Kelham Island Tavern, Kelham Island, Sheffield

The Kelham Island Tavern may not have been the pioneering pub in the city’s real ale scene, opening in its current guise as recently as 2002, but it seems to have become the flagship pub for the area and an essential port of call for fans of good beer and warm, welcoming traditional pubs. You enter to an L shaped room with a mix of wooden floorboards and a tiled bar area. There is a good amount of banquette seating around the room and the walls are decorated with a number of traditional pictures. At the rear of the room, an incredible number of certificates line the walls including CAMRA Sheffield Pub of the Year winners from 2004-2011 and the now famous back-to-back CAMRA National Pub of the Year awards from 2008 and 2009. A door at the back leads to a rather bright room painted in yellow with a good deal of bench and standard chair seating, art prints on the walls and plenty of flowers to brighten the place up even more. From here you can access a pleasant paved garden, much of which is covered by awnings. On my visit there was a second bar in the garden serving up another six beers and loads of cider in addition to those available inside, although I neglected to make a note of them. The choice at the bar was plenty enough for me to be getting stuck into. Four permanent beers, Acorn Barnsley Bitter, Abbeydale Deception, Bradfield Farmers Blonde and Pictish Gold (Thwaites Nutty Black is normally a regular as well, but wasn’t on during my stay) were supplemented by guests in the shape of Milton Marcus Aurelius, Salamander Slapdash, Yorkshire Dales Colt Park Wood, Brew Co Evil Genius and IPA X, Derby King of the Castle, Flipside Denomination and Ashover Damson Porter. As you would expect from such a well regarded pub, the beer quality was very good and the bar staff were friendly and knowledgeable about the beers. The pub was absolutely packed on my Saturday evening visit which created a great atmosphere. I thought I might be a bit disappointed, such was the weight of expectation on this place, but I really liked the feel of this place and think that it merits the accolades that it has clearly worked hard for. Visitors to Sheffield would do well to build any pub crawl around this place and the nearby Fat Cat.