Nottingham Pub Crawl

In our most recent venture in search of good beer, we ended up in Nottingham. An hour's train ride away from our hometown, and with some great bottle shops and whisky retailers to boot, it's one of our favourite places for a day trip. Here's a selection of reasons why...

Hand & Heart

Located a ten minute's walk out of the city centre, this is a truly unique pub, with an ornate back bar consisting of a glorious Victorian cabinet that sits behind the eight hand pumps and six brass keg lines.

The beer available covers a good mix of local and not so local breweries - on our recent visit we sampled the house brew from Dancing Duck, Round Heart, a 4% copper ale, Horncastle's Sacrificed Soul (4.3%), and Scribblers Masher in the Rye, a well balanced 4.8% pale ale with a spicy edge.

Behind the bar, hidden in the rear of the pub, is a restaurant built in one of the old cellars - this original feature is a great atmospheric place to sit. Between the two set just inside the sandstone cave is a snug area featuring leather sofas that seem to absorb humans, and arm chairs set around small tables.

An extensive food menu of well sourced meals caters for all palates and dietary requirements - the oxtail served with parsnip chips and stilton mash sounded particularly appealing.

The Organ Grinder

This pub is the kind of place where you instantly feel at home, being welcomed by the smell of a proper log fire and cheery staff. The first thing to note when examining the bar is that it is riddled with wittily-named Blue Monkey beers... This is because this free house is one of three brewery taps of the Giltbrook based brewhouse (with other Organ Grinder pubs located in Newark and Loughborough). On this trip we went for Sanctuary - a 4.1% copper ale which was slightly reminiscent of Twiglets (in a good way), and the fresh and hoppy Right Turn Clyde, a 4.3% pale ale. Both were perfect for an afternoon pint. The pork pie selection looked great, too.

Keans Head

Set in a beautiful location, the front windows look out on St. Mary's church from a comfy open bar. There's a modern, somewhat continental feel to this place, with exposed brick walls and wooden floors providing a simple basis for the decor, which is largely breweriana from around the globe.

Six cask ales adorn the bar, backed up by a great selection of world whiskies and a gin selection unrivalled in the three pubs we saw on this visit to the city that adopted Robin Hood as their own.

This was the last pub we visited before it was time to get the train home, and there were some big drinks to finish off on. We tried Castle Rock's seasonal beer, Mistletoe, which was the perfect winter ale, dark and sweet at 5.2%. Hop Studio's Fire and Ice was an interesting drink, a 5% pale ale which tasted a bit like Kinder Bueno bars. Finally, the Heartless from Red Willow (one of our top breweries at the moment) was a complete chocolatey treat.

Cheers,

J&L