Tapping the Admiral NW1

London’s Best Beer, Pubs and Bars updates
North London: Kentish Town and Tufnell Park

Tapping the Admiral, London NW1

Contemporary pub (Pineapple)
77 Castle Road NW1 8SU
T (020) 7267 6118 W www.tappingtheadmiral.co.uk f Tapping-the-Admiral tw TappingAdmiral
Open 1200-2300 (2230 Sun). Children welcome until 1900.
Cask beers 8 (Adnams, Brodie’s, Dark Star, Redemption, unusual often local guests), Other beers 5 keg, 14 bottles (UK), Also 4 ciders/perries, 12+ wines, cocktails & home-blended spirits.
Food Thai, Outdoor Beer garden, Wifi. Flat access but no disabled toilet.
Wed quiz, music planned, annual cider festival.

Kirk McGrath, owner of the Pineapple (p156), a gem of a place in Tufnell Park, opened two new pubs in 2011 along broadly similar lines: the Railway Tavern in Stoke Newington and this delightful place in backstreets just round the corner from Kentish Town West Overground station. Like the Pineapple, it’s a small, cozy, characterful and welcoming community pub with a strong beer focus. Originally known as the Trafalgar and for a while bearing the ghastly label Tavern Inn The Town, the pub had been closed, derelict and squatted for years, at one point threatened with demolition to make way for a block of flats, before its current rejuvenation.

Inside the irregularly shaped drinking area is now clean and modern with wood surfaces and a few big posters: less cluttered than the Pineapple, it feels more spacious, although Kirk insists it’s actually smaller. The beer policy is “to stock plenty of local ales and avoid the obvious”: there’s usually a beer each from Adnams, Brodie’s, Dark Star and Redemption, though the exact brand may change, complimented by guest casks that might come from Butts, Kingstone, Meantime, Moorhouse or Purity. It’s also good to see small Welsh brewer Kingstone among a short but well chosen list of British bottle conditioned beers, alongside Adnams’ rare barley wine Tally-Ho and more from Butts, Dark Star and Meantime.  Other choices include house speciality cocktails and a range of unusual flavoured spirit blends, made locally by hand. As in the Pineapple, there’s a good value Thai-based menu, with lunches for a fiver during the week.

While the big new specialist beer bar openings gain the lion’s share of the attention from beer geeks, it’s great little places like this that are strengthening the infrastructure of London’s beer renaissance.

Update. In Spring 2012 the Thai menu was replaced by a more general pub menu with sandwiches, pies, tapas-style dishes and salads.

Pub trivia. After the Battle of Trafalgar, mortally victorious British admiral Horatio Nelson’s body was shipped to Gibraltar in a cask of brandy, from which sailors allegedly took surreptitious sips, thus the phrase “tappping the admiral” for taking a sneaky drink. As the brandy was laced with camphor and myrrh, I suspect there’s little truth in this picturesque tale, but it provided great inspiration when the new owners of the pub were looking for a name that honoured the original, the Trafalgar, one of numerous Nelson-themed pub names in the area, without sounding too flag waving. Look carefully at the pub’s logo and you’ll see the story depicted graphically, making inventive use of an admiral’s uniform shoulder insignia.

Overground Kentish Town West Underground Chalk Farm, Camden Town, Kentish Town Cycling LCN+ 6A

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