Categories
bristol pubs

New openings: Bruhaha, Totterdown, Bristol

The new Bruhaha brewery tap in Totterdown, Bristol, is a remarkably successful melding of pub and taproom.

As the crow flies, it’s not far from us, but there are railway lines, a river, and a bloody great big hill in the way.

We schlepped there in the gloom of a late afternoon, in need of something to see off the January blues.

From the approach, the bar looked inviting, with golden light behind big windows bearing the brewery logo, and a crowd visible inside.

The pub (we checked on our spreadsheet) is plain and minimal in terms of decor:

  • picnic benches
  • white walls
  • bare wood
  • fairy lights

In other words the IKEA showroom school of bar design.

But with two levels, partitions and careful lighting, it felt cosy and intimate, rather than like a shop unit.

Every seat was taken by groups of older people, couples with babies, couples with tiny dogs, couples on dates, groups of lads, and various other combinations.

“It’s great to have more than three people in,” said Steve England, the owner, when asked how it was going by an inquisitive customer. (Not us. We just happened to be standing there when the conversation happened.)

There was only one beer from Bruhaha on offer, a Doppelbock, that was decent enough, if perhaps lacking the crisp cleanness of the German originals. If it was rebadged as a strong winter ale it would pass.

We didn’t struggle to find tempting beers from other brewers on the menu, though. From Good Chemistry’s Oatmeal Stout to New Bristol Session IPA. Lost & Grounded Keller Pils was there as a safe fall-back, too, and tasting particularly fresh and fine.

For the peckish, there was Indian food from the Roti Shack on offer, or nuts from big jars on the bar.

The bar is also being used for various local community groups and activities, such as oil painting classes – very laudable.

We found it hard to leave and agreed that we would not let the obstacle-strewn industrial and natural landscape of Bristol prevent us visiting again soon.

Bruhaha is at 156-158 Wells Rd, Totterdown, Bristol BS4 2AG, and is currently open on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Details of events and food pop-ups are on the website.

Categories
France

Serve Yourself in Nice

We’d been in Nice a couple of days before we took the right combination of turns in the pleasingly confusing old town and stumbled across Au Fût et à Mesure.

Discreet as it is, we noticed it because it wasn’t a bistro a cafe or a Bar Tabac, being less formal than the first, boozier than the second and smarter than the last. Then we noticed the beer list on display outside:

Au Fut et a Mesure, Nice: beer list, summer 2015.

Lots of places in Nice call themselves ‘Cave à Bières’ because they have Guinness and Kronenbourg, but this looked like a really decent range, and competitively priced at that (€3.90 for 250ml — cheaper than basic lager in many places we’d found ourselves). But we scratched our heads over ‘Nos bieres pression en self’ — was it a clever way of referring to bottles, or did they genuinely have all of these on tap? There was, of course, only one way to find out.

Categories
Beer history pubs

The Seven Types of Boozer, c.2001

Neon sign: 'Bar'. (By Peter Sigrist.)
SOURCE: Peter Sigrist on Flickr, under Creative Commons.

It can be hard sometimes to recall details of the recent past. It does, after all, tend to blend rather seamlessly into the present.

That’s why we love coming across specific, detailed contemporary observations such as this academic study of nightlife in British cities in the period 2000-2002.

Its authors, Meg Aubrey, Paul Chatterton and Robert Hollands, categorised the seven types of drinking establishment in the UK c.2001 as follows:

Style Bar: One off, individual, décor obviously highly designed and stylised. By nature fairly new. Could be part of a large company which owns many pubs but a style bar would not be branded.

Café Bar: High levels of design, serves food & coffee, lots of seats/tables, range of clientele/atmospheres throughout day. Can be independent or part of a national operator.

Traditional Pub: Characterised wood tables, patterned carpets etc Can be either corporate or owner-run so includes branded traditional pubs.

Ale House: Very Traditional, scarcely changed, original features & loyal, regular clientele. Can be either brewery owned or independent. Often in need of redecoration. Often situated in run down areas.

Theme Pub/Bar: Main feature is that it follows an obvious style throughout, often with memorabilia, chalk boards, bar dress etc. Themed outlets include (1) multi-sited, national High Street Brands such as Sport, Nationalities (Australian, New Zealand, Irish) or student theme pubs or (2) single site concept bars.

Disco Bar: Vertical drinking, loud music, few seats, very busy Fri/Sat. Often closed during day and do not open till evening.

