Four Candles, Broadstairs

This is a very small micro pub in the backstreets between Broadstairs and St Peters, making use of what appears to have once been a corner shop premises. The compact room is bare boarded and has a couple of high shelf-like tables through the centre and a long ledge around much of the perimeter. Tongue and groove panelled walls give the place a bit of a proper pub-feel, with one dominated by the beer board and the other liberally covered with framed cartoons, many of which seemed to have a local theme, possibly drawn by local artists, with some available to buy in postcard format. A shelving unit to the right was well stocked with old Good Beer Guides, board games, various bits of glassware and plenty of candle holders as well as a photograph of four candles. Further study reveals numerous fork handles dotted around the room in a nod to the famous Two Ronnies sketch from which the pub takes its name. There is no servery – just a tap room through a door to the rear left, with the landlady bringing the beer out to customers at their tables, which is always a nice touch in my book. The pub has its own in-house brewery and three of their cask ales were available – Four Candles Double Hopburst, Archers and Garden Green Hop – alongside a couple of real ciders. The Double Hopburst was a reasonable £3.20 a pint and turned out to be a decent drop. There was a good band of jovial locals in who were happy to chat and recommend other local pubs to us, which made the place feel very welcoming to a couple of new faces like ourselves. It was this warm welcome that left the lasting impression on me, as this is a fairly basic, small micropub which might easily have been forgotten were it not for the locals and landlady. This, combined with the unusual feature of a home-brewed beer range, made this place stand out from the pack and we both ended up enjoying our time here.