Settle Inn, Stirling

Good Beer Guide 2020 Entry. Small bar with fierce coal burner. larger back room, with Bingo on a Monday night :-) Two hand pulls - surprisingly Hobgoblin and Tribute. What happened to national pride? Tribute nicely kept.

This quaint rural-style pub claims to be Stirling’s oldest public house, supposedly dating back to 1733, and it certainly looks and feels like a nice old historic pub. You enter into a tidy little front bar with the servery immediately along the right-hand wall. The bar has a nice dark wood counter and bar back under rustic criss-crossing beams. The front of the room boasts some pleasant wood panelling whilst the rest of the walls are exposed stone which includes an impressive arch on the left-hand wall beneath which there was a lit stove which was doing a fine job of keeping us all warm and cosy. Fairy lights have been strung around the place, helping to create a nice ambiance through muted lighting, whilst mirrors, old photographs and a well-stocked bookcase rounded out the décor. Two L-shaped banquettes provide the majority of the seating although most of the punters were sat on stools along the bar. A door leads through into a rear room which has plenty more seating and appears to have been hewn out of the rock in the hillside behind the pub, making it a very atmospheric spot. A decent ‘70’s rock soundtrack was playing in the background and probably reflected the tastes of the pub’s main customer base, which seemed to be middle-aged blokes, although a couple of confused looking students wandered in just as I was on my way out. They had three ales on at the bar – Hanlon’s Yellowhammer, Caledonian Piston Broke and Lee’s Phantom. The latter was a reasonable £3.20 for a pint and was a well-kept drop of ale served to me by a friendly, welcoming barmaid. I managed to walk right past this place earlier in the day without even spotting it, as it is a little out of the way and perhaps not where you expect to find a good pub, but I’d say it is well worth seeking out for some good beer in a very warm and welcoming environment. Probably the pick of the pubs I visited on my short tour around Stirling.

We arrived here soon after opening and were initially nonplussed by the three bare naked hand pumps which greeted us. The very friendly and welcoming landlord (he later introduced "the boss", who is his daughter) promptly reeled off the names and descriptions of the three beers that had just gone on, and gave us generous tasters of all three. After serving us he rummaged through a cardboard box until her had found the appropriate pump clips and restored the bar to a semblance of normality. He was rightly proud of the condition of his beers, and pulled a face when I told him we'd just come from the Spoons in town. Beers available at the time of our visit were Box Steam Tunnel Vision, Inveralmond Ossian and St Austell Cornish Best. (I suppose my complaint in the Spoons review about beers brought from the other end of the country could also apply to the two non-Scottish beers here, but I'll let it pass.) I'd enjoyed my visit to Stirling, but not enough to think about coming back again. Half an hour in the Settle Inn changed my mind about that.