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bristol pubs

Punks, pool and arty postcards – crawling the pubs of Easton

We spent Saturday night exploring the pubs of Easton in Bristol, revisiting some we’ve not been to for a while, and one completely new to us.

Easton is a couple of neighbourhoods across from ours. It’s got a reputation for alternative culture – anarchists, punks, hippies and graffiti.

But, like most places in Bristol, it’s been gentrifying rapidly and its many small terraced houses are increasingly likely to be painted grey with window boxes full of herbs, and bike sheds in the front yards.

The first pub on our crawl was The Whitehall Tavern which has taken us almost eight years to get around to visiting, making it our 311th Bristol pub.

Why the delay? Well, because from the outside it doesn’t look anything special, or especially inviting.

The moment we walked through the door, however, we realised we’d read the signals wrong. It was busy, warm, and lively. The crowd varied from twentysomething to 70+, from work boots to student scarves, from chess players to pool players, from tattooed cider punks to rockabilly hipsters.

It felt like a pub balanced on the sweet spot between traditional and gentrified, where incomers to the neighbourhood had been made welcome but not allowed to dominate.

It took a while to get served because there was only one person behind the bar.

“Got any help coming?” someone shouted.

“From 6pm,” he shouted back, running past with a fiver in one hand and a pint of cider in the other.

He was one of those professionals who was a pleasure to watch. He always knew who was next to be served and the regulars only had to raise a finger for their usual pint to be delivered.

When our turn finally came we ordered two pints of Butcombe Original. He pulled them two thirds of the way and left the foam to settle while he served two or three other people at lightning speed. Then he topped off our drinks and said:

“Six pounds, please.”

Did he say six pounds? For two pints? We didn’t really believe it until we saw the amount on the screen of the card machine.

The beer was excellent, too – cool, fresh, and presented in a perfectly clean branded glass.

From our corner by the dartboard we watched strangers play pool, listened to middle-aged men debate the football, and observed a conversation that seemed to be simmering up to an argument.

“Dad would have loved this,” said Ray. “Especially the price of the beer.”

Frightfully nice

Our next destination, by way of contrast, was The Greenbank, a large corner pub that we would guess was built in around 1900.

The Greenbank is a middle class stronghold – one of those Nice Pubs with small plates, posh burgers, quirky artwork for sale, and artfully mismatched furniture.

“It’s like being in an Antic pub in London in about 2012,” said Jess, not disapprovingly.

Though the pub feels as if it might be in London, and the conversations around us had Home Counties accents, the beer is Bristolian all the way.

A very pleasant barman served us cask Beer Factory Everytime (cask) in a dimpled mug (a key signifier of a posh pub these days) and a half of Wiper & True Espresso Martini coffee stout. This round came to £6.75 – which, by 2025 standards, isn’t bad value either.

Having taken against it on a previous visit – we can’t quite remember why – this made us think we ought to visit more often, if only to eavesdrop on the entertaining conversations of people in mustard-coloured beanie hats.

Samosa intermission

After two rounds we needed a snack and so detoured to Jeevan Sweets on Stapleton Road, where a sign prohibits the consumption of alcohol or tobacco.

We ordered two samosas (£1 each) and a single piece of mango barfi (75p) and ate them as we wandered towards our next pub.

“I had my first samosa when I was six,” said Jess with her mouth full. “It changed my life.”

“The first time I came to stay with you in London you couldn’t wait to buy me a samosa from Pete’s Fish Bar.”

The samosa is superior boozing food. Starchy, crunchy, and only mildly spicy, it lines the stomach without knackering the palate. Pubs should sell them as a matter of course.

The interior of a bare, fairly basic pub with white walls.
The Sugar Loaf

A classic big light pub

Last time we went to The Sugar Loaf it was struggling and felt more like a youth club than a pub.

We weren’t surprised when it closed for a while and have been following the story of its resurrection under new management for a while.

Again, first impressions were good. It felt brighter, cleaner and more friendly, while retaining a down-to-earth East Bristol atmosphere.

We both ordered Timothy Taylor Landlord which, along with Wye Valley Butty Bach, is a permanent part of the offer. It was excellent, making three great pints of cask ale in a row, in pubs that we haven’t particularly noticed cask heads enthusing about.

A couple of years ago Steve ‘Carsmile’ Hewitt used the phrase ‘big light pub’ to describe the typical Sheffield boozer. It could definitely apply to The Sugar Loaf, too, where there aren’t many shadows to hide in.

