The White Hart Inn, Ellesmere

Impressive-looking pub hidden away along a side street in Ellesmere. There are a couple of rooms and when we arrived on a Wednesday evening, a quiz was about to kick off in both rooms. However, with only 3 teams participating, it was confined to the right-hand room (lounge). As such, we headed for the fairly compact public bar. The house beer is White Hart Bitter from the Plan B Brewery. Guest beers were Spitting Feathers Session Beer & Milestone Cathedral Gold. A couple of boards also listed an impressive selection of bag-in-the-box ciders - Snail's Bank Raspberry Ripple, Peach Melba, Black Forest, Perry Bomb & Banoffee Pie, Weston's Rosie's Pig Rhubarb Cider,Raspberry & Cucumber Cider & Family Reserve, Sheppy's Orchard Dew, Thistly Cross Whisky Cask & Cockeyed Monkey Mango. Customers seemed to be a loyal bunch of mainly ageing locals, who seemed friendly, as did the governor and his barmaid. This was our final pub and also our favourite pub on our 10-pub crawl of Shropshire.

I liked The White Hart. The building is quirky and traditional and somewhat smaller inside that it appears outside. We slid into the bar which was fairly full on an early Tuesday evening and were soon in conversation with the locals about which beer was best amongst other critical issues. It's a very friendly and inclusive atmosphere here. We did then sit down in the more sumptuously appointed lounge area as it was the only place with spare seats. The lounge is small but comfortable and, probably because of the serving hatch arrangement for drinks ordering, feels slightly cut off from the heart of the pub. Beers on were Stonehouse Cambrian Gold, Ludlow Best and Gold and Salopian Shropshire Gold. A preponderance of Golds there and nothing over 4% which made us yearn for the Salopian Hop Twister clip above the bar to be on one of the handpumps. The Cambrian Gold came out clean and started well but the second half of the pint wasn't great. I don't think this was the pubs fault, just not a great beer from an otherwise reliable brewery. A very nice pub which just needs a little more variety in it's beer selection to make it excellent.

An attractive old building and a friendly weloome from both the landlord and the regulars,this is very much a small town boozer.The bar is in left hand room where the locals gather in the L shaped interior.To the right is a modest carpeted lounge with a small servery,a fireplace with a stags head on the lintle,a upturned barrel as a table and some exposed timbers.It's very dog friendly with no sign of either screens nor muzak.At the bar there are 5 handpumps,and a Salopian brew is usually offered here,judging by past pump clip and the presence of Salopian Gold on my trip,in good shape.The other choices were 2 from Ludlow and one from Stonehouse but all were at the low end of the ABV range sadly,so we pushed off for pastures new.In retrospect a mistake given the pausity of ale choice in the other pubs in town,so I will try this again when next around and hope for a stronger Salopian .