The Dancing Man, Southampton

Great old stone building, lovely refurbishment with brewery and outside space next to the docks. Excellent stone interior and good beer

Always busy, this brewery tap is much as described below. It’s become trendy, and the lack of other decent pubs in the area has increased the numbers coming here. It was noisy, not particularly convivial, and crowded, so not as enjoyable as it should have been. The beer was good though, my favourite behind the Old Fashioned bitter which hit the spot nicely. I shall come back in the hope that things will be more enjoyable when it gets too cold for the tourists.

This is a rather fancy brewpub in a nice old wool storage building built from stone and stood just across the road from the Isle of Wight ferry terminal. There is a large patio area outside the front of the building, across which countless picnic benches have been laid out, all of which were fully occupied when I visited early on a warm Saturday evening. You enter into a stone floor room with a good bit of open space around the entrance and a mix of bench and chair seating either side. A large spiral staircase in the centre of the room makes for an eye-catching feature and leads up to a first floor restaurant, whilst also nicely breaking up sightlines and acting as a place from which various decorative items can be hung. The room has been decorated in a rustic style with exposed stone walls, wooden beams and posts, old signs, clocks and the like on display and muted lighting all coming together to create a nice, coherent look. The room’s centrepiece is arguably a large pulley/winch contraption that was presumably used to haul wool bales in and out of the building in the past, whilst various junk sculpted robots can also be found dotted around the room. Towards the rear of the room, you go up a couple of steps for the bar area, which is a bare boarded space with a sweeping curved bar counter along the back wall. The counter has wooden plank frontage whilst the bar back has been cleverly designed to look like a large keg. High tables and stools run down the left hand side of the bar, with some of the stools designed to look like logs – definitely a case of style over comfort though. The brewery is visible to the right of the bar and through some windows to the left. The first floor restaurant is a much quieter, formal affair, with more bare stone walls and quirky decor plus lots of standard seating options and an amazing high vaulted wood beam ceiling which is worth the trip upstairs to see alone. Dancing Man beers unsurprisingly dominate the bar, with the handpulls dispensing Dancing Man Vagrant, Jack O’Diamonds, Mi Amiga Phantasma and Old Fasioned, with a single guest ale of Dark Revolution Electric. The keg range was even more extensive and included four of their own brews on the bar plus many further keg beer and cider options dispensed from taps on the bar back, each with their own novelty handle. I tried a pint of the Mi Amiga Phantasma and it was an excellent drop which I thoroughly enjoyed and had I not agreed to meet friends elsewhere, I would happily have stayed and sampled more. This is a great use of an old building which had been shut for a number of years following its use as part of the Southampton Maritime Museum. The brewery have eschewed the modern tendency to design an industrial-styled brewery tap and have instead created a very individual, interesting and comfortable bar and restaurant full of well kept beer from the on-site brewery. This is one of the best pubs in Southampton right now and it is well worth the walk down to this end of town to check it out.