Newington Temple, Liverpool

Formerly known as The Old Ropewalk and before that, The Newington, this is now a modern bar complete with wooden floor, dull grey walls and white tiles with drinks offers scrawled in marker pen on them. It’s hard to know what this place is trying to achieve, as it has the look of the sort of fashionable but drab bars you might find in the capital, but rather than specialising in cocktails or wine, it has an excellent bottled beer menu. Belgian, German and American beers in particular are well stocked and everything is certainly well priced if compared to, for example, the ‘craft’ beer bars in London. But this place doesn’t really sit alongside those places either, as the keg range doesn’t really stand out and there are only the five cask ales available – Ringwood Boondoggle, Greene King Abbot Ale, Timothy Taylor Landlord, Moorhouse Pride of Pendle and Roosters Yankee on our visit – a decent selection in isolation, but not the stuff to get the beer geeks out in force. None of this seems to bother the punters though, as it was packed on a Friday evening with a mostly young crowd. For the record, my pint of Yankee was excellent, so they know how to keep the beer properly. It’s not a foodie place either, just a Pie Minister menu and that’s about your lot. Seating is fairly limited, with a few standard wooden chairs around the raised seating area to the front and some padded benches where the room opens out slightly at the rear. Music was playing quite loudly from a laptop behind the bar, but it wasn’t so bad that you couldn’t still enjoy a conversation. I think there were a few TV screens dotted around as well, but they weren’t on during our stay. Liverpool is blessed with loads of great traditional pubs which boast handsome rows of hand pumps to satisfy the ale drinker for days on end, but should you fancy something a bit different, a bit more contemporary, perhaps even a bit more lively, you could do a lot worse than give this place a go. With a clearer sense of purpose, this could be a worthy addition to any crawl.

Almost everytime I have walked past this pub the shutters have been down but at last I found it with the doors open. The interior is a single square room with the bar and some vertical drinking space to one side as you enter, the rest of the room is a raised area with a balustrade, leather upholstered bench seats, round tables and chairs. To one side steps lead down to the toilets. At the wall end of this area are large speakers and there are spot lights fixed to the ceiling - karaoke is put on Thursdays to Mondays. Décor is flashy wallpaper with boxing pictures and some drinks advertising signs. A few nice victorian touches still remain but otherwise a fairly bland modern interior. There is a standard range of keg beers on sale although Tetleys dark mild is amongst them. Early evening when I visited so I was the only customer but the staff, who outnumbered me, were friendly enough.