I’d like to be able to say that this place was a bit of an eye opener to me, except that it was almost impossible to open your eyes in here due to the permanent, thick fog of stale smoke and complete absence of ventilation. The pub – technically a Nachtcafe – is a long cellar under the main street of Mayrhofen, Tirol, and most nights it was impossible to see from one end to the other. Until my first visit to Apropos – Appies from now on – most of my drinking had been confined to isolated freehouses in the Welsh Marches. Which is another way of saying that I was naïve about almost every facet of adult life. Prior to my first descent of the steps into this beautiful subterranean galley, the last pub I’d been to was a flat roofer on a caravan park in Mid Wales, full of people from the Black Country who had accidentally bought mobile homes in a country that they seemed to utterly despise. Now I was a thousand miles away in a pub that I would come to feel more accepted in than I ever had ...
Oh my fucking tits, what have we walked into? I can't recall a time in my life when the expectation/reality matrix has been fucked any harder than this. Except some jobs I've done. And some Tinder dates, de rigueur . I was in Zummerzet for Zoider. And who could possibly resist a specialist cider bar at the foot of the Mendip Hills (immortalised by Adge Cutler and The Wurzels). This is an easy win. Local, natural, traditional cider. Some people come to Somerset purely for the cider. I know I fucking did. Not exactly a captive market, but a fairly reliable one surely? Sell a quality product, and don't take the piss - people will keep coming back for more. The Cider Barn in Draycott however, have taken a different tack. Imagine if you will a specialist real ale bar that served Doombar, Greene King IPA, and Caffreys. Imagine going to a fancy wine bar that had Echo Falls, Blossom Hill, and Blue Nun. You would scream, and quite rightly, "I have been massively fucking misle...