The Brickmakers Arms, Swanmore - 25th October 2018

Kevin kindly organised a visit to The Brickmakers Arms and we all enjoyed it.



The charming manageress, Selena,  offered us a choice of 4 ales, which we all found to be very acceptable.



There was a choice of 2 pies: Chicken & Tomato (chosen by 2 of us), or Steak Stout & Stilton (chosen by the rest of us). Both came with Mashed Potato and Mixed Vegetables.
The Chicken & Tomato looked like this:



The Steak Stout & Stilton looked like this:



We liked both pies. There was a range of puddings available:



The Chocolate Brownie looked good.



The pies were £13.50, and the ales were around £3.80/pint. Good value for money, and a very commendable effort.

Scores (max of 5 in each category, 25 overall)

• Pastry         4.62
• Filling        4.68
• Beer           4.73
• Ambience  4.42
• Value         4.67
• Total        23.12

Thank you to everyone at the Brickmakers Arms for their hospitality and thank you to Kevin for organising it.

The Square Cow, Wickham - 27th September 2018

This venue had previously been the Wickham Wine Bar and was opened as a pub earlier this year, so as it is local and a new pub we thought we should try out their pie offering.
So we arrived in Wickham by bus with some of our more energetic friends walking part of the way and then joining us on the bus.

We were very pleased to find 3 beers on tap from one of our favourite local breweries, Bowman Ales:
Yumi - 3.9%, Meon Valley Bitter - 3.9% and Quiver - 4.3%. So we set to the beers while awaiting the pie to be cooked.

The pie was a Steak and Guinness homemade pie which had been prepared as one large pie to serve all of us. This type of pie is always our preference as you get less pastry but more filling!

The pie was served with chips or mash and a good selection of vegetables.

The concensus was that the pastry was good but the meat in the filling was a little tough and would maybe had benefited from longer cooking. However, they were polished off and we then contemplated  a fine selection of desserts.

The selection was so tempting and most of us opted for a dessert. We then had time to kill before the next bus back to Bishops Waltham so what else could we do but have another beer!
We all got the bus back with no one electing to walk, surprise, surprise!

Scores (max of 5 in each category, 25 overall)

• Pastry         4.32
• Filling        3.64
• Beer           4.76
• Ambience  4.56
• Value         4.48
• Total        21.76

Thank you to everyone at the Square Cow for their hospitality and a most enjoyable lunch.