The Pub, Leicester

Interesting pub on New Walk, a quiet pedestrian street in the city centre (at least it was during my visit). Small looking from the outside it is one long open plan bar inside running past the serving counter. Numerous real ales of good quality. Friendly, nice place to enjoy a beer, there is also a small drinking area outside the front

Quite an attractive façade, in a restrained sort of way, but the interior is really rather dull with limited seating and plain decor. On the plus side, and its quite a plus, there is a great array of 15 handpumps offering many interesting brews (including my pint of Art Brew Art Nouveau, £3.00). Worth a visit certainly, but not really a place to linger.

A fairly uninspiring pub both externally and internally but the long bar with many different ales on tap and a good line up of foreign bottle beers make this place a must visit for those after something different on the beer front. It was fairly quiet for a Saturday night but maybe the nightlife has moved on in this area. All the ales we tried were in good condition with a good range of both light and darker ales available.

Fairly spartan in both decor and seating this pubs main speciality is the beer. 15 handpumps including a real cider are on offer. The two beers I tried were in very good nick although I thought the service was a bit lackadaisical with the barmaid having to stop reading to come and serve me, they had only just opened the door though. This was the meeting place for the PuG crawl of Leicester for which it was ideal. If I lived in Leicester I'd call in this pub regularly, but probably only for one.

So, this place is called ‘The Pub’. Not a promising start, but I held out some sort of hope that all creative energy had been expended on a fantastic interior, leaving no time for trivial matters like choosing a proper name. But regrettably, there really is very little of note inside this simple, narrow, single room set-up. There is a mix of stone and wooden flooring with sofa and standard seating running down the right hand side of the room and a single banquette in a small recess on the left. The servery is at the rear of the room, along the right hand wall and broken by an unfortunately placed pillar, whilst a skylight is an effective feature to help light this space. The walls have been decorated with some thematically diverse photos and posters and I noticed a couple of TV screens, switched off during our early afternoon visit. Thankfully, for those who appreciate good beer, there is one very notable redeeming feature which makes this place well worth a visit. The bar boasts fifteen handpulls, most, if not all, of which were happily dispensing beers from microbreweries from around the UK. There were too many for me to note them all, but my eye was caught by Belvior Old Dalby, Oakham Inferno, Beowolf Dragon Smoke Stout and Art Brew Nouveau (£3.00), with the last two being in fine form and the Nouveau in particular slipping down very nicely. Not really one for the traditionalist then, but the seating is comfortable enough and the quality and variety of the beer range means that this would be near the top of my list for a revisit.

What this place lacks in traditional pub character it more than makes up for with its massive selection of varied ales, lagers and ciders, both bottled and draft. The décor is more trendy student bar than traditional pub, but you will not be finding 15 Real Ale pumps, 17 keg fonts with a good selection of world lagers, fruit beers, and Belgium beers and then two large fridges with an impressive bottled beer selection in any student bar. On the real Ale pumps Oakham Ales are a permanent feature as well as a couple from the Leatherbritches Brewery in Derby. But I also went for the Welbeck Abbey Cavendish Blonde and a particularly good stout, the name of which escaped my note book.. This is not a place I could see myself frequenting for a fun evening down the pub with friends, but as a venue to drop into to try a different ale, to the norm, it delivers in spades. And one big plus over the owners former incarnation of the VIN IV/Vaults across the road is that the Pub does food, although we weren’t here for that on this occasion.