How many different pubs did you visit last year?

Veteran blogger the Pub Curmudgeon recently published a post establishing that last year, he visited 128 different pubs. He went on to say that whilst this figure was considerably more than in the previous two years of lock-down, it was still less than the totals achieved in the four years preceding the pandemic. In order to try and gauge the experiences of others, Curmudgeon went on to conduct a Twitter poll on how many different pubs people had visited over the year. The poll attracted 511 votes, with the results divided into four separate bands, depending on the number of pubs visited.

You can see a detailed breakdown of these figures over at Curmudgeon’s blog, but what is interesting was his attempt to tie them in with, not just his own experiences, but with those of others. These were people who he either knows personally or is familiar with via his blog. The post included an interesting piece about how he became interested in pubs, after visiting them first with his father and former school friends, and then how his pub going experiences widened during his student days, at university.

During Mudge’s early years, a major factor in his choice of pubs was the ability to sample different beers, and this certainly mirrors my own experiences. With the tied house system very much the order of the day, and only a small number of nationally distributed beers available, one had to travel in order to find certain brews, and that was all part of the fun. My own pub visits had a similar motivation, back in the day.

As the beer scene changed, and brewery ownership of pubs became less prevalent, the close-knit connection between local ales and local pubs began to break down, and with far more beers distributed across the country, it is now not uncommon to walk into a free house, or an outlet owned by one of the national pubcos and be totally surprised at what is waiting on the bar.

The uncertainty of not knowing what beers you might come across, led to Mudge becoming more interested in the pub itself, rather than the beers it stocked; a position I can certainly empathise with. I am also in complete agreement with his quest to seek out pubs that feature on CAMRA’s National Inventory, and have been visiting as many of these unspoiled gems as I can.

The post attracted a healthy number of comments, with correspondents revealing the number of pubs they’d visited during 2022. Some of the figures were in the stratosphere, but these were largely confined to people who “tick” the CAMRA Good Beer Guide, (the ticking is usually achieved by marking the pub off in the guide, with a coloured highlighter pen). This group go out of their way to visit and “tick” off as many GBG pubs as possible, but it does require a certain type of individual with the drive, dedication, and the time necessary to complete this pursuit. The rest of us will have our own reasons for choosing pubs to visit, which more often than not will be centred around the places we frequent over the course of a normal year, interspersed with holidays, excursions or even the odd business trip.

So, with no bragging rights about numbers, or a desire to impress, I was more than happy with sharing my total with  the others who’d responded to Mudge’s post. In total, I visited 81 different pubs last year, which was a lot more than I initially thought. It took me a while to total this amount up, as I don't normally record the pubs that I visit over the course of a year. I resorted to checking back on my blog, as this is as good an indicator as any, but it did entail quite a bit of trawling back through the 123 posts that I published last year.

Like the other correspondents, I’d obviously visited some of these pubs on more than one occasion, either because they were local to me, or because they were places, I'd been to before and wanted to return to. Apart from local pubs, a pattern did emerge regarding my visits, with the numbers being boosted by days out to locations such as Bath, Cambridge, London, and Sheffield, along with several bus trips, either undertaken alone, or in the company of local CAMRA members. The latter were specially organised outings, jokingly referred to as “old codgers” bus trips. There was also a short family break to Barry Island, in South Wales, which resulted in a few more pubs being ticked.

Breaking down the figures, I'm pleased to report that 28 of the 81 pubs, were places new to me, meaning they were places I'd never set foot in before. This reveals my spirit of adventure and discovery is still alive and kicking, although I'm not sure whether I'll beat that total this year. January hasn’t got off to a particularly good start, with only a half dozen visited so far. We've also booked a lengthy foreign holiday for later in the year which will obviously impact, negatively on pub going opportunities in the UK.

Counting up the numbers remains an interesting exercise and is also a bit of fun. Fortunately, I don't have deadlines to meet or targets to achieve, and I'm rather glad that I don't. Instead, I can just enjoy stepping into new pubs, in different parts of the country, as and when the mood takes me, so to end, here are my top ranking “ticks” from 2022.

In no particular order, the pubs are – Larkin’s Ale House – Cranbrook; Star Inn – Bath; Fat Cat – Sheffield; Free Press – Cambridge; Nelson Arms – Farnham; Waterworks – Rye.

In addition, there were a few “also rans”  that came in slightly lower down the list, and these were – Bell – Bath; Bull – Benenden; Bath Hotel - Sheffield.