Reasons To Be Cheerful #10

(If you're wondering what this is all about, click here.)

The Anchor Inn

When I first moved to Birmingham last September, there was one imperative that motivated me more than any other: to find a decent pub within easy reach of our city centre flat.

Despite having spent increasing amounts of time over here over the course of the previous three years, I still hadn't found a good, honest, unpretentious boozer. The city centre itself often bizarrely resembles a ghost town of an evening because of the lack of drinking establishments. Those that there are are all crowded together on Broad Street, a fuckbunch of awful neon-lit hellholes where weekend revellers go to sweat on and rub flesh with one another, all at great cost.

(Is it a sign of age to want to find somewhere that you're not pressed up against someone's armpit clutching a £3 bottle of Stella? Perhaps, but I don't give a shit.)

So thank goodness for The Anchor Inn in Digbeth, Birmingham's Irish quarter - not the place to go if you're out to impress your companions with glitz, glamour and style, but a must if you're at all a fan of the humble public house.

The Anchor is a three-time winner of Birmingham CAMRA's Pub Of The Year award (following their most recent success the owners handed it on to The Bartons Arms, #2 in the Reasons To Be Cheerful series), and so unsurprisingly offers a plentiful array of real ales at all times, in addition to holding regular beer festivals showcasing the best produce of small local breweries as well as the odd beer imported from afar. Don't expect common-or-garden Chardonnay or Merlot if you ask for wine, either - it's flavoured fruit wines or nowt.

Best of all, though, and my particular favourite is the hand-pumped Thatchers Cheddar Valley Cider - 6%, flat and the same nuclear orange colour as Tango. If you're lucky you might find a bit of apple floating in your pint. A few of those and speech becomes a challenge.

The first few times we went to The Anchor, something always happened.

The very first time, on my birthday, we went for a last orders pint and ended up getting regaled with tall tales by a nutter from Stockton.

The second time was on a pub crawl with fellow Birmingham bloggers Kenny, Phill, Andy and Donna, when we discovered the delights of Craic and Kenny had the pleasure of being serenaded by a rather camp gentleman singing 'Fly Me To The Moon'.

The third time a friend and I accidentally hustled a couple of locals on the pool table despite being four or five sheets to the wind on the aforementioned cider.

There was also the time when a night on the cider resulted in a friend's girlfriend vomiting orangely all over his car in the vicinity of Walsall the next day.

I could quite happily take up residence at the bar there - a pub I can now almost call home.

And of course they sell pork scratchings.