If your demise was scheduled and you had time to make visits to three pubs, which would they be?
This was the ridiculous high-stakes thought exercise we conducted on our return visit to The Barrels in Hereford on Saturday night.
It was prompted by our wondering whether The Barrels might be (Martin Taylor style) a top 100 pub. Or maybe even top ten.
Why three? Because it’s impossible – but it does help you make tough decisions.
In the past, we’ve played a similar game with Beatles songs: if you can only keep 10, and the rest get wiped forever, which are they? (We’ll share our respective lists on Patreon, for those who are interested.)
The temporal question
The big question when it comes to choosing three pubs is whether you can travel in time.
We immediately began talking about The Nags Head in Walthamstow c.2007, The Star Inn at Crowlas near Penzance c.2014, and The Blue Ball at Worrall, near Sheffield, in the run up to Christmas.
Ray wondered about The Artillery Inn, Exeter, c.1982, when his parents ran it, his dad was in his prime, and Ray’s only worry was whether he might get that X-Wing fighter for Christmas.
We say, if you’re having a go at this yourself, feel free to range about the space time continuum – but that is probably a slightly different question.
Roam if you want to
The next question is what we mean by ‘pub’ and whether we’re just thinking of the UK, or even England.
Every Saturday we share our favourite beer-related reading from the past week. This time we’ve got Kellerbier, booze-free beer, and pub renovations.
First, more stats on the health of the hospitality trade in the closing weeks of 2024, via CGA: pubs in particular saw a 4.7% growth in sales compared to the same period in 2023. Bars also saw growth, but less significant at only 1.3%. That says something interesting, doesn’t it, about consumer preferences?
A Bier Keller.
At Craft Beer & Brewing editor Joe Stange has given himself space to explore one of his own obsessions: German Kellerbier. The article starts with a warning about the depth of this rabbit hole, then takes us way down into it:
In 1807, Joachim Heinrich Campe wrote what’s considered one of the most important German dictionaries of his era. It includes a definition for kellerbier (my translation): “beer that’s offered at a public keller and fetched from there, as opposed to bottled beer that’s kept in one’s own cellar.”… In its most essential form, kellerbier is simply beer from the keller… By tradition, it was the freshest beer you could get, right at the spot where it lagered in those tunnels. That tradition continues, in a way: While some German breweries still occasionally pour beer from a lined, spigoted barrel known as a Stichfass or Holzfass, that practice is entrenched in Franconia – even if, these days, they typically fill those barrels with finished beer from the lagering tanks… While you can find “kellerbier” almost anywhere in Germany, it’s usually a bottled, unfiltered version of a brewery’s flagship lager. Outside Franconia, “keller” became code for unfiltered or slightly cloudy.
It’s quite tough trying to reboot your career from the bottom when you’re nearly 40. I’ve worked in pubs before 2023, of course but if you’d asked me what my actual job was I would’ve told you I was a journalist. I might’ve even tried to claim that until this summer. I was still doing bits, after all. Getting flown to Abu Dhabi to interview autonomous race cars and that sort of thing… I’d been fairly happy to climb the Spoons ladder for a bit, except that no one was offering me a rung. So when a different pub company came calling, via a very good friend who recommended me to them, I didn’t feel too bad about sneaking off to a pre-shift interview… It’s not gonna be like working for Spoons, they pointed out. You have to run your own business. You’re a publican not just a manager. Made me a bit nervous, if I’m honest.
All alcoholic drinks in the UK are subject to duty. This is payable by the manufacturer per litre of alcohol produced, in accordance with the changes to duty introduced by the previous Conservative government in August 2023. As part of the update to these regulations all produced beverages rated at 1.2 per cent alcohol or lower were declared exempt from duty. In many instances there is little difference in retail price between modern alcoholic and non-alcoholic options, so producers are able to claw back larger margins on these products… This could be a reason why the category has seen so many new entrants over the past 18 months, and why so many small breweries are adding no and low beers to their existing portfolios. Just this month both Cornwall’s St Austell and Derbyshire’s Thornbridge have introduced 0.5 per cent alcohol versions of their respective flagship brands: Proper Job and Jaipur. Meanwhile Manchester’s Cloudwater brewery recently informed me that its Fresh AF 0.5 per cent IPA was one of its best-selling beers of 2024.
Wax & Taps, Barnoldswick. SOURCE: Scott Spencer.
