Steam Town Brew Co, Eastleigh

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.