Brinkburn Street Brewery, Ouseburn, Newcastle Upon Tyne

Please Note: This review is over a year old.

Will Larter left this review about Brinkburn Street Brewery

A cellar bar that is difficult to photograph favourably, and once down the stairs the medium sized space reminded me of somewhere. On reflection, it's got something of the look of student facilities, with a bar counter at one end, random low level seating in the middle and a hatch for delivering food opposite. I suppose the difference would be the waiter service for meals, but then it's a few decades since I was a student, so maybe not so much nowadays. We were warned that their card terminal was out of commission, which was distressing news to customers who entered just after we did, but my daughter and I are old fashioned types and had cash on us. At least, I did.

There was quite a lot of reproduction armour and helmets, which made an interesting display. I hope it's easy to fix, because I picked up a helmet by the nose guard, which immediately came off in my hand. (Sorry!) This seems quite a popular pub and I was interested to sample some beers from this new (to me, anyway) brewery.

The main bar counter features keg beers, with the hand pumps all ranked on a separate bar to the right almost as an afterthought. I'm (fairly) sure it's not intended to look that way, and I'm sure it didn't affect the way the beer tasted. (See photo for five of the eight hand pumps.) I went for the Byker Brown from their own brewery, which was not the best brown ale I've ever had. We both had our eyes on the House of the Rising Sun, a 10.2% imperial stout on keg, but decided to come back the next lunchtime rather than add to the Friday evening's imbibing. When we did, it was slightly disappointing, being cold, fizzy and sweet. And £3 for a third of a pint.

Date of visit: 16th November 2018

On 8^th February 2019 - rating: 6
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