Tag: everypubinbristol

We’ve rebooted our approach to logging pub visits for 2023 so we can over-analyse our behaviour with even greater accuracy.

Jess in particular has always been keen on logging things – cash spent, books read, miles walked and run, miles of yarn in the knitting stash, the contents of the larder…

So, when we first moved to Bristol, she started logging our pub visits on a spreadsheet, mostly so we could keep track of our #EveryPubInBristol project.

But it also meant we could produce reasonably detailed stats on our pub-going habits.

For example, see this piece of ancient history from 2019, when we were two years into the exercise:

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.

Reading it through made us think about how much has changed since then, both in terms of pubs (“The likelihood of finding mild is almost zero.”) and our habits.

We’ve moved across town, for starters, so The Drapers is now almost an hour away as opposed to a 3-minute walk.

Our data gathering also went screwy during COVID.

There would be months of nothing, and then further months in which we prioritised places with outdoor space.

And we’d got out of the habit of logging pub visits so couldn’t always be sure our data was accurate.

In our sheer glee at being back at a particular pub for the first time in perhaps a year, did we always think to tippy-tap it into our spreadsheet? Maybe not.

With that in mind, we started a fresh spreadsheet in January 2023, and we’ve now got a month’s worth of data to look at.

Here’s an initial snapshot.

• In January we made 18 pub visits in Bristol, with a further 9 on a long weekend in London.
• The Bristol visits cover 15 different pubs.
• Our only repeat visits were to The Swan With Two Necks (×3) and The Barley Mow (×2).
• We only ticked two new pubs in January 2023, The Bulldog and The Green House, although that’s better than some months in 2022.

What might be behind these numbers?

We were quarantining before Christmas and therefore keen to visit pubs all over the city, once we were free.

And, though we don’t have a local, because our neighbourhood is publess, both of our most visited pubs are about 20 minutes walk away.

So, local-ish.

It’ll be interesting to see which does end up as our most visited pub by the end of the year and thus our non-local.

As for new pubs, there’s an obvious problem there: most of the pubs we haven’t yet visited are on their own in far-flung suburbs.

That means we have to make a special effort to visit them, walking for hours or battling with Bristol’s awful public transport. (And some of those pubs don’t look terribly exciting, either.)

The spreadsheet only includes pub visits, by the way, so trips to Lost and Grounded and other tap rooms aren’t logged. Not yet, anyway.

Maybe it’s time we accepted that we sort of do like taprooms after all, especially when they’re the very nearest places to get a pint.

When you’re faced with overwhelming choice, you need a strategy. Last weekend, we adapted an approach that’s worked with Belgian beer lists to help us choose which pubs to visit.

For beer, it goes like this:

1. drink something completely new to us
2. something we’ve not drunk for a long time
3. and one that’s a stone cold classic

In category two you’ll often find things like Charles Quint or the various Duvel knockoffs. They’re beers we don’t remember especially fondly, or at all.

Category three is where you find Duvel itself, Westmalle Tripel, de la Senne, De Ranke, and so on.

This really works for us as it balances our desire to try new things with our increasing unwillingness to waste alcohol units on something we have to slog through – especially when the best beer in the world is so readily available.

For pubs, we hoped, the same might hold true.

We still have between 50 and 100 new pubs to visit for our #EveryPubInBristol challenge. Covid killed our momentum on this and we’ve been struggling to pick it up again.

The problem is, they’re increasingly far flung; rarely near each other (or, indeed any other pubs at all); and, let’s be honest, not particularly attractive from the outside. 

However, we probably do better at visiting completely new pubs than revisiting ones that for whatever reason we just didn’t click with.

There’s been many a time when we’ve finished a visit to a new pub, and said something like “That was fine, wasn’t it? If we lived round here we’d come here more often.”

Which means, in practice, that we never go again.

But pubs do change ownership and direction, sometimes for worse, sometimes very much for better, and we know we could be missing out on some newly-polished gems by sticking to reliable favourites.

To put the theory into practice, we planned a trip to Southville which would include The Avon Packet (new to us), The Old Bookshop (we went once in 2018) and then a city centre favourite, to be confirmed based on how the afternoon had gone.

This was a great success.

We’d heard various positives about The Avon Packet even though it doesn’t look all that welcoming from the wrong side of the heavy net curtains. Anything could be going on in there.

We came in as the server was part way through the biggest bank holiday lager-and-chaser order of all time. That gave us time to take in the decor, barely changed from the photo in our 1975 pub guide.

Of key interest to us was the mirrored Bass box on the bar because the pub is famous for its Bristol-style (flat) Bass.

Flat Bass (Ray) and creamy Guinness (Jess) duly obtained we went out into the unexpectedly huge and bird-filled garden. There is a duck enclosure and, possibly due to the supply of feed, a deafening chatter of birds from the nearby hedge.

The atmosphere was great and the pub very much ‘proper’ making this yet another great example of why we do #EveryPubInBristol – to make sure we don’t overlook hidden gems through sheer laziness or cowardice.

When we visited The Old Bookshop almost four years ago we wrote a note: “Is it a pub? More like a cool bar in Kazimierz.” (Think Krakow’s answer to Shoreditch.) We can’t remember what we drank but the fact we didn’t write anything down suggests it didn’t especially grab us. 

We’d heard the offer had been revamped, however, so were hopeful of an interesting round or two. But we weren’t expecting to like it as much as we did.

We’d assumed that the relaunch of a bar in trendy Southville might mean more cans from breweries like Deya and Cloudwater – not our thing.

We were totally wrong.

What we found was a small, well-curated and varied beer list, including Tegernsee Helles, De Ranke XX, a cask beer from Elusive, and an enormous range of lovingly described ciders and, er, mezcals.

It isn’t cheap. Tegernsee was towards £6 a pint, for example. But there is a house ale at just over £4 and third-of-a-pint measures are available. More to the point, a lot of thought and care has clearly gone into this list and its presentation.

The place had been opened out, too. There’s now some pavement seating and a lot more air and light inside. The bar is, still, slightly bizarrely, an old piano.

We stayed for a second round and considered a third, thus immediately promoting it into the category three. Wanting to complete our plan, however, we headed into town to the Llandoger Trow.

This is a pub that has similarly made the transition for us from ‘once in a blue moon’ to regular haunt.

It’s fascinating because the crowd is the same as before, and the location puts it squarely on the route of stag dos and pub crawls, but the beer offer is probably the best in Bristol right now in terms of range.

Lager is a speciality, in all its forms, including Märzens, Weissbiers and Dunkels.

There’s enough local keg to keep visitors happy but also four real ale taps, usually including at least one northern classic. This time it was Plum Porter. That promise will keep us coming back for a good while yet.

We're like this but for pubs that once had Oakham Citra, Jarl, Jaipur or Plum Porter. pic.twitter.com/6gDpzmvhEk

— Boak and Bailey (@BoakandBailey) January 16, 2022