Derbyshire – Castleton – Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Inn

This confused me a little, as a couple of miles down the road is the Good Beer Guide listed Cheshire Cheese Inn that I visited last year. This pub is in Castleton itself with the present building dating to 1660 and it has been an inn since the middle of the eighteenth century.

There are six real ales available, but yet this pub doesn’t make it into the Good Beer Guide, which seems to be due to the high quality of other pubs in the region. Anyway, that’s a decent choice for a pub to have, although I personally thought that the balance of different beer types was slightly askew, but that might just be my own tastes.

The service in the pub was friendly and warm, with a table being found for the four of us. There was compliance with Covid rules and the pub seemed clean and well organised. Table service is currently being offered and that worked out well, with no real wait. There was an offer for us to pay separately which went awry as the pub has a weird way of dealing with tax which the staff member couldn’t work out either, so we felt best just to pay as one round. Richard had some ridiculous double gin thing which was well over half the cost of the round, so my attempts to wean him onto beer seem to have taken a step back. But I didn’t say anything….

The Barnsley Bitter from Acorn Brewery was better than I somehow expected, quite malty and having a decent flavour to it. The Brown Cow from Bradfield Brewery, which is relatively local as it’s from Sheffield, had the flavours of what I would call a drinkable session beer. Both beers tasted well kept and were at the appropriate temperature, all perfectly acceptable.

I like this kind of signage, it suggests a friendly staff team and it’s informative and easy to read. Lovely last line as well of “come in and say hello, we’re ready to see and meet new faces” which is I think a well communicated welcome, I might try and use a similar version to that myself in the future.

There were a couple of beers from Abbeydale on, which were Deception and Moonshine. I’ve only had the Daily Bread beer from them, which was the yeastiest beer I can remember having (to the point that I wasn’t entirely sure it was meant to taste like that as I’m not enough of a beer expert to know). Anyway, I’ll try some of their beers next time I’m back in the Peak District, although the Daily Bread beer has been stocked in the Plasterers in Norwich before.

All told, I still wonder how near this inn must be to getting into the Good Beer Guide, as I thought it was catering to the needs of most real ale fans. Friendly, clean and welcoming, so all really rather lovely.