Brewers Fayre, Weston Seafront, Weston Super Mare

A recent addition to Weston’s seafront, this pub occupies a large corner plot and is part of the attached Premier Inn hotel with large windows making the most of the views. Food is obviously quite a focus here with a “Please wait to be seated” lectern just inside the door, although as we were only popping in for a drink we declined to wait and headed straight for the bar. It’s a good sized pub separated in to a number of different areas, and is, I suppose, attractive enough in the usual bland, corporate sort of way. Flooring is a mixture of wood strip in the entrance way, some attractive mottled tiles around the bar and patterned carpet elsewhere. The paintwork is a mixture of neutral and maroon, although there is also a decent amount of exposed brick work and wood cladding as well as some etched glass partitioning. A couple of brick chimney breast housed fires of some sort although I suspect these were of the decorative electric variety rather than anything more functional. A few vases dotted about on the shelves completed the furnishings. We didn’t inspect the menus, which were liberally sprinkled over all the tables. I suspect they were of the usual mass produced variety that you would get in any of their other pubs. There was however a carvery counter which was only just packing up even at 10:00pm of an evening and even a candy floss vending machine which was a first for me. Service at the bar was painfully slow with just one barmaid serving and having to deal with punters who were (a) ordering food; (b) not knowing what they actually wanted to order; and (c) paying by card. An apology from the barmaid after our long wait would have been nice, but unfortunately this was not forthcoming. Beers on tap were Butcombe and Hobgoblin which to be fair is better than I had expected from an establishment such as this, although it was rather regrettable that they were dispensed through a sparkler. Hobgoblin is apparently the official beer of Halloween, and came complete with flashing LED’s on the pump clip. The solitary cider was Strongbow, unfortunately and the pub is also “proud to serve Costa coffee” which always strikes me as an odd thing to boast about. It could be worse I suppose, at least they weren’t claiming that they were proud to serve Strongbow.

Official pages of Brewers Fayre - www.brewersfayre.co.uk