Meandering Bear, Halifax

Named after a bear that escaped from a local zoo, this is a modern bar with a reasonably sized drinking area with large windows to the front and with the bar on a raised area to the rear of the room. Beers are listed on a board to the left-hand side of the bar. On cask, there was Darkland Indie Wildfire & Auld MacGowan, Wishbone Blonde, Hophurst 2 Rounds of 6 Before Breakfast & Thornbridge Wye. The cider was Lilley's Tropical, whilst craft beers were Vault City Cloudy Lemonade, RedWillow Nelson, New Invention Whispers & Thornbridge Lukas. Another decent Halifax bar that was quite busy on our Saturday afternoon visit.

Another good modern beer bar offering five cask beers and seven, I think, craft keg,I went with the same beer as Tris below, Black Edge NZP4 and also found it decent. I would have no problem looking in again.

Opened in September 2019, the name taken from the event when a bear (!) escaped from the former Halifax Zoo and well described below; it’s also a sister bar to the similarly virtuous Grayston Unity. My Blackedge NZP4, £2.50 half and nice though pricey. A good place for those who like modern bars rather than pubs.

This was our final port of call to end an excellent days drinking in Halifax. It’s another of the newish wave of modern bars in Halifax that first opened in 2019 and managed to ride out the pandemic and is now riding the local marketing movement to brand Halifax as the Shoreditch of the North. None of the locals I spoke to during the day were taking that particularly seriously and there’s one key difference with the craft beer emporiums in this town and that is that they all have a strong cask ale presence as well, as was the case here. Along with the 8 taps for crafty stuff there are five hand pumps on the bar and for the Pubs Galore Crawl these were providing Tapped Brew Co. Cannon Best Bitter, Wishbone Brewery Blonde, Black Edge Hop Pale Ale and NZP4 New Zealand pale ale and then a rather excellent Parkway Brewery Black Forest Stout. Again the sort of thing that has got it included in CAMRA’s GBG for the last couple of years. The keg options included brews from Thornbridge, Roosters, Lost and Grounded and then a Pink Lemonade Sour from Electric Bear Brewery in Bath for those who like that sort of thing. It’s not the biggest of bars, set over two levels with the serving area on the higher level at the back left, and it’s probably big enough to make it unfair to refer to it as a micro, although the toilet facilities were certainly leaning to what you find in that genre. It’s also another of the bars in this part of town who ( like the Grayston Unity) alter their opening hours if there is an event on in the Piece Hall. As modern beer bars go it’s perfectly comfortable, just didn’t have the character to make me revisit over some of the other pubs and bars, but definitely worth poking your nose in if in this part of town.

Official site of Meandering Bear - www.meanderingbear.co.uk

Official site of Meandering Bear - www.meanderingbear.co.uk