Harveys Country

We treated ourselves to a proper day off, yesterday.

It's been rather manic with our work over the last couple of weeks.  We run a local community-based organisation that teaches people of all ages creative and digital skills.  Sometimes we lead or support sessions, sometimes we're designing things for sessions or for people who have asked us to, sometimes there are meetings. Oh so many meetings.

Monday saw me working all day on a grant funding bid to see our organisation take the next step in its evolution.  These things always, but always, go right to the wire despite all our efforts to prepare well in advance.

So it was a fairly intense day.  And it rained all day so not much hope of getting out into the fresh air.

Tuesday was forecast to be dry, sunny and cool.  So - we decided to go to nearby Lewes.

We figured that if it turned out too cool to linger in the outdoors, we could at least take refuge.

We walked around 5 miles through a nature reserve and, for me at least, clambering through a barbed-wire fence surrounded by hedge (alway check the tide times, children...remember some rivers are tidal). So by the time we got back to the town we were, naturally, well up for a pint.

If you know beer, you'll know Lewes.  It's the home to one of the best-loved "traditional" breweries in the country:  Harveys.

I'd never drunk Harveys beer in Lewes so I thought it was about time we did.  So we went into the John Harvey.  We were delighted to see Olympia on the bar so we had a couple of pints of that and relaxed on a traditional pub bench seat surrounded by the remnants of Fermentation Tank no17 which had be thoughtfully repurposed as a curved snug enclosure.

Naturally, the beer was as good a pint of Harveys as you could hope for, and the surroundings were unapologetically proper pub-like.

Thence to the Gardeners Arms which is another very down-to-earth place.  I had a pint of Downlands and the boy decided that he should remember that beers come in colours other than pale.  So he had a black IPA - which was lovely, too.

We weren't too moved to have anything else there and we had a Harveys Gift voucher burning a hole in our pockets so we went to the Brewery Shop which was an absolute delight.  We got bottles of Star of Eastbourne and Tom Paine and some cans of Elizabethan Barley Wine which they've called "Tin Lizzie".

We'd heard that the Elephant and Castle had a brewery co-op within it which makes beer for the pub, so we hacked our way up the hill to fnd out what they had.  As it turned out the brewery co-op isn't quite a productive as we might have hoped so we had 360-deg APA and something else that I can't remember.  Both good but not stunning. 

After that it was time to eat so we headed to a Thai restaurant we'd been to before to round off the day.

It was a lovely day out, and the pubs did a good job but I think I was a bit disappointed that nothing there took me by surprise.  Never mind, next excursion day we've got another couple of places in the county that we'd like to do a bit of walking and drinking...you never know...