Freemasons Tavern, Hove

Two-floor bar on the Western Road with quite an impressive exterior. The bar is now owned by Laine and only stocks their keg beers. On this visit, they had Source, Mangolicious, Sonar & Rippa. Also on was Beavertown Gamma Ray. Only a few other customers were in and all were in the ground floor room. Further seating is available upstairs, where the toilets can also be found. Not really much to recommend about this one.

The Freemasons Tavern has a relatively traditional pub interior with a front island bar and little seating areas around. There are a few sofas thrown in and after looking a little deeper I discovered that this is in fact a pub aimed directly at students who get discounts throughout the day and evening. Pub grub is served between noon and 21:00 every day and the mains are priced around the £8 mark. The bar is stocked with limited standard draught products and two hand pumps were unused during my early Tuesday evening visit so Deuchars and W J King’s Five Generations were the ale options. To the right rear of the pub there is a seating area that houses a plasma screen that was showing a football match via Sky Sports. This was muted as far as I know as there was some loud funky house playing and I got the feeling that the pub probably gets busier later in the night. As far as I could tell there is a late license every night and this pub shuts in the early hours at the weekend. There is a room upstairs with bar that is available for hire, but I didn’t visit on this occasion. The art deco frontage in copper with mosaic tiling and masonic symbols as well as references to Kemp Town Brewery is worth a look if passing. However, the interior is less interesting and I’m not within the demographic that this pub is aiming at so I’ll be walking past next time I’m in Hove.