The Dead Crafty Beer Co, Liverpool

This is a decent sized craft beer bar close to Lime Street station and well positioned at one end of Dale Street’s excellent run of pubs. The premises is divided into two notional rooms by a bare brick wall through the centre, albeit with a sizable opening that gives the place more of an open-plan feel. Seating comes mainly in the form of hard chairs, low stools and a few benches, all in pretty good supply and serving a mix of table sizes. The bar is in the back part of the venue and sports a long row of keg taps across a rather dull plywood bar back, fronted by an equally unmemorable counter. Of more interest are the windows, which have obscured panes decorated with a Liver bird design. Décor comes in the form of breweriana - mostly modern enamel brewery signs - a large mural on the back wall and a few random promotional items for the rock band Pearl Jam. There’s an overspill/function room downstairs, but this was occupied by a large stag-do group when we visited, so I didn’t bother trying to explore. A quality indie soundtrack played throughout our time here and the other customers were a pretty lively bunch who made the stag-do group look pretty tame in comparison. For some reason, this place has decided to retain pandemic-era table service, so I didn’t get to take a proper look at the bar, having been plonked at a table to the front and given an extensive beer menu to choose from. There were twenty craft keg lines to choose from, along with extensive bottle and can options, and after much deliberation, I opted for the ridiculously named Sureshot Dang What’s Up With All These Books for £4.30 a pint and a pretty decent drop thankfully. The staff, for all their fussiness about not moving around the pub, were very friendly and dealt with the boisterous group very well. This is a good example of a craft beer bar, offering plenty of interesting brews from micros at mostly reasonable prices, along with a few relatively familiar beers for their less adventurous customers. The table service thing was a bit annoying, but overall I enjoyed this friendly little bar and thought it was nice to have something a little different to dip into when crawling Dale Street.

The Dead Crafty is very often on our route from A to B in Liverpool. So, we often stop by for a swift one. The prices preclude anything more. Beers are all craft ones. Although it has become much harder to see what is available, as unless you can get hold of one of the paper menus, the pumpclips situated on the back wall of the bar are difficult to make out. Nevertheless, the selection on this visit was Stiegl Grapefruit, Wylam Betty the Rat, Salt Hessian, Amundsen Madzi, Pomona Island Choose The Ball, Equilibrium Fractal Citra/Mosaic, Neon Raptor Plot Twist Alibi & Defeat the Rancor, Northern Monk Patrons Why Didn't You Tell Me, Garage Beer Tindal, Pressure Drop Pockets of Space, Deya Steady Rolling Man, Hackney Millions of Peaches, Modern Springs Capri Sun, Top Rope Cold Rope Cream Austin: Banana Split & Pentrich Spiral Sky. At £5 for a third and 13% in strength, my Defeat the Rancor was extremely enjoyable, if not a bit boozy!

Although we drink mainly cask, we don't mind trying craft, so called in here thinking we would be impressed with the 20 tap choice so chose a dark one, Six Degrees North Chopper,and a lighter one Burnt Mill Quiet Glow, but despite the expense we were not impressed with either beer. It came to the point where we had to leave some. Maybe we were unlucky.

a very hip and trendy craft bar at fhe start of Dale Street with all the features you expect from such a place. we factored into our pub crawl in this area and wished we didn't to be honest. expensive and sludgey beer available in a typical modern bar with no atmosphere.