Beer-aeth

I was in a pub in Richmond not that long ago. It was early afternoon on a warm day in June. The pub, The Sun Inn, was highly inviting. I'd noticed it on a previous visit to the lido and it had lodged in my mind. A Fuller's house, with a pleasant shady patio out the front adorned with hanging baskets and colourful planters - I needed no further encouragement. A grey flag loomed across the threshold however. The pub was filled with televisions, all showing sport. Nothing unusual about this per se, and it was during the soccer World Cup/the latest toe-curling attempt at American sportswashing/Trumpian grifting daisy-chaining extravaganza. There were also a couple of screens showing English rugby, but here's the point - nobody was watching. The inside of the pub was deserted, all the patrons were outside on the patio or in the beer garden enjoying the balmy June weather. My conclusion is that management orders dictate that the tellies need to stay on regardless of viewership. I...

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 ...

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...

Plenty of 'craft beer bars' *eurgh...* have opened in vacant retail units or gentrified market halls. I'm sure that I'll write about many more, good and bad. I'm not sure however, many have opened in derelict Victorian lean-tos on inauspicious gyratories of provincial Welsh market towns which are the polar opposite of gentrified. I would guess few. Being somewhat au fait with the locale, I am sure the building in question has been out of use for at least thirty years, and was probably in its heyday at roughly the same time that the canal was. I assume that the name wasn't plucked out of the ether, and that this was indeed a bakery in the olden times, but for everybody in Pool barring the most ancient it has always been a boarded up red brick abutment which has drawn the eye of absolutely nobody. How it used to look I'm pleased to say that things have changed. Actually, I'm not pleased to say that. It;s a lot more fun to slag off places, but this is due t...

I say Walton, it could be Endor. In fact, it almost certainly would have improved Return of the Jedi if there'd been an incongruous red brick pub instead of the fucking Sylvanian Families. And it would have been a shit tonne better for the party when the Death Star blows up. Downside, trickier to flog lucrative merch to impressionable demanding children. I know what the cast would have rathered, most of them were off their tits. Whilst I'm on the subject - isn't this an odd way to start a write up of an excellent pub? - how did they always manage to land on exactly the right spot on an entire Earth sized planet or moon? I know they were Earth sized because the gravity was always exactly 1g. It's a life ruining pain in the arse if you mistakenly go to Carmarthen rather than Caernarfon, imagine if you landed on Dagobar's equivalent of Lapland only to find that Yoda was busy sunning themself in Tuvalu? There were no such issues whilst navigating the forest ...

  I am so fucking massively disappointed, and I only have myself to blame. For some reason, having discovered this pub on a widely used online mapping site, and cased the joint using its street viewing tool, I didn't actually bother clicking on the accompanying link to the pub's website. Had I done so, I would have discovered that the Cricketers is a Stonegate pub. Whilst not being an immediate red flag, it is certainly a grey flag, and I would tempered my expectations accordingly. Let's discuss those expectations.  The quintessentially English pub overlooks a green. Always. This will be used for cricket, or bowls, or croquet, or dancing around maypoles, or burning heretics, or morris dancing (hopefully not), or jousting or some shit. The pub sign will not be affixed to the pub but hanging from a pylon on the green itself. Nearby will be a pond for dangling ones feet in when cooling off in the summer months. The building will be of a nonsensical layout, with various additio...

  I have of late come to realise that the thing above all others that really inspires me to put pen to paper is having my expectations utterly confounded.  I have begun writing a review of The Friendship in Borth, yet to be completed, but there was a bizarre, cold, deserted husk of a pub that over the course of three hours became one of my favourite ever. And the opposite can happen too. I love cider. It has a hard time. I barely ever drink it when I'm out because it's almost impossible to get a good pint of cider anywhere. Even in Zummerzet, as I discovered earlier this year. But in London you can get anything! If you want really good Korean food, you can get it. If you want to go to a specialist Belgian beer bar that makes you feel like you're in Ghent, you're sorted. If you want the latest faddy Instagrammable food trends that cost an absolute fucking fortune and are 'curated' by someone whose Dad is a major shareholder in BAE then there's Borough Market....

Since my first visit to The Hope I have now visited in the region of roughly a million times. I’ve struggled to pick up a pen and add to my missive because I do bore of writing something so wholly positive. It’s a great strain. Such is the lot of the beer writer. I now feel restored enough to write some more complimentary paragraphs and have even had time to think up a handful of negatives which can be firmly labelled and placed within a category marked ‘pedantic nitpicking by a tedious arsehole with too much time on her hands.’ I will suffer for my art. Volume One left off around the back of the L-shaped bar. Continuing around we arrive at the newer half of the pub, which is sadly open plan and therefore fills up as a last resort, once the older front half is at capacity. What’s missing up here is some banquettes, and instead we find tables with individual chairs which gives it a f eeling more like a gastropub. Yes, The Hope does hearty well-priced food, but the gastropub aestheti...