"Have Fun, Drink Beer, Be Nice"

This motto is taken from this billboard which I saw outside the Left Handed Giant brewpub in Bristol. As a philosophy of life, it is difficult to improve upon.

Before I get onto the main business of this blog, which is my recent visit to Bristol, I wanted to give a quick update on my exploits with my Beer Passport. These have been less extensive this year.  But nevertheless, I have now visited 14 beer venues. The latest two involved the Lea Bridge Industrial Estate, accessed by an obscure railway line which runs between Tottenham Hale and Stratford. First up was Neckstamper, whose Gold Dropper dry hopped gluten free lager was particularly refreshing on a warm evening.  Then I wandered down the road to Queer Brewing.  I had heard good things about them, and I was very impressed by the two beers that I sampled. Firstly, a Wit collab with the might of Cloudwater and Duration.  Then their signature pale: “Existence as a Radical Act” - Citra and Simcoe hops with Kveik yeast. 

I was therefore saddened to read shortly afterwards that Queer has now announced its impending closure. Times are tough right now and it seems that simply making great beer is not enough to maintain a viable business.  The barman in Neckstamper was telling me that the arrival of the quarterly VAT bill was unfortunately often the death knell for a brewery - of course a brewery like any business should put the taxman’s money to one side as it goes along, but…

Anyway, Bristol.

I finally managed to carve out a weekend to get down to Bristol and see my daughter. I decided to make a full weekend of it so that I had time to sample the delights of Bristol beer as well.  For Bristol has a thriving craft beer scene.  If you prefer to ingest your beer blogs in video form, click the link below to watch me as I made my way around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N84tfcuWX6I

When you look for recommendations of where to discover great craft beer in Bristol, one name that keeps coming up is the Small Bar on King Street.  So that was where I headed first. I settled in there for a few beers, not least because the weather outside was very unpleasant at this point. I started local, with the Keller Pilsner from Lost and Grounded. However, my head was then turned by some of the other riches on tap. The bar had a good selection of beers from one of my all-time favourite British breweries – Track of Manchester. In particular, I noticed that they had, on cask, an “American amber” called Dancing Fire. It was dark, rich and velvety. I was then intrigued to see that the offerings on tap extended to beers from Jester King of Austin, Texas.  This particular brewery is famous for leading the American spontaneous fermentation movement, in homage to the lambic and geuze production of Belgium that I enjoyed so recently (https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/teur-de-geuze-2026 ).  I tasted their “Spon 26“ and I can now see what the fuss is about.

At last, the biblical rain eased and it was time to move on. I started to make good use of the Bristol bus system, and caught a bus out to Southville for the Bristol Beer Factory. It was a lovely, cozy, atmospheric High Street tap room. A guy was doing a set on his guitar, singing about how he never ever wanted to go to work ever again (after his set was over, he said hurriedly “I do work here now, of course, but I wrote this about my previous job“).  As a delightful bonus, I had not registered that the offerings of this particular brewery included The Champion Beer of Britain 2026.  This was “Independence“, a cask (of course) American pale with a delicious hoppy bite.  (Having failed to taste last year’s CBOB at the Great British Beer Festival - see https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/we-see-through-a-cask-darkly-gbbf-2025 - I had the sense of a box usefully ticked)

After a rest back at my hotel to gather my strength, I caught another bus, this time out to Brislington, the home of Lost and Grounded. This was a very different vibe – a large industrial estate space. It was absolutely heaving with customers. This was about 6 pm on a Saturday. The locals were happily engaged drinking in the open air and listening to music while being buffeted by the wind and gently moistened by the rain. Lost and Grounded are famous for their lager, claiming to be inspired by the technical accuracy of German brewing (although I would still give the British lager crown to Pillars of Walthamstow, which may just be London bias).  I hoped that they might have some interesting variants at the taproom, and sure enough there was a very tasty gose.  They also claim inspiration from the idiosyncrasy of Belgian brewing, so I tried their delicious 6% “Saison d’Avon”.

For my next stopping point, the quickest way between the two points was on foot, so I took my exercise. I was now heading up to the east of the city, just north of Temple Meads station. This area boasts a tightly packed cluster of brewery venues. I decided to look in first at Unwins. They are the newest kid on the Bristol block, having just started up at the beginning of the year. Famously, their beer was so popular that it ran out following a local event. anyway, they were empty when I arrived, which was a stock contrast with lost and grounded. The lady behind the bar said that they had been busy earlier in the afternoon with two groups of lads doing a crawl of all the tap rooms in the area.  We got talking about the London scene, with her saying that this particular bit of Bristol was the closest that they had to the Bermondsey vibe.  Anyway, I ordered their strawberry coffee sour, which sounded fascinating and tasted very nice. I also took a taste of their 9.6% barley wine, but concluded that discretion was the better part of valour.

As part of the “Bermondsey of Bristol“ vibe, the next tap room was literally next door. This was Little Martha, named after “Marfusha”, the rabbit who was sent into space on a Soviet rocket in 1959 along with her canine companions Brave and Snowflake (a nice bit of trivia for future Pub Quiz ref). They specialise in highly flavourful pale ales and IPAs made with international hops. Somewhat against my better judgement, I ordered the “Unexpected Intergalactic Object” NZ DIPA . A powerful experience, but not advisable given the amount of ground that I was seeking to cover in terms of different breweries.

I realised at this point that there was no way that I could hoover up all of the other venues in this part of Bristol and still be standing at the end of the day. I could have gone to Moor, or to Good Chemistry, or to the Bristol Beer Factory pub at the Barley Mow. Instead, I went on another March towards my final stopping point of the day, which was the district of St Werbergh‘s (with a view to meeting my daughter who lives nearby), and the Wiper and True barrel store.

If we were playing one of those games where I was hypothetically only allowed to keep one Bristol brewery, it would probably be Wiper and True. Like Anspach and Hobday, it sounds like a name steeped in history, but is in fact just the surnames of the two blokes who founded it in 2012. I had already been to their big venue in the Old Market area of Bristol on a previous visit. The St Werbergh‘s barrel store was their first brewing venue. It is smaller, but still has a very good choice. I very much enjoyed their West Coast IPA. Then I fancied something gentle, so I switched to the task bit that they had on tap from the Three Acre brewery of Sussex.

So that was Saturday. Before I headed back to London on Sunday, there was just time to stop in at Left Handed Giant, specifically their large and spacious brew pub on the river just across from the Castle Park. Again, this was a place that I had been to on a previous visit. In an ideal world, I would have stayed there all afternoon and sampled their full range, but this was not possible. So I restricted myself to a fascinating new pale that they had just added to their roster, with flavouring of lemon, lime, grape and guava. With that combination, you need to know that the brewery is good enough to make sure that a proper beer emerges at the end of the process, and these guys are definitely good enough.

In terms of reflections after the events, it really was a bit crazy of me to try to cover as much ground as I did. But I do now have a much better understanding of the beer geography of Bristol, which I will put to good use in future visits. The Small Bar was a real gem. Any one of Wiper and True, Left Handed Giant, or Lost and Grounded would have been an extremely good place to spend a whole afternoon or evening. As always, I ended up majoring on brewery tap venues as opposed to pubs, so my apologies to anyone who is reading this and becoming angry that I did not seek out the perfect pint of Butcombe Best. And we haven’t even considered the cider, which was in plentiful supply around the city, including in some very interesting looking tap rooms.

So that was Bristol. A lot of happy beer memories. And, by coincidence, my local brewery Mondo has just produced an IPA in collaboration with wiper and true, so I have a few cans of that in my fridge to keep the memory fresh in my mind.