Still recovering after my trip to Kyiv I decided to stay local and get a few more of the nearest Guide entries visited. My first port of call was the Putney branch of Ghost Whale, one of my favourites. This was my first visit in 15 months and it was so good to be back. As it happened, and unbeknownst to me until I was nearly there, Jezza had also decided to visit. There ensued a very impromptu Guide catch up meeting, comparing notes and plans, all whilst drinking some very good beers. We each kept wandering to the fridges, spotting something we liked the look of and settling down to share. Normally we meet up on research trips visiting multiple venues so it made a very pleasant change to settle down in one place and enjoy a quality session. All afternoons should be this good!
We parted company and I crossed the road to hop on to a 337 bus for the short trip along the Upper Richmond Road to Micro Beers. This is another excellent bottle shop that also has 4 beers on tap which today included a new, to me, American brewery – Mountains Walking Brewery. Again it had been well over a year since my previous visit and so it was good catch up on how things were going, and it was encouraging to see the place so busy. As usual I managed to find a couple of beers that were begging to go home with me, that happens quite a lot in these places…
It was time to hop back on to the 337 and head further along the road to the outskirts of Richmond and the always worth visiting back street pub The Mitre. It looks like any one of hundreds of similar residential pubs across the country but this one always has a great range of beers on both cask and keg. Very much a place to visit when in the area as you never know what you may find and my cask beer from Anarchy Brew Co was in superb condition. It is just one of the great Guide entries in this “corridor” of South West London from Wandsworth to Twickenham. I’ll get round to writing up a more detailed guide one day, but that will mean I have to visit them all again…