Without a doubt, this is one of my favourite pubs of 2025. Lewes is a town not short of great pubs. A first time visitor to The Snowdrop may even find themselves, and not unreasonably, questioning why they appear to have walked past so many inviting hostelries on what seams to be a journey out of town. But those extra five minutes of perambulation are certainly worth it in this case. Not that the frontage of the pub gives much indication of it, being rather nondescript. The astro-turfed beer garden, on the town side of the pub, may be enough to turn some more scrupulous Twats away. But those who venture inside are in for a treat. This place scores high marks for character - there is tat everywhere. Barely a surface is clear, and that includes the ceiling. Reclaimed wood is used for panelling (no MDF in here), beams are exposed, the panels around the bar are hand painted with designs that appear to come from an early Victorian narrowboat. One of the tables has been made out of an old tr...
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 ...