We listened to a conversation in Spanish from one side and the click of pool balls from the other. Every now and then we’d catch a whiff of weed from somebody passing by. Three skateboarders wandered in, wandered round, and wandered out.

“If the Whitehall is more your kind of pub,” said Jess, “and this is more mine.” (Context.)

Punk’s not dead

Finally, with some trepidation, we made our way to The Chelsea Inn. Not because it’s a particularly scary pub but because when we last visited we got the distinct feeling we were too square to be there.

It’s not all about us or how comfortable we feel, after all, but how comfortable other people might feel with us standing there in the corner looking like a pair of geography teachers, or council inspectors.

The first thing we noticed when we arrived at the door was a sign saying that, while dogs are welcome, they have to be out by 7pm because after that time the pub just becomes too loud for them.

We walked in to find half the space given over to a drum kit and various amplifiers. Around the bar were crowded people in leather jackets, denim, and army surplus. There were studs, chains, piercings and tattoos everywhere. Most of the hair was white, grey, pink or purple.

There was also a small child in ear defenders running around in their pyjamas in a state of extreme excitement. They were high-fived by the regulars, hoisted in the air by a barman, and generally treated like royalty.

We were delighted to see that the cask ale on offer was from Ashley Down Brewery, a tiny outfit run by Vince Crocker, former co-landlord of The Drapers Arms.

He’s a slightly reclusive figure, Vince, better at brewing than schmoozing, but he seems to have a fond status as the Gandalf of Bristol brewing.

As a result, his beer turns up in all sorts of unexpected places, with its handmade wooden pump clips bearing the slogan “Nice with crisps.”

This particular beer, Red Stoat, was rather marvellous: as round and rich as Fuller’s ESB but with more pine and spice.

For those counting, that’s four great pints of cask in four pubs on a single evening – full house!

While the band finished setting up, the child in pyjamas had a go on the drum kit, with the encouragement of the crowd. They weren’t half bad, either.

We slipped out just as the music began in earnest, leaving the punks to their anarchy.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 11 January 2025: The Cat Creeps

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time we’ve got thistle glasses, more Kölsch, and an accidental cult beer.

For a generation of British craft beer drinkers, this news carries some emotional resonance: Magic Rock Brewing is appointing administrators.

It’s a brewery you could use to tell the whole story of the UK craft beer boom: family money, a talented brewer; launching at just the right time to attract a new breed of beer drinker; then, a buy-out by big beer, followed by divestment once the brand had lost a decade’s goodwill.

Breweries come and go. They rise and fall. You’re allowed to feel sad but, in this case, the magic really went a long time ago. For us, it will certainly make re-reading our book Brew Britannia bittersweet.


Koelsch barrels on a serving counter in a Cologne beer hall.

Katie Mather has dropped part 2 of her report on a trip to Cologne and it’s as joyful, and envy-inducing, as the first part:

Brauhaus Päffgen is such a great place that I just got emotional thinking about it. An historic brewery beloved by hardcore Kölsch nerds, of course the beer is good, but the place itself is perfection. We sat on a wooden bench and ate delicious pumpkin soup, bread, cheese and mustard, and Tom ordered a single gherkin jsut because it was on the menu. The wooden-beamed dining hall was welcoming and haunted at the same time, flanked by windowed partitions and a “confessional” — the strange but efficient booth where the maitre d’/Oberkellner took telephone bookings on a rotary phone, controlled the lighting from a central switchboard, and thrust tickets and receipts onto a steel spike at the side of her desk.


An illustration of a glass of stout in front of a burial mound.
SOURCE: Pellicle/Mark Hill.

An article by Eoghan Walsh, one of our favourite writers, at Pellicle, one of our favourite publications? That went into the bookmarks folder for this round up before we’d even read it. It’s about a cult Irish beer, O’Hara’s Leann Folláin extra Irish stout, and the circumstances that led to its creation:

2008 was an important year for Seamus and the Carlow Brewing Company. It was 12 years since he’d co-founded the brewery with his brother, and 10 since they’d started selling beer from an old goods shed beside Carlow town train station. They’d had a solid decade of export-led growth, and with local interest finally starting to catch up, O’Hara was eyeing up a move to a larger site in nearby Bagenalstown… It was, Seamus says, an “inflection point”—for them and for Irish brewing too. O’Hara’s, together with Porterhouse and Dublin Brewing Company, had all launched in the mid 1990s into what Seamus describes as a “one-dimensional” Irish beer market lacking in adventurous or creative beers. In the mid-2000s they were joined by a new generation of breweries prompted by changes to excise rules that favoured small producers, and Irish drinkers were becoming (a little) more adventurous.


