It's everything a pub can be

By Phil Mellows 

Walking into the Tamworth Tap is like going back in time. You’re immediately immersed in the familiarity of rustic furniture, church pews and an accretion of pictures, knick-knacks and breweriana smothering the walls. Wherever you look, as you sip your pint, there’s something to catch the eye. You could spend hours in here, soaking it all up. In fact, it’s recommended. 

Yet this brewpub has only existed for five years. There is evidence from a 1741 map that the 16th Century buildings, squatting beneath the walls of the town’s Norman castle, once housed a brewhouse and bar (along with stables and a pigsty). But the site was gutted when George and Louise Greenaway took over in 2018. It’s what they’ve done here since that has just won them the title of National Pub of the Year, awarded by the Campaign for Real Ale. 

The Tamworth Tap is also the holder of the Best Pub Garden title in the Great British Pub Awards, a category I helped judge. It’s very unusual for a town-centre pub specialising in beer to win something that usually goes to a rural gastropub with plenty of green space around it, but it just as much deserves to be a destination. The Staffordshire market town may not be high on your list for a visit, but this is a special pub.  

The main bar pours up to eight well-selected cask ales – “nothing too off-piste” as George describes it – including at least one brewed by Tamworth Brewing next door, and is one of the very few pubs where you might find a pint of Bathams outside that brewer’s own estate. Alongside is a small bar devoted to Belgian beers, on draught and in bottle. 

The Tamworth Tap’s whole feel, in fact, is a kind of blend between a traditional English pub and a Belgian brown café, extending into the upstairs rooms where the pub welcomes all types of gatherings. 

The garden is accessed through a separate passageway, where a door on the left opens into the pub’s three-barrel microbrewery, which predates the pub, before you emerge into a courtyard where another door takes you down into a wonderful stone-vaulted cellar (actually the best bit for any beer geek, if you’re allowed in there). George is aiming to develop the derelict building above it into “a sort of bierkeller”. 

Then it’s out into the main part of the garden, in the shelter of the ancient castle walls, where, in summer, live music plays from a stage at one end and cult films are screened at the other. 

As George says, “it celebrates what a pub can be”, and right now, with so many struggling, that’s something worth celebrating.