulls—and a fridge behind it with the telltale half-poured pints. The Bass in the Sun Inn is served banked as standard. Depending on how many drinkers are in, four or five pints sit waiting their turn to be topped up, the distinctive red triangle logo juxtaposed with glasses of cold foam.

The pints of Bass at the Sun Inn are magic. It's a beer I usually don't even like, but when banked, the beer seems to change a tiny bit. The fluffy head brings out a little more bitterness, the body is mellowed into something less vaguely malty and brown, into something soft and clean, like, perhaps, an unusual dunkel lager. It's no wonder banked Bass at the Sun Inn has a small cult following in the strange dedicated world of Bass fans, it's markedly different and really special.

Teesside’s obsession with foam permeates more than a few cask beer pubs; huge working men’s clubs slake the thirst of card-carrying members. Once-thriving and pillars of the community across the North, in Teesside they’re still surprisingly popular. Buzzing drinking halls with bingo, questionable country music and a labyrinth of rooms and bars. But how to satisfy the foam obsessed drinkers, with standard keg fonts and ‘pint-to-brim’ glasses?

A now very uncommon method of dispense is used. At the push of a button, the cellar automatically metres and dispenses a half-pint of beer. The beer is ejected through a tight nozzle into an oversized 23oz (653ml) glass from a height, creating a mound of foam. It’s then carefully topped up with another press, providing an accurate, legal pint plus/minus half a millilitre, with the beautiful large head of a true cask banker, in a giant glass.

The keg beers served this way are brewed exclusively for North East clubs, heritage brands otherwise long forgotten. Easy drinking and comforting dark ales such as Tetley’s Imperial (supposedly once marketed as “Teesside’s favourite pint”) Worthington’s Ale, or my personal favourite, John Smiths Magnet, with its notable twang of dark liquorice. Whether it’s pure nostalgia that keeps these beers in existence, or that they are perfectly designed to be drunk in large quantities, perfect for foamy metered dispense, these old brands cling on solely in the clubs of the North East.

Sitting in overly bright rooms inside flat-roofed buildings might not seem as attractive as a cosy country pub, but holding an oversized glass of metered Magnet, with its fluffy creamy foam, reminds me of drinking some of my first pints, at charity nights, christenings and funerals. Giant pints in giant places that were built for the working-class community, some seating over a thousand people. With names like The Steelies, The Malleable, and The Dormans, after the town's industry. Videos exist of the heydays of North Eastern working men’s clubs, with trays upon trays of half poured foamy pints awaiting thirsty members, some serving over 40,000 banked pints in a single day.

““I would hate to see this true working class drinking culture disappear from Teesside.””

“I grew up drinking McEwan’s Best Scotch and Newcastle Exhibition,” local beer historian and club enthusiast Brad Wight tells me. “Neither of those beers would taste right without a big head and the same goes for Strongarm, and your Teesside bitters.”

“The head undoubtedly changes the flavour, locking the astringent bitter hop oils in the foam and leaving a sweeter, maltier liquid beneath,’’ he adds.

Brad also shares an interesting concern stemming from working in the dispense industry: what serve is as the brewer intended? A good example is the Twitter account Shit London Guinness, which attracts thousands of people mocking pints not served to the Irish brewery’s well defined perfect pour; the iconic, rich, creamy head that creates a satisfying meniscus of foam.

In 2019 I started brewing a “rustic” lager to celebrate my love of foam, called Big Foam. I often cringe at pictures of publicans pouring it in pint-to-brim glasses, carefully and slowly to minimise head. It's a celebration of foam! Designed to be poured and enjoyed with equal vigour.

While many fawn over the famous Czech pilsner pours, Bavarian schnitts and American brewery slow pours, bankers have never received the love and attention they deserve. Recently I uploaded a quick photo of two Bass bankers onto Twitter. Instantly there was anger and chaos, with people upset at the amount of foam. They descended upon my post to unleash their frustrations, aghast at the potential liquid lost to foam. That looks hard to drink from! My god they've ruined the beer!

Despite this, for every tired “want a flake with that?’’ joke, there were a handful of Teessiders, or people who had visited the area decades ago, excitedly messaging me and talking fondly about banked pints, even making plans to go and enjoy some of their own. To those who’ve drunk them, they are a wonderful—and delicious—quirk of home. It feels a bit like a secret club; a joke only we are in on.

As the mines, steelworks and factories that brought bankers into being fade away, I would hate to see this true working-class drinking culture disappear from Teesside, born from the grassroots out of necessity and invention: the Cornish pasty of pints. In the current culture of cynical marketing, and constantly chasing the “next big thing,” we have to make room for our heritage. Because as industry comes and goes, the workers who powered it still remain, and in one small area, unique and beautiful banked beer is hanging on.

And for as long as it is, you can put me one in the fridge, because I'm staying for another.