A thistle-shaped glass with a bulbous bottom and fluted top.
SOURCE: Finest Beer Shop/Martin Brewers.

One of Kevin Kain’s special areas of interest is glassware – something that doesn’t often attract forensic attention. This time he’s been asking when and why the ‘thistle glass’ came to associated with Scottish beer, at least from a US perspective:

The popularity led an English importer in Antwerp to create his own brand for the Belgian market. This brand, Gordon’s Highland Scotch Ale, was originally brewed by George Younger & Son in Alloa, Scotland (after changing hands many times, it is now actually brewed in Belgium). Their branded thistle glasses go hand in hand with the beer, now sold as Gordon Scotch Ale. They also often have a special Christmas edition thistle glass for their Xmas beer… So where did we get the notion that the thistle glass was somehow an important part of Scottish beer culture? The Gordon glass may have played a role. However, the 1993 book, Scotch Ale, by Greg Noonan likely had a significant impact, at least in the United States. The cover prominently features a beer in a thistle glass.


A can of BrewDog Wingman IPA with a bird wearing a pilot's helmet.
SOURCE: BrewDog.

In a post reviewing BrewDog’s Wingman Session IPA The Beer Nut says a lot in a 300 words, and much that we agree with:

BrewDog does still be Brewdogging. Whenever the discourse turns in their direction, there’s always someone saying “yer, and thur beer is shit now too,” but in my experience it’s not, and never has been (unless you got one of those Punk cans). This beer is fine, leaning to good, but most importantly is what it’s meant to be. I have no objection to it being on the market and can see it being the best available option in any number of circumstances. Now there’s a slogan for them.


A large country pub surrounded by snowy hills.
SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons/Geograph/Matthew Hatton, under CC BY-SA 2.0.

This piece by Robyn Vinter about being snowed in at The Tan Hill Inn is a great read, including the fascinating detail that some people head there hoping for an extended stopover:

On Saturday night at the Tan Hill Inn, Britain’s highest pub, the snow is falling and the crowd of about 30 people inside know they are probably stuck here for a couple of days. Throughout the place, at the northern edge of North Yorkshire, drinks are flowing and friends are being made… Weather warnings for snow are in place across much of the UK, and the Met Office has advised the public to only make necessary journeys, with road closures, train and flight cancellations, and rural communities becoming cut off… That is something the staff at the Tan Hill Inn, which is 528 metres (1,732ft) above sea level, are used to. The pub has a history of what people call “snow-ins” – in 2021, 61 punters who had come to watch an Oasis tribute band were trapped for three days.


Finally, from BlueSky, a very desirable drinking vessel…

It's not incredibly rare, but I picked up this nice ceramic tankard recently. Made by Coceram (like Orval, a Belgian company) and I'm not sure of the date – 60s-80s maybe? I love the shape and especially the handle, and curiously, it holds exactly one imperial pint! …

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— IrishBeerHistory (@beerfoodtravel.bsky.social) January 8, 2025 at 7:57 PM

For more good reading check out Stan Hieronymus’s round-up from Monday and Alan McLeod’s from Thursday.

Categories
pubs

Stats on our Bristol pub visits in 2024

We’ve continued to log our Bristol pub visits and as we tick over into a new year it’s a good time to share some stats and further thoughts.

We also wrote a version of this post last year and similar caveats apply:

  • Our spreadsheet only captures visits to Bristol pubs, not pubs anywhere else.
  • We continued to neglect logging of tap rooms.
  • We only count joint visits to pubs; several pubs would be higher on this list if we counted solo visits.

It’s also worth saying that it’s entirely possible we’ve missed some visits, particularly to our regular haunts which we might take for granted.

When we’re out for a crawl we usually remember to log them but when we’re popping in on the way home, maybe not.

However, as with last year, we’re happy that the numbers reflect the overall pattern of our visits. And anyway, we’re not the Office for National Statistics.

The big numbers

In total during 2024 we logged 111 pub visits in Bristol, across 50 different pubs.

This compares to 125 visits across 54 pubs last year. 

Also down this year was the number of new Bristol pubs visited for our ‘Every Pub in Bristol’ mission. We only managed 10 in 2024.

Perhaps it’s natural to expect that this number will keep diminishing as those that are left to tick are further out and harder to get to.

