The Beer Emporium, Bristol

Beer Emporium is a cellar bar with flagstone floor throughout and two long vaults that run side by side. On the right side is a bar that runs down the right side facing seating down the left. On the left side is seating and a kitchen is found further left. Premium keg is available and the two handpumps were unused. I found the service to be terse, in fact the young barman was a bit of a nobhead. I’m not a massive fan of cellar bars, they always remind me of the vampire drinking dens in Blade. To be honest, if I had to spend an extended period in here I wouldn’t grumble if Wesley Snipes ran in and cut off my head.

I do love a cellar bar. Initially greeted by a bar but the action is down a couple of flights of stairs, with a lift available should you need it. A cavernous vaulted ceiling. Very atmospheric. Mainly long wooden tables but a couple of leather sofas for more comfortable seating. Extensive collection of bottles and hand pulls but £8.80 for a 300ml St Bernardus 12 is taking the mick a bit.

Another of Bristol's well reviewed finest on King Street. The Beer Emporium is a calming cellar bar with friendly, attentive and knowledgeable bar staff. It felt slightly odd to be drinking beer here rather than eating jamon and drinking fino but that was soon forgotten as the fine beer selection was chosen from. Beers on were: Flint Knapper Ramsbury, Bad Co. Comfortably Numb, Brass Castle Oatmeal Pale, Boss Brave Adventurous American IPA, Bristol Beer Factory Junga, Electric Bear Bear Wit Me, Siren Vermont Tea Party, Tyne Bank Dark Brown Ale, Beowulf Gold Work, Totally Brewed Slap in the Face, XT XPA and Blue Monkey 99 Red Baboons. A great selection of beers from quality brewers and all that we had in good shape. Less lively than some of King Street's other establishments but the best beer selection that I saw in Bristol on our visit.

Really enjoyed a couple of visits to the 2016 Good Beer Guide cellar bar with a lift access for disabled going down from the bottle shop. There is a great range of real ales and keg available, and we enjoyed beers from Captain Cook, Untapped, Ashley Down and Truefitt on the first visit, and a couple of days later another Captain Cook, Grey Trees, Mumbles and Abbeydale.

Opened last year, this is one of a number of new craft beer houses that have turned King Street into a destination area for drinkers. This one wins out in my view due to the interior - down some stairs to two sets of arched cellar vaults, passing a bottled beer shop on the ground-level floor space (what a clever little idea that is). The vaults themselves were originally storage for a wine merchant and apart from some cleaning remain undressed and unmolested (along with a flagstone floor) which makes for a superbly atmospheric setting, if perhaps acoustically poor when it gets busy. There’s also a brightly coloured stained glass skylight above the bar which caught my eye. A good range of ales available, plus some cider and huge amount of bottles in fridges dotted around. My Mallinsons American Mild was in good form. I liked it here and it was my favourite of the ‘new’ pubs on King St visited that day.

One of a number of modern ale houses on King Street, Beer Emporium, which opened back in July 2013, stands out from the crowd by virtue of the fact that the bar is down in the cellar, with a bottle shop taking up the ground floor space. The Grade II listed building was originally owned by a wine merchant, with the cellars used to store their stock. Nowadays it is beer, rather than wine, that prevails and this is made abundantly clear by both the name and the neatly ordered shelves that face you on entry, lined with countless bottles of small batch beer. The stairs leading down to the bar have some very nicely worked, highly polished wooden hand rails and decorative features, which created a favourable initial impression. The vaulted cellar bar sees the servery run down the right hand wall with a row of fairly limited seating options opposite, although a partitioning wall partially obscures a much larger seating area beyond. The walls, as you might expect, are bare brick and there wasn’t a great deal of décor around the room, although a bright stained glass skylight above the bar provides some much appreciated natural light and acts as a nice focal point. To the rear of the room, a large table had a collection of leaflets and flyers for various events around the city as well as numerous CAMRA publications. Music was playing surprisingly loudly for a mid-afternoon visit although the volume may have been accentuated by the acoustics of such a large, bare brick room. If the idea of subterrainian drinking isn’t for you, there is the option to take advantage of the picnic benches that have been arranged outside along the front wall. The hand pumps here were dispensing Mallinsons US Mild and Baton Rouge, Secret Brewery Trial Brew, Five Sisters Red Pale Ale, Milestone Hoptimism, Dunham Black Velvet and Butcombe Haka, with at least one box of cider visible on the bar back and a good keg and bottle range as well. I tried the US Mild which didn’t really work for me, but it was in good shape nonetheless. I enjoyed our relatively brief visit here and thought it offered something a bit different from other such bars around the city. It’s definitely the place to go to if you want to try some interesting bottled beer and is worth inclusion on any crawl of the city’s top craft beer bars.

I am all for new locations opening to take advantage of the current focus on Craft and Cask beers, especially when they promote to a younger crowd, but I find a lot of them sterile and bland. But have to say I quite liked this underground brick cavern bar located below a bottle shop and think they have done a very good job in the conversion from storeroom to a trendy bar but still with some character. One very long bar section to the right as you enter then a much larger seating area through arches to the left. It wasn’t too busy for our visit but some of the locals in our crowd commented that a negative is the acoustics which are pretty terrible and you have to shout at each other when it is busy on weekend evening. A positive was definitely the Craft and Cask beer offerings already well described by the reviewers below. I tried the dark Ruby Porter, Black Velvet, from the Dunham Brewery , and very good it was to.

A cellar bar with quite a modern feel about it,12 handpumps offered an excellent range of beer and in my short stay I tried both the Mallisons US Mild and Durham Black Velvet,both being in fine fettle,I quite warmed to this place but I imagine it could get pretty rammed of a weekend evening and maybe a not so comfortable drinking experience as I found on my afternoon visit.