Hare & Hounds, St. Albans

Another backstreet pub in this part of town, this is a fairly large, multi-roomed boozer seemingly popular with a relatively younger crowd. You enter into a slightly lower front room with a grand fireplace under a huge dark wood lintel to the right with a couple of sofas in front of it, making it a good spot to grab on a chilly Autumn evening. The greeter’s lectern was just to the left of this space and having completed the unnecessarily complicated sign-in process, I was led through a low doorway to the left, into the main bar area where I was seated at a nice table opposite the bar. The servery runs along the back wall and has a tongue and groove counter front which runs in an unusual ‘bulging’ angular shape. The bar back is remarkably basic and detracts a little from the room’s overall effect although it had been brightened up a little by the addition of some fairy lights, which snake out from here across the ceiling beams. Tub chairs serve a few small tables opposite the bar but the majority of the seating appears past the left-hand end of the servery, where the room opens out into a bare boarded space with basic seating underneath low panelled walls decorated with traditional paintings and an acoustic guitar. One final room can be found to the rear right where some more chair and banquette seating can be found in a compact bare boarded space. A TV screen here was showing muted live football whilst a dreadful 90’s pop soundtrack played away in the background – I’m tempted to give this pub the score of shame just for making me listen to the bloody Macarena in full. I counted six handpulls on the bar, two of which were unused, leaving a choice of St Austell Tribute, Adnams Ghost Ship, Youngs Special and Rat White Rat. The barmaid who had made the registration process such a chore on my arrival, continued to prove particularly inept in dealing with my complex order of one pint of White Rat, eventually managing to serve up a decent drop of a beer I don’t see down this way very often. Despite the borderline hopeless service, I rather enjoyed this place which has a nice mix of rooms, mostly very nicely presented and comfortably furnished. Having at least one interesting beer on the bar certainly helped the cause and were there an interesting local brew available and a better choice of music on the stereo, I may well have thought even more highly of this place. Definitely worth a look if you’re crawling the backstreets of this part of town.

As others have mentioned the Hare and Hounds gives off all the exterior vibes of being a modern gastro pub, but fortunately inside is still quite a nice traditional pub interior. Yes the main bar room is mainly laid for dining and is a tad dark, presumably because of the low beamed ceiling combined with smallish windows and a very dark bare wood floor, but this pub surprises with the comfortable Chesterton filled section beyond and the impressive exterior decking space and large garden with children’s play area beyond. Impressive range of six ales as reported below and the Trumans Lazarus was in good condition. Difficult to truly judge as it was almost empty for our mid afternoon visit , but certainly one I would consider returning to.

This pub I found to have more of a country pub feel about it,family friendly with several drinking areas throughout the pub.The beer selection, already summarised by Blackthorn below was half decent, I went for the Longman American Pale Ale which again was half decent without being stunning . Its worth a pint here but its nothing too exciting.

A good sized pub in a residential area just a short stroll from the town centre, I thought it had something of a gastro-pub look about it in terms of the exterior décor and signage, but fortunately this was not the case. Internally it consists of a number of different bar areas as well as gardens on two sides. The main bar to the left is an L-shape room with rough wooden boards on the floor, a couple of black beams on the ceiling and some chunky wood tables. The colour scheme was predominantly green with quite dark paintwork on the lower part of the walls and very pale up above. A number of watercolours brightened it up somewhat and there were also a couple of plasma screens, although fortunately the volume was off so these were not too intrusive. To the right was quite a cosy snug with a very low ceiling and a large brick fire-place with alcoves either side and a couple of sofas in front. To the rear of this was a longer room with a red colour scheme, again two tone dark and pale. This led out on to a large beer garden which I thought let the pub down slightly, being a little tatty and the presence of a climbing frame at the end meant rather too many noisy kids running around for my liking. Beers on this occasion were Red Squirrel Summer Daze, Otter Ale, Truman’s Lazarus, Longman American Pale and Ale and their own St. Albans Hare & Hounds, which is apparently brewed by Ringwood. Ciders meanwhile were Thatcher’s Heritage and Addlestones.