It’s also been a tough year personally so we’ve favoured a certain amount of familiarity, and had less time for expeditions

The pubs we visited most

Like last year The Barley Mow, The Swan with Two Necks and The King’s Head were our most visited pubs, making up 39 visits between them.

That compares to 29 last year, backing up the point above about seeking familiarity.

They’re also all a handy 20-25 minutes walk from our house.

We were both surprised to see The Barley Mow had pipped The Swan this time round, though, because we’re fonder of The Swan these days.

We think that reflects The Barley’s Mow’s convenient location on the way home from the central train station, and from the centre of town. The Swan usually takes us a little out of our way.

Our next biggest hitters are also localish.

We visited the newly reopened Crown Tavern 5 times and suspect it might be more next year, especially given its enticing Bass Club, and its proximity to The Swan.

We shouted out The Langton in our top 5 Bristol pints post at the start of last year and it continues to be a friendly local serving a wide range of customers and tastes.

Then after that, there’s nowhere we’ve visited more than three times, including a lot of our supposed favourites.

This is partly because we have been trying to spread the love a little, and revisit some pubs that have changed hands or changed their offer.

Particularly happy rediscoveries this year were The Nova Scotia, The Bridge Inn and The Duke of York, all of which made our updated 2025 Bristol Pub Guide.

How we did on our resolutions

We managed to visit all the pubs listed in our 2024 Bristol pub guide and all those that we were considering for inclusion in 2025.

However, we failed to log taprooms consistently, which means that we’re missing probably 30-40 drinking sessions from this list, as we do go to Lost and Grounded most Friday evenings.

And as for Every Pub In Bristol, well, perhaps we’ll be realistic and stop saying that we’re going to finish the full set this year..

Instead, we’ll just aim to visit more new Bristol pubs in 2025 than we did in 2024. If we manage 11, taking us to 321 in total, with about 25 to go, that’ll be a win.

Categories
bristol pubs

Best pubs in Bristol in 2025: our guide on where to drink

Bristol has a huge number of pubs and a decent number of breweries. If you’re in town for a few days or hours, where should you go to drink?

We’re asked for advice on this all the time and in 2018 decided that, rather than keep typing up the advice in emails and DMs, we’d give it a permanent home.

We aim to update this post at least once a year and this most recent update is from 5 January 2025.

If you’re reading this later in the year, some of the pubs we recommend might have changed or closed.

We haven’t been to every pub in Bristol, although we’re not far off, having been to 310.

We’ve visited most of those in the city centre, and most several times.

In general, Bristol pubs are pretty easy to find, on main roads rather than backstreets.

They’re also fairly easy to read: chain pubs look like chain pubs, craft beer bars look like craft beer bars, and so on.

So, you won’t go too far wrong following your instincts.

There are some hidden gems in the suburbs and up side streets, though, so do explore.

And if you want to keep things loose there are some decent crawls with varied and interesting pubs:

  • St Michael’s Hill – Zero Degrees, The Open Arms, The Robin Hood, The White Bear (sometimes), Beerd, The Highbury Vaults.
  • Gloucester Road – start at The Inn on the Green at the top, drop into The Crafty Cow, The Wellington, The Drapers Arms, and then keep going until you’re done, or you arrive in town. Or vice versa.
  • Kingsdown – The Hare on the Hill, The Hillgrove Porter Stores, The Kingsdown Vaults, The Green Man, The Highbury Vaults.
  • King Street – Small Bar, The Royal Naval Volunteer, The Beer Emporium, Llandoger Trow, The Old Duke (jazz and cask ale), among others.
  • Bedminster – there are a lot of pubs in Bedminster, from very down-to-earth to super-crafty. Standouts are Lupe (formerly The Old Bookshop), Alpha Bottle Shop & Tap, and the Bristol Beer Factory taproom.
  • St Judes – The Crown (Bass, Cheddar Ales), The Swan With Two Necks (see below), The Volunteer, The Phoenix.

Before we get down to business we must once again thank Patreon supporters like Mark Landells, Andrew Drinkwater and Simon Branscombe whose ongoing support justifies us spending time putting this together, including on-the-ground reserach. If you find this post useful please do consider signing up or at least buying us a pint via Ko-Fi.

Categories
News

News, nuggets and longreads 4 January 2025: New Year’s Evil

Every Saturday we round up good writing about beer from the past week. Here’s the first for 2025, with landladies, pork pies and Golden Pints.

