July 2025. Alton.
I’d picked a very cheap hotel for my night in Alton, though the Crown was fine, if a little “fuzzy” as the pic shows.
Or perhaps that was just me. Staying in Alton meant I could tick GBG newbie Cassidy’s with its irritating but increasingly normal 3pm on a day most pubs kept pleasingly trad hours.
I can’t recall anything about this classy High Street microbar. So let the photos reveal.
Quite an adventurous little craft range,
perhaps a bit too adventurous judging by an indistinct Electric Bear (2.5).
Is “indistinct” a recognise beer style ?
While I waited for the inevitable end of evening Chinese takeaway* (NOT a beer style, unless Vault City do it),
I nipped in my hotel bar for a half. It’s marked “BOMB BAR”, which encourages thoughts of excitement the Crown failed to deliver, the only banter concerning a holiday to Singapore thwarted by a brother who’d nicked his passport.
I don’t know why I do this to myself, but I tried the Greene King “guest” from a pump hidden at the back of the bar,
served in a Farnham Beer Ex glass commemorating the year the barrel was first broached.
Oddly, Farnham Beer Ex memorabilia popped up on Ed Wray’s blog this week,
modelled by the drummer from Wet Leg, who in a “Alanis Morissette Ironic” sort of way were last featured in this blog during Aldershot beer festival. Won’t someone now organise a pub crawl round Aldershot ?.
*Crispy beef 3.5, “Singapore” rice 2.
retiredmartin 
You do it to yourself because you know it isn’t your last beer.
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I’ll not be organising a pub crawl around Aldershot. Final answer.
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Very wise, Mick. Very wise!
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All so sad for us who remember Farnham hop fields, with them providing the zest in Courage’s APA, brewed, hence the ‘A’, in their long-lost Alton brewery.
Mind you, you’ve got to be heading towards 80, like me, to recall any of this first-hand, but I like to think that a few, doubtless very few, youngsters can imagine an area where the Courage name had a lad salivating.
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