Alternative Pub: Defined by décor, but often due to music policy, clientele, attitude.

That chimes with our memories of our early twenties when we spent a lot of time  in one particular ‘alternative pub’, drawn by the music and atmosphere rather than the beer.

But would a 2014 version of that list today also include ‘Craft Beer Bar’ as a distinct category? An early example of the phenomenon, Leeds’ North Bar, founded in 1997, actually gets a mention in a quote from a clubgoer (link to PDF, p20):

There is a real Milos crowd like there is a real North Bar crowd. They are quite similar to the North Bar people in fact some of them used to be North Bar people and then they grown out and they moved to Milos because there is like DJ sort of funk. And friends of the DJ will come and it is the bar people are all friends with each other and it is a big scene.

By way of context, the authors say: ‘One of the distinctive elements of Leeds’ nightlife is that many of the bars have loyal followings, often based upon musical and style policy.’

Perhaps these days, ‘craft beer’ is part of ‘style policy’. Or is it a ‘theme’?

Categories
pubs

Bars and Pubs and Clubs

Dada bar in Sheffield.

Last week, we interviewed the founders and owners of North Bar in Leeds, arguably the first ‘craft beer bar’ in the UK, and, in the course of our conversation, asked: ‘So, what makes this a bar rather than a pub?’ After much head-scratching, they had to admit defeat: they didn’t know. ‘But we know a bar when we see one.’

Here’s a quiz, then: are the following bars, or pubs, or something else?

  1. Dada, Sheffield
  2. Craft Beer Company, Islington, London
  3. Craft Beer Company, Clerkenwell, London
  4. The Parcel Yard, Kings Cross, London
  5. any branch of All Bar One.

A pub has to sell beer, but then so do most bars. A bar is more likely to sell cocktails, but some don’t, and some pubs do. Pubs are more likely to be brown, while bars will have white/cream/grey walls, but white-painted pubs and brown bars do exist… no, this isn’t getting us anywhere.

In the introduction to her 2002 book Bar and Club Design, Bethan Ryder defines bars as follows:

They are modern, spectacular forums, underpinned by the ideas of display and performance, rather than utilitarian, more casual places in which people meet, drink and gossip — such as the pub…

We’re not sure that works — North felt pretty casual, for example, but is definitely a bar. She also, however, says this in attempting to define the nightclub: ‘…to a certain extent they have always been whatever a… pub is not.’ Now that, vague as it is, might work as a definition of a bar.

As, perhaps, might this: a pub should always feel as if it is in the British Isles; whereas a bar should feel as if it is in Manhattan, Stockholm, Moscow or Paris.

If you think you’ve got it cracked, let us know in the comments below.

Our answers would be 1) bar; 2) pub; 3) bar; 4) something else; and 5) chain pub with pretensions.

Categories
london pubs

Posh pub/hotel in Hackney

Old pub livery on the Ship Inn, Hackney
Old pub livery on the Ship Inn, Hackney

We’d walked past the Ship Inn tons of times. We’d even photographed it and put the pictures here. From the outside, it looked like a pretty rough old dive, partly because of the gang of people smoking outside the long tunnel you have to walk down to get in.

Then we read somewhere that, far from being rough, it’s actually the poshest boozer in Hackney, so we got over our nerves and went in for a nosy round.

It’s actually a boutique hotel, and a nice looking one at that. The bar makes more sense when you think of it as a service for guests rather than a pub for locals. It’s done up, as the phrase goes, like a tart’s boudoir. A good half of it is laid up for dinner with table cloths, big wine goblets and silverware. The barmen/waiters are smartly dressed with continental aprons. One of them looks like Tobey Maguire.

Standing by the door, we had one of those moments: it’s too posh! They’ll expect us to eat even though we’re not hungry!

But they didn’t. And they were very nice. The beer was nothing special (several so-called world lagers, Tim Taylor Landlord and the now ubiquitous Sharp’s Doom Bar) but well enough kept. We enjoyed our pint and felt, on the whole, that this would be a good place to go on a date or to bring people from work who don’t like ‘old man’s pubs’.

More to the point, though, it’s across the road from the usual venue for the Pig’s Ear Beer Festival (scheduled this year for 2-6 December). Any out of towners struggling to convince other halves to join them at a beer festival could find a couple of nights in this place will clinch the deal, and it’s pretty convenient to stagger home to as well…

The Ship is owned by Urban Inns, who also own the Coach and Horses in Isleworth.