The Humphrey Bean (JD Wetherspoon), Tonbridge

Official site of The Humphrey Bean (JD Wetherspoon) - www.jdwetherspoon.com

Official site of The Humphrey Bean (JD Wetherspoon) - www.jdwetherspoon.com

The Humphrey Bean is a vast Wetherspoons with a bar than runs up the right hand wall and open plan seating throughout. My visit was on Friday evening when the pub was busy with a mixed crowd, some of which were getting ready to go home and others who had just begun their evenings. At the rear of the pub is an almost equally large L shaped beer garden that was also busy. Tuborg and standard draught are available from the bar which supports two banks of six hand pumps. These were drawing Adnams’ Broadside and Lighthouse, Fuller’s London Pride, Greene King’s Abbot Ale (x2), Ruddles Best (x2), Whitstable Brewery’s Winkle picker, Turner’s East Sussex Bitter, Goldmark’s phoenix and Black Lion and Westerham’s 1965. Food is available all day and the usual Spoon’s meal and drink deals are available. Tim Martin is certainly raking it in with this place.

This was originally the Tonbridge Post Office but before that there was a pub whose landlord was Mr Bean. Inside there is a pleasant front room which was presumably where the old Post Office serving area would have been and behind that there is something of a shed type of building that was presumably a sorting office. The bar extends down the right from the rear of the front room into the back room. At the end of the bar were two booze related quotations, one by WC Fields that looked oddly familiar and the other by Churchill. It was surprisingly busy on my Friday morning visit with an assortment of shoppers, the daytime brigade and families. The bar has two banks of six hand pumps. The right ones had the usual boring stuff with Broadside Available Soon while the other six further down had Red Squirrel English IPA, Marston's Help For Heroes, RCH Double Heeader, Wantsum More's Head, Westerham Grasshopper and Whitstable Renaissance Ruby Mild. I went for the Red Squirrel IPA and the Renaissance Mild both at £2.40. The IPA was in reasonably good nick but the mild was excellent. This is possibly one of the better Spoons but not their cheapest.