Different beer each week and great atmosphere helps bring new life to vicarage-turned-pub

One place which has created a buzz is the Olde Vicarage Ale House in Bilbrook, which turned a former vicarage into a pub for lovers of ale in May last year and, since then, has enjoyed becoming a focal point of the community.

The pub is the latest thing in the building, which has previously served as a vicarage and child’s nursery and had been a restaurant and events place prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, a moment in time which led to the demise of the restaurant.

Andy Evans, who has been the mastermind behind the Codsall Beer Festival, said that he and co-owner George Price had met with a few other people to talk about turning it into a micropub, with Andy invited to be the person responsible for choosing the beer.

Mr Evans says he’s worked in pubs previously and gained a lot of experience from running the beer festival, so feels the time was right to do it.

He explains: “In January 2023, we all got together and because of my history running the beer festival for the last eight years, I was asked to do the beer side, which meant looking at the beers and choosing the right ones for the pub.

“I’d always wanted to open a micropub anyway for about seven or eight years, so it kind of ticked the boxes for me, and because there’s a few of us, it was less of a financial commitment and not a burden on me to do all the work and look after the place.

“It kind of scratched an itch that I wanted to do, so we got to work last April and converted the building into the pub in about seven weeks, taking it from what it had been to the pub it is today.”

Mr Evans says the team wanted to keep the character of the pub and make it look like it had been there for years, so purchased a lot of furniture from closed-down pubs and on Facebook marketplace.

He recalls: “Some of the pumps and other stuff, we bought from other pubs as we wanted to make it look like it wasn’t a new place and I think there’s hardly anything new in the pub, apart from some pumps, the pipes and a few lighting fixtures.”

In terms of the beers on offer, Mr Evans said he and another colleague were responsible for the beers served and said that the pub had tried to be unique by frequently rotating its beers.

“What we try to do is rotate all our casks every week and we very rarely repeat a beer, so it could be one week, we have Oakham Pendulum on, and people say it’s great and can we get it back, to which we say that we can, but we don’t repeat our cask beers very often.

“We try to have something different each week, like a different brewery each week, and we use an app recommended by CAMRA called Pub Watch Real Finder, which we use to update with what beers we have on and when they are finished.

“It means anyone who has the app can see whether we’ve changed our cask ale or gone to cast beer or something like that, so people who like to try different ales and beers can come to us.”

Mr Evans says the pub has had more than 200 different ales since the pub opened, with six to eight beers a week, plus a few more if there is an event on.

The pub also offers a range of bar snacks, including pork pies from Michael Kirks in Wolverhampton, cheese and onion and ham cobs and a range of scotch eggs from a company in Stafford, with flavours including balti, chilli and black pudding flavour.

Mr Evans says the pub is special because of the beer and the variety of it, but also because it has become a live music hub, with plenty of musicians coming by to play.

He says: “Not many pubs do what we do as they tend to keep a few beers that the locals like, such as HPA and Golden Glow, whereas we rotate our beers quite a lot.

“We also have live music twice a month, with some great solo acoustic artists coming by to play, such as Amelia Evans and Matthew James, and next month, we’re bringing in a singer-songwriter session where anyone who writes and sings their own songs can come by.

“I think having live music always attracts people, plus we do a lot of events to promote activities in Bilbrook, such as a quiz for a boy with cancer, so we’re very much a community-based business and we’re here if anyone wants to do something.”