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Two years, two hundred pubs

We’ve now been in Bristol for two years and have logged every single official Pub Visit since arriving.

We started doing this mostly to remind ourselves where we’d been for the sake of #EveryPubInBristol, but also decided to log subsequent visits to each pub, providing us with an interesting data set revealing our habits and favourites.

Our definition of a Pub Visit for this purpose is that it has to be a pub, both of us have to be there, and at least one of us has to have an alcoholic drink.

(We’ll return to the subject of what makes a pub in a separate blog post, as this exercise has given us a real impetus to define it better.)

We have chosen to define Bristol as the unitary authority of Bristol, plus any bits that join up to it without a break. So the pubs of Kingswood and Filton (technically South Gloucestershire) are in, whereas the wonderful Angel Inn at Long Ashton isn’t because there is, for now, at least one open field in between the village and the ever-increasing spread of South Bristol.

Overall stats

We have logged 516 pub visits in total.

Almost 30% of these were to our local, The Drapers Arms.

We have visited 216 different pubs.

Our pace of visiting new pubs has slowed: we went to our first 100 in six months; our second 100 took a year; and we’ve only added 16 in the last six months.

This is partly because of geography – the pubs we haven’t yet visited are harder to get to and more spread out – but also because we’ve come across so many pubs that we like and want to revisit, rather than ticking new ones.

Here’s a list of all the pubs we’ve visited more than once.

Drapers Arms | 150
Wellington Arms | 16
Highbury Vaults | 16
Barley Mow | 15
Zero Degrees | 14
Brewdog | 13
Small Bar | 11
Inn On The Green | 10
Grain Barge | 10
Hillgrove Porter Stores | 9
The Old Fish Market | 7
Bottles And Books | 7
Merchants Arms | 6
The Volunteer Tavern | 6
The Orchard | 6
The Annexe | 6
The Bank | 5
Bristol Flyer | 4
Strawberry Thief | 4
The Good Measure | 4
Golden Lion | 3
Royal Oak | 3
Commercial Rooms | 3
The Canteen (Hamilton House) | 3
The Old Duke | 3
Snuffy Jacks | 3
Hobgoblin | 3
The Hare / The Leveret Cask House | 3
Colston Arms | 3
The Grace | 3
The Victoria | 3
Christmas Steps | 3
Corner 33 | 3
The Cottage Inn | 2
Nova Scotia | 2
The Bridge | 2
Pump House | 2
Mardyke | 2
Hare On The Hill | 2
White Lion | 2
Robin Hood | 2
The White Bear | 2
Beerd | 2
The Sidings | 2
Gloucester Road Ale House | 2
Kingsdown Vaults | 2
The Knights Templar (Spoons) | 2
The V Shed | 2
The Royal Naval Volunteer | 2
Bristol Brewery Tap | 2
St George’s Hall | 2
The Gryphon | 2
The Greenbank Tavern | 2
The Oxford | 2

Are they really your top pubs?

Mostly, yes.

Our top 10 includes two pubs that are there simply because they are close to our house – The Wellington and The Inn on the Green.

The Wellington scored particularly highly during last summer’s heatwave, because it has Sulis, Korev and reliable Prophecy. The others are all clear favourites of ours and appear in our guide to the best pubs in Bristol.

Porter
A pint of porter at The Good Measure.
If you’ve visited more than once, does that mean it’s good?

Not always. We’ve had one accidental second visit, to St George’s Hall, a soon-to-be-closing Wetherspoons, having forgotten we’d already been.

Sometimes a second visit might be to check out a change in ownership or offer.

It might also reflect convenience. The Knights Templar, AKA Hellspoons, is right by Temple Meads station and so a convenient stop before catching a train. Now the bridge to The Barley Mow has reopened, and The Sidings has decent Harvey’s Sussex Best, we don’t expect to need to go there again.

But three or more visits and it’s probably safe to say we like it. (Although we’ve fallen out with the Hare in Bedminster now it’s the Leveret Cask House.)

Not quite science

Of course the keeping of this information distorts our behaviour from time to time.

If we’ve got a choice between two pubs, we’ll sometimes pick the one we think ‘deserves’ to be higher up the rankings. And we occasionally give a pub a swerve because it feels as if it’s coming higher up the charts than it ought to.

It’s still an expression of preference but… Well, it’s complicated.

Wishful thinking

There are certainly some pubs that would be higher up the list if they were easier for us to get to.

The thing is, your local is your local. Part of the magic of pubs like The Oxford in Totterdown or The Plough at Easton is that they reflect and serve the communities they’re in.

We’ll drop in if we’re in the area, and sometimes daydream about how nice it would be if we did live nearby, but it would be daft for us to schlep across town to go there every week because… We’ve got a local. One that’s, you know, local.

We wouldn’t necessarily expect these pubs to creep up the rankings in the next year, even though they are excellent.

Pubs such as The Good Measure, on the other hand, probably will, because they offer something distinct we can’t get close to home.

(And in that particular case, it’s reasonably handy for the Highbury Vaults so makes a good end to a St Michael’s Hill crawl).

Some thoughts on Bristol pubs

In general, Bristol pubs are good.

They tend to be friendly, even if they don’t always look it.

They’re extremely varied – hippy hangouts, old boys boozers, gastropubs, craft beer exhibitions, backstreet gems, family hangouts, and so on.

They mostly have real ale, even those that might not if they were in any other city. We reckon we’ve counted three (four if you think BrewDog is a pub) that didn’t have anything at all on offer.

They’re loyal to local beer, even if there’s no single dominant historic city brewery.

Your chances of finding Bass, Courage Best, Butcombe or some other classic bitter are very high. The likelihood of finding mild is almost zero. Hoppy beers tend to be hazy, soft and sweet. (Not that we’re grumbling but we do sometimes crave paler, drier beers of the northern variety.)

And we’re still finding good pubs: we only visited The Annexe for the first time late last year; The Coronation in Bedminster we discovered for the first time a couple of months back. No doubt in the final hundred or so there will be a few more crackers.

We’re not as scientific about cataloguing pub openings and closures as the local CAMRA team in the excellent Pints West magazine but our feeling is that pubs are not closing as fast as they were and that more pubs or other drinking establishments are emerging.

Unsurprisingly, reflecting national trends, pubs are more at risk in poorer areas, and are (re) opening in wealthier or ‘up and coming’ parts of the city.

Final thoughts

This has made us think hard about what makes pubs attractive to us – although granted, we’re not necessarily typical customers.

Yes, it’s important for pubs to have a unique selling point to stand out (that’s the pub with the heavy metal, or eight types of cider, or amazing cheese rolls) but, when it comes down to it, our drinking habits are primarily influenced by convenience.

We suspect that’s fairly universal.

2 replies on “Two years, two hundred pubs”

I have been keeping a similar record of pub visits (see here http://forums.pubsgalore.co.uk/showthread.php?26993-New-pub-visits-2018/page17 for a summary of 2018); before anyone comments on how many there have been, let me just say that most of them (380 out of 753) have been for the purpose of having a swift half and writing a review for Pubs Galore. My spreadsheet is not limited to pub visits where I live (just 284 out of 753) but my top ten most frequently visited were nearly all in Sheffield, with an outlier in Leeds (where I go to watch Leeds Rhinos). The most frequently visited is on Sheffield station because of all my trips away, but the close second is the one that is closest to my house: so no surprises there. So far this year 405 pub visits, again with just over 50% one-offs, with a top ten featuring nine Sheffield pubs and once again the Scarbrough Hotel in Leeds.

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