The Three Swans, Frome

A two roomed pub, well lived in but comfortable, the left hand room quite nicely turned out a courtyard garden to the rear, a fairly chatty landlord that guessed it was a CAMRA get together by the fact everyone, around twelve or so, were ordering halves, then spotting Wills note book gave the game away. Butcombe Original and Hop Union Bonville Pale, the latter being a decent drop.

This interesting pub has been well described in the previous review, though our server was not a Goth but the landlord, who commented to a couple of his regulars something along the lines of he gets nervous when the notebooks come out, at exactly the moment that I pulled a notebook out of my rucksack. He'd correctly deduced that we might be all CAMRA members, doing beer scoring or whatever it is CAMRA members get up to in pubs, because they're surely not out to enjoy themselves. We had a good laugh about the notebook phobia, anyway. On the beer front, this pub is not in the current Good Beer Guide, but the CAMRA website shows three pint glasses which means it would qualify if those were the scores applicable at selection time. If he continues to serve half pints of too cold beer in narrow glasses he's not going to score many "very goods", I reckon. This was Hop Union Bonville Pale 4% £5.75/pint which got a "good" from me - but could have been better; I can't speak for the others, of course. (The other beer was Butcombe Original.) Quirky, as has been mentioned, but not quite interesting enough to wish I was planning on making repeated visits to Frome.

Weird semi-goth pub over two rooms with an even weirder gent’s pisser, I almost mistook the sink for the urinal. Of note is the carved wood lower servery detail which is repeated on some of the bench seating and lower wall panelling, presumably ecclesiastical salvage. GBG listed with three cask, a pedestrian Abbey Bellringer (NBSS 2) was pulled by a young statuesque gothic lass who was as genial as you might expect from the genre. Quirky enough to warrant a look-in but another duff GBG serve in this rather peculiar town. 6.5