Crafty's, Letchworth Central, Letchworth Garden City

ON a sunny Saturday afternoon, with Morros dancing taking place a few yards down the road, this was a lovely spot to find. A very relaxed approach at an establishment where, by my observation, table service seems to be offered alongside a decent range of beers. Two if these beers were cask, with a mild by Bruha (?) and Vocation's delightful Bread & Bitter (£4.50 pint). With the latter, you can't go wrong! This is only a couple of minutes away from the railway station and close to Garden City Brewery, on a road that has minimal traffic. My only negative observation is that for a bottle shop there wasn't much of a range of bottles on offer.

The name says it all,a good place to sample keg beers.A clever shop conversion ,the original curved front windows are attractive.Inside there are tressle tables and upturned kegs to sit on ,to the right is a rear room with the bar to the left tended by a friendly and attractive barmaid. The beer list is on the left wall,on my trip just a single cask ale in Duration Best Bitter ,while on keg there were 9 beers from the likes of BrewYork,Duration,Forest Road,Stamford and my Thornbridge Jaipur at £3 the half was acceptable on keg but a pale imitation of the cask version. The other keg taps were offering three contintal lagers,a fruit beer and a sparkling cider.It's dog friendly ,bottles are on display to the side and it has an upbeat vibe. A good place to try a variety of craft keg output,not too much for the real ale enthusiast but given the paucity of drinking options in this Garden City I would use it again.

Facebook page of Crafty's - www.facebook.com

Facebook page of Crafty's - www.facebook.com

Originally opened in 2016 as a bottle shop cum micropub in a former jewellery shop, this is now more micropub with the main internal square space and a small ante room at the back by the one toilet set with tables and only the right hand wall has racks and a fridge with bottles and cans for sale. And it takes advantage of being located on the pedestrianised Leys Avenue by having several outside benches on the pavement in front of the bar. The left hand wall is dominated by a large chalk board detailing the beers available which for my visit was two cask ales, served from barrels with cooling jackets on a table behind the serving bar, and 11 keg products and a couple of ciders, most from a Heath Robinson set up of tap board, cooler, kegs and a spaghetti of pipes at the back of the bar area. There are a couple of permanent keg pumps on the front of the serving area dispensing continental lagers and I didn’t think the other keg options were particularly aligned to modern cask options outside of one each from Kernal, Cloudwater and BrewYork. The two casks were Five Points XPA and 3 Brewers IPA and I went for the Five Pints brew and it was in good form. This still felt too much like a shop for my liking and I’ve been in much better micropubs for a drinking experience. But in a town centre virtually void of any decent ale choice or decent pubs, this place is worth its weight in gold.