Ten of the best

Well-known beer writer Pete Brown has been given a weekly column on beer and pubs in the Sunday Times magazine. He says this will be the only regular column on the topic in any national newspaper. His first contribution is a list his ten favourite “proper” pubs. A non paywalled version of the article can be found here. He says:

Beer never tastes as good as it does in a pub — provided you’re going to the right ones. It takes longer to get drunk on beer than on wine or spirits, so the pub is built around that long, slow curve of inebriation.

The pub is our pressure release valve. I’ve seen people’s body shape change as they walk into a pub, as if they were being given an invisible hug. It’s the Rovers Return, the Woolpack or the Queen Vic, where men and women from all walks of life meet as equals. It’s where you might meet the person you’ll spend the rest of your life with. It’s the place where your mate saw that great band when they were starting out. It’s the shelter of stone walls and a roaring fire after a rainy country walk. It’s where you go for a big game, even if you can watch it at home.

Here are ten pubs I’ve drunk in professionally that are among my favourite pubby pubs. Yes, the beer is good, because it’s well chosen and well looked after. So is the food, if they serve any. What they have in common is a good atmosphere — because the people who run them care, they love the pub and they’re good at it.

The ten pubs on his list are:

1. Blue Stoops, London W8
2. Bow Bar, Edinburgh
3. Coopers Tavern, Burton-on-Trent
4. Crown Liquor Saloon, Belfast
5. Free Trade Inn, Newcastle
6. Grapes, Liverpool
7. Pigs Nose Inn, Kingsbridge
8. Rosebery, Norwich
9. Rutland Arms, Sheffield
10. Ty Coch Inn, Morfa Nefyn

I’ve only been in three of those - the Bow Bar, the Coopers Tavern and the Crown Liquor Saloon. The Grapes in Liverpool is the one on Roscoe Street, not the more familiar one near the Cavern Club.

Obviously any such list will be highly personal and subjective, and will also inevitably have a recency bias. You will remember a pub you visited last month much more clearly than one you haven’t been to for twenty years. On that point, he says of the Free Trade Inn, “the graffiti in the loos is an essential (if unrepeatable) read”, but apparently the pub was spruced up a few years back and that has now disappeared.

With the exception of the Coopers Tavern and the Crown Liquor Saloon, he’s avoided the “usual suspects” all too often seen on lists of classic pubs. It’s also good to see some writing about pubs that doesn’t primarily focus on their food offer, which is all too often the case with articles in the quality press.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I haven’t always been Pete Brown’s biggest fan, and the feeling is mutual. However, he does write well when he puts his political prejudices to one side, and articles like this are entirely positive for pubs.

In response, someone suggested that I should come up with my own list. I duly did this, but deliberately confined it to pubs that I have visited in the post-Covid era and so have experienced relatively recently. This means I have excluded what would otherwise have been nailed-on certainties sich as the Blue Bell in York and the Star in Bath. My ten are as follows, split evenly between urban and rural:

1. Anchor, High Offley, Staffordshire
2. Bell, Aldworth, Berkshire
3. Black Horse, Clapton-in-Gordano, Somerset
4. Boat & Horses, Newcastle-under-Lyme
5. Cross Foxes, Shrewsbury
6. Crown, Churchill, Somerset
7. Great Western, Wolverhampton
8. Hare & Hounds, Manchester
9. North Star, Steventon, Berkshire
10. Templar, Leeds

I did something similar back in 2013, and there are only two pubs that have carried over. Some pubs have changed, not for the better, some were only there because I had had particularly good recent experiences, while others fell out simply because I haven’t visited them recently. For example, on my two visits to the Digby Tap in Sherborne, I’ve thought it was a splendid pub, but I haven’t been there since 2004.

Of course, unless you feel welcome and at home in a pub, however good the beer, and however impressive or characterful the interior, will all count for nothing. But that doesn’t mean a “hail fellow well met” bonhomie, it’s often simply more a case that there’s nothing in the reaction of staff or other customers to make you feel uncomfortable or out of place.