Welcome Back

 We walked out to Easton to restock on spice provisions.  Obviously, SweetMart is the obvious place to do this.  It's a couple of miles' walk there but that's an added benefit of the place.

After filling our bag with poppadoms, creamed coconut, rice, lentils and spices we repaired to the Greenbank pub to recover.

It's a really interesting pub.  It pretty much manages to pull off a brilliant trick of simultaneously being cafe, pub and social/community hub.  

They had 4 cask and 3 keg local beers available and a short but interesting little menu from the kitchen (pizza, burgers, casserole, etc).  We've eaten there before and the food was good, if not amazing.

The beers don't set the world alight in terms of range or novelty but what we had was good, cool and well kept.

We watched with interest the wide range of people in the place - from parents with kids, to someone working at one of the tables - to us.

We arrived about 4.15 and it was already buzzing - not bad for a January Thursday.

I've no doubt that we'd be reasonably happy were it very local to us and we'd kill for somewhere that interesting in Eastbourne but, neither of us think there would really be the appetite for it there.

Still - well done the team that have taken it over.  It's a lovely model for a pub.

After two pints we decided to head home and perhaps call in at the Assembly for a pizza if it looked promising.  So we struck out back down St Marks Road.  We discovered that G Brothers is now doing eat-in for their fab pizzas (their website indiciated they were take out only).  It would have been rude not to...

They didn't have keg beer on but they did have a fridge full of canned local beer.  

It was lovely being back in this quirky place and even better to see the stream of orders and callers being serviced.  We weren't the only people eating in, either.

This is another place that pulls off an excellent trick of being more than one thing to maximise it's appeal.

If I needed to buy a house in Easton, I'd be able do so knowing that the local amenities would readily available, and provided by fantastic independent traders.

Bravo!

New Year, New Worries

 Here we are, the beginning of another year.

The cost of living crisis is biting hard - not just for the worst off, but for people and businesses who were doing OK.

The latter part of 2022 saw the closure of two local breweries and, undoubtedly, there will be more before the summer.

We've chatted to a couple of the other small breweries that know us quite well.  Moor said it'll be hard but they have a business model that's allowing them to weather things at the moment.

Martha's is a very different animal - a personal passion project for a small number of people - but they feel reasonably confident just now.

My guess is that the likes of Bristol Beer Factory and Arbor will also be able to cope but there are others who I think are in peril - and especially small bottle/tap shops.

As always, we won't be observing any sort of "dry" January.  Our behaviour will be mostly unchanged, we rarely drink seriously large amounts, and rarely drink nothing - but that's us.  Whilst I hate the moralising "dry january" messages, I equally hate the belittling of anyone who doesn't drink - either by choice, or by necessity.

Whilst we fairly regularly do work meetings in an independent drinking establishment - there are various reasons why we pick particular places - and it's usually based on the fact they have a range of non-alcohol drinks that people actually enjoy drinking.  This means it works for all the people at the gathering and we're still managing to support some of our small local businesses without making anyone feel like alcohol is the only option. (I made this edit after a post by another blogger I follow who feels he needs a beer break without the added guilt of knowing that pubs and breweries have a tough time at this time of year).

We'll have lots of things to do on our house once the building work has finished and, hopefully, a lovely new space to enjoy - nevertheless, we've already pledged between ourselves that we'll make the effort to keep going to the pub and buying beers directly from breweries.  Also, to make sure we eat out at our favourite restaurants because resorts in January can be a pretty bleak place.

Good luck everyone - we're all going to need it.