Harbourmaster Hotel, Aberaeron

The Harbourmaster Hotel is a modern open plan gastro pub with U shaped bar on the back wall that is lined with bar stools. On the bar, in amongst a range of standard and premium keg products, are three hand pumps that were drawing Mantle Brewery’s Hoodwinked, Purple Moose Brewery’s Glaslyn Ale and a third unknown ale. During my recent Monday evening visit it was very busy, which I was expecting after the local Aberaeron guidebook warned to book well in advance if planning to dine here. I found the service to be polite and I’m sure the food is great, but I wouldn’t return here just for a beer as it is a little too food led for my liking.

Modern gastro pub well described below with an even more posh restaurant on the floor above. The downstairs bar section is all aluminium and glass as mentioned and the posh bar top has those aluminium Ale pumps that have small chalk boards for pump clips that the beer is scribbled on. The key selling point certainly is the view of the harbour from behind the large glass frontage, but I did like the back story for the stuffed Albatross on the far wall. It was OK for a lunchtime beer but in the evening the bar area definitely had more of a restaurant feel to it and most people in were dining and if you do enter just for a beer you do feel a bit like a spare part. We did eat here and I wasn’t that impressed for what you had to pay for the bar menu. As a pub, it was too much Gastro bar for me, and as a Gastro bar it didn’t deliver on the food front. However as Purple Moose Snowdonia Ale was one of the two beers available during the week we were in town I didn’t mind it as long as I got a window seat.

Modern style open plan with large windows giving harbour views, one of two in Aberaeron that are listed in the GBG 2013. Largely given over to food there are 3 hand pumps at one end of the big square bar, with well kept beers from two Welsh microbrewers on the first two and a house beer on the third. There’s also a mid range UK keg choice and masses of wine. Laminate floor and some leather clad benches to one side, the rest of the furniture is tables and chairs including a couple of chunky tall ones. Tasteful artwork and on the ball restaurant style service mark it out as a civilised venue. There’s a big screen and an even bigger stuffed seabird in a glass case.