My visit to The Inn Beer Shop (Southport)

I found out about The Inn Beer Shop in Southport a few months back when searching around for decent bottled ale shops close to Ormskirk.  Last weekend I finally managed to get a chance to get down there and check it out.  The shop is run by Peter Bardsley (brother of Paul who runs the impressive Southport Brewery) who kindly posed for the photo below.

Bottled ales fully line one side of the shop with cafe-style seating at the front and pub-style seating at the back (you can drink your select bottle in the shop for just 50p more).  They also have a cask pump which was serving Southport Brewery's Sandgrounder - I had a cheeky half whilst browsing the shelves of ale.  They have an impressive selection of German & Belgium beers as well as stocking a good selection of local (Southport, George Wright, Moorhouse's amongst others) & national ales. There were some old regulars such as Hobgoblin & Black Sheep but plenty more that I'd not heard of to ensure that each trip would be worthwhile.

They also had a very impressive range of stouts and porters filling a lot of the shelves - I can only imagine that seasonality plays an important part in Peter's stocking decisions, something I personally liked very much - this will add further interest to future visits.

I was particularly drawn to the over-sized bottles (550ml) of Samuel Smith's ales, and so I picked out two of these from the shop's selection, as well as a few others:

The Inn Beer Shop can be found near the roundabout right at the north end of Lord Street, Southport, see The Inn Beer Shop (Southport) on a map for more directions.