Steam Town Brew Co, Eastleigh

I popped into Steam Town Brew House late afternoon on a recent Thursday when it was comfortably busy with a mixed age crowd. I was unaware of the first class carriage seating in the room to the rear, so I stayed in the bare board floored bar area where there are beer shelves, standard tables and repurposed barrel tables to sit at. The serving counter is in the middle of the rear wall where craft keg fonts run across the tiled back bar and eight hand pumps sit on the bar, six of which were in use drawing two ciders and Steam Town’s own NZ Pale, Stoke, Barton and Northern Soul, the latter of which was also the genre of music playing in the background. Regular live music is advertised for the weekends. There were two polite members of staff efficiently working the bar and another was delivering the food, which seemed to mainly consist of burgers. I ended up perched at a beer shelf to the left of the bar where there was a handy plug to charge my phone while I enjoyed both the Northern Souls on offer. Worth a look.

It's a noisy walk over a long bridge carrying plenty of traffic between the town centre and the Steam Town Brewery Tap, with a pedestrian crossing to navigate before you get inside. Once you've navigated the external obstacles, you'll enter the bar area, where it's mostly wood, with 5 handpumps for ale and several more for cider. Plenty of keg taps extend the choice and the homebrew is competitively priced and good quality. Just around the corner, en-route to the toilets, is the 'restaurant', where the offer is the usual modern brewery choice of burger or dirty fries. A novel touch is that the seating is, in part, comfortable former 1st class train seats, though you may have to sit on a plastic bench instead if the place is busy. Actually getting your hands on any of this, however, takes considerably longer than you'd expect with the bar only staffed occasionally from what I could tell and, while table service is advertised in the restaurant, that too was a bit hit-and-miss. All of those who I dealt with were excellent, it has to be said. There's much to like about this place, which the annoyances shouldn't detract from. Get a grip, and it'd be as good as anywhere.