Organ Grinder, Lincoln

A good beer drinkers' bar in a shop conversion with a reasonable amount of space, fairly typically furnished and with some rather vigorous artwork on the walls. A useful mix of handpumped and keg brews, possibly needing a few more darker ones but good enough. I had a Front Row Try - clearly rugby themed - which was quite drinkable. The sort of place you might drop in to see what was on offer, rather than go for a session.

Beerheadz is a wooden floored open plan shop converted bar with a wooden serving counter on the rear wall that supports craft keg and three hand pumps that were drawing Abbeydale’s Dr Morton’s Angler Management, Great Newsome Brewery’s Stoney Binks and Beermats Brewing’s Summat Blonde. The counter faces high wood tables that run up the right-hand wall, a long thin wooden table up the centre and wooden booths that run up the left-hand wall. In the front left corner is a raised area with converted keg stools and small tables. At the rear is an overspill area with some seating and no decoration. The service was polite, but it was dead in here during a recent Thursday evening visit when other local pubs were reasonably busy. This isn’t somewhere I’ll be rushing back to.

Chain pub located at the top of Steep Hill, near to the Cathedral in Lincoln. Whilst I'd already been to the much more atmospheric branch at Nottingham station, I'd failed to visit the Melton Mowbray branch, as it was still closed fairly recently. The pub was fairly quiet on my late Saturday evening visit. Only two other customers were present. The single room has a range of different seating. I was seated on a cask! A regularly updated beer menu is put onto each table. The two real ales were Burning Sky Plateau & Wickham House Double Hop Jester. Wickham House are a seemingly new Lincolnshire brewery. Real ciders were Westcroft Janet's Jungle Juice & Gwatkin Red Diesel. Craft beers included Rooster's After The Horse Has Bolted, Porterhouse Oyster Stout, Brick Hatchet Sour & Bone Machine Comfort Zone. I'd expected a little more from this place. But nevertheless, it's still a place I would return to when next in the city.

Just around the corner from Lincoln’s cathedral and castle, this is a simple single room craft beer bar which forms part of a small chain with branches in Nottingham, Melton Mowbray, Retford and Grantham. The room is roughly square-shaped and has exposed floorboards throughout and the servery along the rear wall. A row of hard-backed bench booths runs down the left-hand side of the room, a high ledge with stools running from front to back through the middle and some small high tables with stools to the right. The walls have been painted white but have a couple of pretty impressive, brightly coloured, expressive abstract artworks painted on both of the side walls, which really give the room some much needed warmth and colour. Elsewhere, the walls have been decorated with framed pump clips, beer posters, brewery art and on the front wall the initials ‘BHZ’ have been written in keg font inserts. The bar has a timber counter supported by some scaffolding, with a colourful bar back with a TV screen to one side listing various draught beer options. The usual Covid precautions apply (hand sanitiser, contact details, table service, visor-wearing staff), but unlike in pretty much every pub we visited in Lincoln, we got in at our first attempt, having to endure no more than a three- or four-minute wait outside for a table to be cleaned. The TV screen indicated two cask ales were available, which was backed up by the detailed printed beer menu we were also supplied with. Options on this visit were Brass Castle Misfit and Ferry Ales Mosquito. Given that the latter is brewed in Lincoln, I decided to give it a try and found it was a well-kept if fairly unmemorable pint of bitter. Five keg taps were pouring beers from the likes of Kernel, Signature Brew, Ora and Brew by Numbers, so I really needn’t have left London if I’d wanted to drink the craft keg here! A cider and a perry option were also listed on the menu as well as a good range of microbrewery cans and bottles. This seems like a pretty good craft beer bar with some interesting, well-kept beer, friendly staff and a decent atmosphere. The seating options are fairly uncomfortable, and it would’ve been nice to see more local microbreweries supported, but I felt this place just about hit the spot as an alternative to the traditional ale houses your likely to spend the rest of your time in if crawling in Lincoln.