Searching for pubs in strange towns

How do you find a pub via Google that is most likely to meet your specific requirements, in a particular moment?

We were roaming around South East London over the weekend, an area that neither of us know very well, for somewhat psychogeographical reasons. After a few hours, some of it in surprising September sunshine, we decided it was time for a pint.

Ray got out his phone and instinctively Googled “micropub near me”. I thought this was an interesting approach but not one that I usually take.

On the way to the most promising option from his search results, we discussed this.

When Ray is looking for a pub, he says, he wants something that (a) has good beer and (b) is characterful and not corporate.

And these days, in his mind, a micropub is likely to deliver that.

I agree on (a) but not necessarily on (b). I want to be able to relax and enjoy my beer and the difficulty with “characterful” is that it can mean different things.

Maybe it will be the friendliest local you’ve ever been in. Or perhaps it’ll be a weird dump full of silent, glowering men.

Micropubs in particular run the whole gamut of the pub experience and the term increasingly covers a range of different establishments.

We’ve written about them a lot over the years, including in 20th Century Pub, in this blog post from last year about the Dodo, and in this long piece about beer culture from earlier this year. 

Our theory is that there can be, and probably is, a micropub for everyone.

That doesn’t necessarily help you if you are in a specific place looking for somewhere to drink.

Usually reading a few reviews then helps to narrow it down (we wrote about this ages ago) and gives a reasonable idea of what you might be walking into. But it’s fair to say my appetite for risk in this game is lower than Ray’s.

It made me reflect on how I usually look for pubs if I’m on my own.

My usual approach is to Google specifically the name of a regional brewer, such as St Austell in Cornwall. I’ll then go to one of their houses. And more often than not it will be quite bland and corporate.

But if I’m on my own, I prioritise beer quality and safety over the risk-reward gamble of a characterful pub.

As we were together, we did a bit of both this weekend. Through Ray’s approach we discovered the excellent Plum Tree Beer Shop in Plumstead. (It’s not obscure, the local CAMRA lot love it.)

My approach, on the other hand, took us to some cute backstreet Fuller’s pubs in the Hammersmith area. They all had excellent London Pride and felt like hidden gems.

On Monday, we decided to try a third approach – one that we tend to resist. That is, buying a guide book and taking someone else’s recommendation.

The latest edition of Des De Moor’s Londons Best Beer Pubs and Bars directed us to a pub not so far from my dad’s house in East London.

Would we have found The Angel of Bow on our own? Maybe, eventually, but Des’s write-up convinced us to go out of our way on the way home after work.

And we found a quirky pub with an excellent selection of beers on cask, keg and in bottles.

The kind of range, in fact, that would have sent us half across London a decade or so ago.