Scott Spencer from Micropub Adventures has been exploring again, this time in Skipton and Barnoldswick in North Yorkshire. And, once again, it makes us want to get on a train immediately. It also contains an interesting bit of trend spotting:
A quick walk brings me to my next visit. Wax and Taps is a cool record bar in Barnoldswick that mixes vinyl records with craft beer. It’s become a hit with both music lovers and locals, offering a chill spot to enjoy great tunes and a beer. This place is part of a growing trend where music and social drinking come together… Inside, the layout is pretty neat, with one side showcasing a collection of vinyl records, while the other side features a cosy seating area with wooden tables and benches that really set the vibe. The wooden bar in the corner catches your eye as soon as you walk in. Some great street food to match.
Let’s wrap up by visiting a couple of pubs. The first is in Dublin where Lisa Grimm is our guide:
Sometimes, just sometimes, a fantastic new(ish) pub pops up where you least expect it. Dublin’s Talbot Street has had a lot of publicity for the wrong reasons over the past few years, and it’s true that it’s neither the tidiest nor most well-kept part of town, despite a goodly number of lovely Georgian and Victorian buildings, often hidden under layers of plastic hoardings. Indeed, until quite recently, the mid-19th century building that houses The Morris Bar was trading as a barber shop/cafe and, before that, a cash-and-carry… but its current incarnation has returned it to its c. 1920s glory.
I can tell you exactly when I last visited the 8JB, as the Kidz would call it if they weren’t all in Spoons… 16 April 2005, heading to see Cambridge United relegated from the Football League, a not-quite 5 year old James dragged along, though we had stopped at Sundown Adventure Land first… Had it changed at all in 20 years?… Nope… Opening hours had become more unreliable, and it had just unexpectedly dropped out of the GBG for the first time since Canute rode a White Horse to Gainsborough Hall to defeat Sweyn Forkbeard on penalties in the LDV Trophy…
In that piece, researched and written in 2016, we said that the term gastropub had essentially died in 2011 when The Good Food Guide stopped using it because it no longer felt like a special category.
But no sooner was 20th Century Pub published than we began to notice a change in the market.
The success of the gastropub, both as a business model and as a buzzword, took it into the mainstream. By the late noughties, received wisdom across much of the pub industry was that you needed to offer food to survive and the wet-led pub was on the way out… Wetherspoon pubs, with their vast menus and low prices, further normalised the expectation that a pub would have food available if you wanted it… We’d argue this has reversed somewhat in the past decade. Between micropubs and taprooms, new wet-led enterprises have opened in most towns and cities in England, and are often go-to destinations.
There were also stories of pubs closing their kitchens, reducing their food offer to simple snacks, reducing the hours of food service, or farming out the work to pop-ups and food trucks.
Now, in 2025, if we think of our favourite Bristol pubs, hardly any of them serve food, and when they do it’s not ‘pub grub’ but pizzas, burgers, dumplings, noodles…
You might think, great! Those things are all better than microwaved lasagna and Brake’s Brothers steak and ale pie.
But part of the appeal of pub grub was its simplicity and variety. A party of six could go to the pub and between them eat fish and chips, linguini, a big salad, a burger, a pie, and bangers and mash.
That’s exactly the menu our acquaintance was after when they asked for a recommendation the other night.
Like many people not obsessed with pubs and the pub trade, they hadn’t noticed the change, and just assumed pub grub would still be there when they needed it.
It’s interesting how often we find ourselves in pubs that no longer serve food and hear people ask at the bar: “Is the kitchen open?” They haven’t updated their mental model from before the pandemic.
Trying to answer the question we’d been asked, we debated The Barley Mow a bit – it does have food, but when is it served? We couldn’t find this out online and nobody wanted to phone to ask.
In the end, we suggested a 10-minute walk into town where The Old Fish Market, a rather corporate Fuller’s pub, is still selling the 1990s gastropub dream.
Our correspondent was very happy with apparently excellent crispy pork belly and roasted vegetables.
That’s it, we suppose – pub grub has become the preserve of chains who can still squeeze profit out of it through centralised supply chains and carefully costed menus.
This is perhaps also why the Fuller’s and Young’s pound chains did so well over the Christmas period: they provide food when people most want it.
On a more positive note, we have observed a resurgence in the availability of clingfilm-wrapped cheese and onion rolls, pies, pasties and scotch eggs.