First, a set of stats, released annually, that we find helpful in gauging what’s up with the state of beer in the UK: how many London breweries are there? And how many pubs and bars are there worth including in a guide to drinking in London? These are now compiled by Stephen Jackson, who took over stewardship of Beer Guide London when founder Jezza moved to Belgium. The headlines are:

  • “2024 started with 108 London breweries on our list and the year ends with 103, a decrease of 5 over the year. This is the smallest net decrease for a number of years…”
  • “2024 started with 315 Guide entries… and we end the year with 291 entries, a reduction of 24…. Of the deletions the bulk (25) came about following an editorial decision to remove all BrewDog bars and all Laine Brew Co bars…”

Drawing: a pub bar.

Just before Christmas The Standard published a piece by Millie Milliken profiling six female publicans from across London:

A black eye, an armed robbery, a run-in with British acting royalty: Natasha Purdom’s 25-year career working behind pub bars has been colourful to say the least. Her first pub job was at The Flower Pot in her hometown in Bedford. She remembers being in awe of landlady Kathy: “She was a strong woman, the driver of the business… Whenever she worked a Saturday night, she was always dressed up: she put on her makeup and clothes and her job was to engage with the customers – I liked the glamour of it.”


A neon sign advertising Suenner Koelsch at a beer hall in Cologne.

Katie Mather has been in Cologne and her write up is a joy both in terms of the writing (she’s cut loose a bit here) and the pleasure at experiencing new things and places she conveys:

It’s illegal, or at least impossible as far as we could work out, to park a van in the centre of Cologne, so I booked a very cheap hotel for two nights. This was actually an amazing idea and a stroke of genius too, because Mühlen Kölsch ended up being right around the corner… This being our first Kölsch in Cologne, we were excited to be ushered to a tall drinking table in the heart of the building. The building itself is an historic brewery hall, dating from 1858. To get in you must navigate a heavy revolving wooden door and then push yourself through an equally heavy velvet curtain, adding a definite feeling of pizzazz to the dining room you enter into. As most people in there have been seated and enjoying a peaceful meal until you arrived, they probably won’t enjoy your squeals of delight at being shoved through into what is essentially German Narnia.


A row of colourful houses in a Bavarian town.

When Ferment went behind a paywall we lost access to some good writing, and good writers, so we were pleased to see that Charlotte Cook has shared something she wrote for them about Zoigl on her own personal Substack:

In the Upper Palatinate of Bavaria, nestled in a hilly landscape of broadleaf forests and gently peregrinating rivers – very close to the Czech border – there are a handful of small towns that have a unique brewing culture. After brewing rights were bestowed on these towns in the 15th century they established communal brewhouses, and a tradition of serving beer from the homes of the brewers, which has remained largely unchanged ever since… This style of brewing used to be fairly common across Europe, in England women would serve beer from their homes, but this gradually died out, with permanent inns and taverns replacing the temporary domestic openings. In these Zoigl towns, however, you can still turn up to a strangers house, sit in his living room, and for the very reasonable price of €2,40 per beer, have as many pints as you care to imbibe, often with the whole family chipping in to serve beer and small snacks.


The meat raffle at The Furnace Inn. SOURCE: Jane Stuart.

Jane Stuart has kicked off 2025 as she means to go on: with a pub crawl and a beer festival, this time in Derby. This description made us want to get on a train:

Now I visited the Furnace almost ten years ago and it has stuck in my mind because, on that visit, I enjoyed the Best Pork Pie Ever. I don’t actually like pies, least of all pork pies. But this one was outstanding… I was dismayed to learn that they had sold out and were awaiting their next delivery from Barry Fitch Butchers in Little Eaton… Pie famine notwithstanding, this was an epic pub – not least because of our incredibly knowledgeable hostess. I smiled to myself as the three women enthused about various beers and I trotted off to take some pics of the interior.


A vintage illustration of a beer glass and beer bottle with the text Golden Pints 2024.

We were pleased to see quite a few ‘golden pints’ posts around – as well as some ‘definitely not golden pints’ which do the same job. Here are those we’ve spotted:


Finally, from BlueSky, a reminder…

Not all good pints are about the beer. Pint of Madri in a plastic cup 1.34 miles out to sea on Southend Pier last year. The donuts were bangin’, and we sipped our pints watching locals fish off the end of the pier.

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— Bramling Ross (@rossisdead.bsky.social) January 2, 2025 at 8:55 AM

For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round-up from Thursday.