Heaton Hops, Stockport

In some ways, a stereotypical micro-pub (not that's a bad thing as far as I'm concerned), with a limited amount of basic furniture and no decoration apart from the bottle shelves and can fridges. However, in better weather, there are a few wooden tables out front providing additional seating (although as I had found the last free seat indoors, later hardy visitors did proceed out in the frigid air beyond). With two handpumps on the compact counter, I found a couple of Marble beers: Pint (£3.50, in fine form) and Lagonda. The purists might recoil from seeing eight craft keg taps on the bar-back, but that certainly expands the range of styles on offer.

Official site of Heaton Hops - www.heatonhops.co.uk

Official site of Heaton Hops - www.heatonhops.co.uk

As has been noted, this is a micro pub, and is small. In that respect it appears to be a victim of its own success, as on Saturday evening it was absolutely rammed, with barely any standing room. A couple of people left which meant my friend and I were able to pounce on a couple of seats on the other half of someone's table. But even getting to those seats was a struggle as the tables are crammed so close to each other. Obviously there is only so much you can do in the space you have, but I think they need bigger premises! There is a fascinating selection of bottles and cans available to purchase to take away, but at £4 for the Shindigger one I was looking at the risk of buying it at the start of my crawl and something happening to it during the course of the evening was too great for me to contemplate the purchase. In fairness, service was fairly efficient given how busy the place was, and at the bar were two cask hand pulls and (I think) 8 keg options. A prominent chalk board lists everything available so you get time to make your mind up before being served. The two cask options were Tim Taylor Landlord (which I didn't really think fitted in with the venue's other offerings) and Sonoma by Track. This is an Untappd verified venue and the menu wasn't quite up to date. We went for one of the keg options, West Coast Pale Ale by Shindigger, at £4.00 a pint / £2.00 a half, and was rather pleasant. Plenty of different styles and strengths to choose from on keg. Nobody wants to see an empty pub but I found this a bit uncomfortably busy and if I were to go back I would probably try to make sure it was during a quieter period. Definitely one to seek out if you're doing a crawl in the area though.