Four Candles, Broadstairs

This is a very small micro pub in the backstreets between Broadstairs and St Peters, making use of what appears to have once been a corner shop premises. The compact room is bare boarded and has a couple of high shelf-like tables through the centre and a long ledge around much of the perimeter. Tongue and groove panelled walls give the place a bit of a proper pub-feel, with one dominated by the beer board and the other liberally covered with framed cartoons, many of which seemed to have a local theme, possibly drawn by local artists, with some available to buy in postcard format. A shelving unit to the right was well stocked with old Good Beer Guides, board games, various bits of glassware and plenty of candle holders as well as a photograph of four candles. Further study reveals numerous fork handles dotted around the room in a nod to the famous Two Ronnies sketch from which the pub takes its name. There is no servery – just a tap room through a door to the rear left, with the landlady bringing the beer out to customers at their tables, which is always a nice touch in my book. The pub has its own in-house brewery and three of their cask ales were available – Four Candles Double Hopburst, Archers and Garden Green Hop – alongside a couple of real ciders. The Double Hopburst was a reasonable £3.20 a pint and turned out to be a decent drop. There was a good band of jovial locals in who were happy to chat and recommend other local pubs to us, which made the place feel very welcoming to a couple of new faces like ourselves. It was this warm welcome that left the lasting impression on me, as this is a fairly basic, small micropub which might easily have been forgotten were it not for the locals and landlady. This, combined with the unusual feature of a home-brewed beer range, made this place stand out from the pack and we both ended up enjoying our time here.

On the small side, even for a micro-pub, but busy even early on a Friday evening. Limited amount of semi-modern seating at high tables and along one wall, and not a lot of décor apart from press cuttings, but it is the atmosphere which is important in places like this (and in full supply here). Not exactly sure what their names were, but the three real ales on gravity from the back room were all in-house brews; a best bitter, a New Zealand pale and a very good porter (£3.00). First class.