The Alexandra Arms, Cambridge

GBG 2025 Entry. A corner street boozer, with two rooms. The pick the one with the real fire. Nice outdoor area, that also included a summer house. Greene King but they seemingly dont stock their beers, with plenty of independent choices. Didnt like the £2 electronic tip machine placed central on the bar. I refuse to be guilt ridden at today's beer prices!

A reasonable backstreet pub albeit somewhat modernised inside, my three Blind Mice Porterhouse Blues was a good drop. I didn't really warm to the interior despite some decent ale, worth the visit though.

Solid, side-street pub with a modernised (but not excessively so) interior. Although a Greene King house, none of its beers was available, with Wolf Brewery's Mad Wolf (£2.45, half) being one of four cask ales and a cider being poured from a total of eight handpumps.

First time to visit for me as I usually restrict myself to one GK pub maximum a day and that would be the nearby Free Press. However, on the PuG crawl running list it was so I dutifully entered my, god forbid, third Greene King pub of the day. Fortunately, in keeping with the others, another of the GK stable in Cambridge that supports a decent guest ale offering as detailed by the reviewer below and my Three Blind Mice Porter was very decent. A nice looking pub from the outside but I wasn’t so keen on this one inside and the modern bare boarded space wasn’t really to my liking, especially the area with the bench seating which sported a wall papered wall that was conducive to headaches. And I’m not a great fan of being able to see the workers in the kitchen whilst I’m sitting there drinking. However, what I was very impressed with was the outside courtyard area at the back which was largely undercover and extremely well designed and laid out. If there was anything resembling a silver lining from the Pandemic it is that a lot of pubs now that their outside spaces as a feature rather than an afterthought. Still don’t think I would rush back to this one, given what lurks nearby.

I popped into the Alexandra Arms for a quick half after catching up with the main body of the Friday Pubs Galore crawl around Cambridge. All is still pretty much the same as my previous visit in 2021, although on this visit I paid more attention to the beers that were on offer from two banks of four hand pumps. One was unused, one was being used to hold up the food menu and another was advertising a sparkling margarita jug for £10. More interestingly the remaining five pumps were drawing Wolf Brewery’s Mad Wolf, Milestone’s Cushty Peeve, GK Future Brewers’ Spring Break, Three Blind Mice Brewery’s Porterhouse Blues and Weston’s Rosie’s Pig Cloudy Cider. I went for the Cushty which was good and served with a smile. This place is still worth a look if passing.

Another modernised backstreet pub. With four on cask, I plumped for a half of the Tom Sharp-inspired Three Blind Mice Porterhouse Blues which was nice. Worth including on a crawl.