Battle Tap, Battle

Blue Scrumpy left this review about Battle Tap

Small taproom/shop on the main street through Battle. This is now rather confusingly called Battle Brewery. Although, the brewery itself is not located here.

We arrived to find the young barman and just one other customer with his dog. There is a list of beers available to the left-hand side of the bar, which was far too descriptive. It wasn't easy to tell which beers were cask and which were keg at first glance. We asked the barman for guidance and he told us cask beers were on the left and keg beers on the right. All seemed fine until we realised he was pouring us keg beers and that he had given us duff information. The cask beers were actually on the right!!

Luckily I'd had a cask Battle beer in the previous pub. As I'd not enjoyed it particularly, I was partly relieved that I had ordered a keg beer from another brewery. 3 cask beers are on and all are dispensed by gravity from casks against the rear wall. They are Battle Arrow Head, Axe & Crossfire. Keg beers were Battle Knight Rider IPA & Royal Rumble, Gun Numb Angel & Pig & Porter Apparition. A boxed cider (Charrington's The Earl's Reserve) was also on offer. My Apparition was a stout, which as with most craft beers, was served too cold for my liking.

This micropub has a couple of rooms. We stayed in the main room where the bar is, but there is a second larger room off to the right in what liked it used to be different premises. The left room features a replica of part of the Bayeux Tapestry on the right-hand wall. There is also a TV in one corner and a fridge next to the bar containing various bottles and cans.

This is a strange place. The beer board contained far too much information, which didn't make choosing a drink a particularly easy task, especially when the young barman was also steering us in the wrong direction. My experience of Battle beers from the previous pub did not particularly inspire me and I also noticed that the brewery have renamed some or possibly all of their beers, presumably as part of some kind of re-branding exercise (for example the Tostig mentioned in the below review is now Arrowhead), which added to the confusion.

There's probably a reason why this place has not appeared in the last couple of editions of the Good Beer Guide and maybe I've picked up on that somewhere in my review! It does seem to have lost its way a little.

On 13^th May 2025 - rating: 6
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