That includes at The Kings Head, one of our favourite Bristol pubs, whose beer offer skews hip and crafty.
Snacks like that might not satisfy those in search of a hearty three-course meal but they’re certainly welcome when, otherwise, you’d have to abandon a cosy spot, and ale on good form, to find something to eat.
Like-for-like sales at pub company Fuller’s for the 41 weeks to 11th January were up 5.9%… These figures include excellent trading over the important five-week Christmas and New Year period, said the company. This delivered like-for-like sales growth of 10.2%.
What does this tell us? That corporate chain venues are perhaps outperforming independents, perhaps. And why might that be? Based on the Fuller’s pub here in Bristol, it’s certainly not because they’re cheap. Maybe because of reliability, familiarity, space and scale.
If Roosters was built on the back of Sean Franklin’s legacy, then it was Baby Faced Assassin that ushered in the beginning of the Fozard era. When it comes to that legacy there’s a definite sense of stewardship, which is why you’ll always find Yankee on the hand pulls in the taproom, and on the bar at pubs across Yorkshire… But there’s also a sense that – in terms of identity – it’s something of a burden, perhaps aggravated by [Tom Fozard’s] inherently creative instincts and desire to do things his own way. Roosters was never going to be a blank canvas for the Fozards, but Baby Faced Assassin, at least, gave them a fresh set of paintbrushes with which to depict the brewery’s influence on beer and brewing in the United Kingdom.
(Also, Matt’s written sources for this article are excellent. Ahem.)
SOURCE: Scott Spencer/Micropub Adventures.
Scott Spencer has been exploring Peterborough, a city that we’ve never visited, for Micropub Adventures:
The Bumble Inn… is recognized as Peterborough’s first micropub, opening up in June 2016 after transforming from an old chemist shop. The place was brought to life by Tom Beran and his wife, Michelle. Before diving into the micropub scene, Tom spent a decade running the Coalheavers Arms Pub in Peterborough. His goal with The Bumble Inn was to create a unique experience, prioritizing quality over quantity and offering a rotating selection of beers from both local and national breweries… Tom gave me an awesome warm welcome, and it was really nice chatting with him and a few regulars…
This glass is a wonderful piece of workmanship that no photo will do justice to. It is made from quality glass that approaches lead crystal in colour, quality and sound, and appears to be mould-blown or similarly formed before the eight facets were cut and polished by hand to form an octagonal-shaped lower section around an extra thick base, with the bottom of the glass also polished to an incredible smoothness. As to the more boring details, the tumbler is approximately 15cm high by 8.5cm wide at its mouth, it weighs 400grms and holds 400ml of liquid… this volume is a perfect fit for a 330ml bottle of Guinness including room for a head right up to the rim without overflowing, which is helped by the conical shape. The name and product that comes to mind in the 1950s with regard to Guinness on the continent, and Belgium in particular is John Martin in Antwerp, and bottles of Guinness Foreign Export Stout.
At BeervanaJeff Alworth provides some insight into the history of Baltic porter, the specific variant found in Poland, and its continuing popularity in that country:
In 2019, I traveled to Poland for the first time. I was excited to try grodziskie and get a handle on one of the old, but underrated European brewing countries. What I discovered was that grodziskie was a really obscure style, made by just a few breweries… Baltic porter, on the other hand? It’s not as popular as domestic pale lagers (which are sadly tasteless little wan beers in Poland), but it is definitely a major and successful style. Large industrial breweries still make it, but so do many of the little breweries that have popped up over the last decade and a half. I remember stepping into a beer store in Kraków with scores of beers from local breweries, and a lot of them were Baltic porters.
SOURCE: Andreas Krennmair/Polish national archives.
[A] big reason for me to visit was to find out more about the historic Goldfinger brewery in Kraków. I previously did a little bit of research into Markus Goldfinger through online archives, mostly the Austrian newspaper archives…There wasn’t much I could find about Goldfinger in the first place, and of two bundles of documents that I ordered, only one was made available to me. What I did get to view was a big bunch of correspondence between members of the Goldfinger family and the magistrate (think of it as the municipal office), most of them stamped with Austrian revenue stamps of 50 Kreuzer each (value nowadays would be roughly €8.50)… There was one letter that caught my eye, though…
Finally, from BlueSky, a post which, for some reason, Steve didn’t think would make this slot…
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 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.
