Tag: everypubinbristol

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.

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.

On Thursday night we quietly ticked over another milestone: we’ve now visited 300 different pubs in Bristol.

Our pace has definitely slowed. It took six months to do 100 pubs, 2 years to do 200, and it’s been six and half in total to get to 300. 

Now, of course, there were two COVID years in the middle of that.

And what we found in the first year or so after COVID was that we wanted to check in on all of our favourite pubs rather than tick new ones. And there are a lot of good pubs in Bristol. 

But even accounting for all that, it’s been a slow journey to 300. But not unenjoyable.

Part of the reason for the slow down is that we’re now mostly down to pubs that are scattered out in the distant suburbs.

They’re a pain to get to and present fewer options for crawls.

We hit upon a good formula immediately post-COVID: one new pub, a revisit of somewhere we’ve been to once, and an old favourite.

The problem is, this resulted in us discovering some new, er, old favourites, such as The Old Bookshop and the revived King’s Head.

As a result, we became even less likely to explore new pubs with these gems beckoning.

Further observations on local pub culture

We wouldn’t change much from our observations in 2019 when we were reflecting on the first 200 pubs, despite the upheaval caused by COVID.

From a quick skim through the spreadsheet we would say that in Bristol there are more openings than (permanent) closings, and the vast majority of pubs still have at least one cask ale on.

The Pied Horse in St. George, for example, is a down-to-earth neighbourhood pub where everyone seemed to be drinking lager and cider. And yet there was cask Bass on the bar, tasting as good as it gets.

Perhaps some of the suburban pubs feel a bit tattier. Maybe there are more people drinking cheap cans of Coors or Natch than there used to be.

And a couple of pubs we’ve been to lately felt cold and damp, as if they’d switched off the heating to save money.

But, overall, it doesn’t feel as if there’s been a total collapse of local pub culture.

It’s also interesting that some pubs have become pubbier, or reverted to their essential pubbiness, shutting their kitchens and focusing more on cask ale.

In our first year or two of ticking Bristol pubs, we often ended up drinking pints in the corners of what felt like restaurants, to all intents and purposes. That hasn’t happened for a while.

We were going to write about how we intend to finish the mission in 2024 – but then we remember thinking at the start of 2020 that there wouldn’t be long to go, and look at what happened then.

A reminder of the rules

We have this spreadsheet to help determine if it’s a pub and therefore whether we need to tick it.

To count as ‘a visit’ both of us have to be there, and at least one of us needs to drink something alcoholic.

‘Bristol’ in this context is the unitary authority of Bristol plus any settlement not separated from the city by a field – so a good chunk of South Gloucestershire is included.

And to prevent arguments about the various settlements along the A30, it’s bounded by the M4 to the north.

We don’t have a definitive list or know how many we’ve got to go, but we know it’s at least 20, and suspect it’s more likely to be around 50.

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.

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