If you’re a regular user of pubs I’m probably someone you’d refer to as a ‘transient’ pubgoer. I enjoy variety—the spice of life, as it were. Stimulation, for me, comes from visiting lots of different pubs, and here in Manchester I am spoiled for choice.

It’s easy enough for me to hop from Café Beermoth, to The City Arms, to Bundobust, to head over to The Salisbury for yet another Old Peculier. And if I jump back on a train or bus to where I live in Stockport, I can visit The Magnet, Ye Olde Vic, The Petersgate Tap, Runaway Brewery… you get the picture. 

But it’s also part of a problem in that this desire I have to visit and experience lots of places often leaves me lacking the feeling of being grounded. And when you think about it, that’s one of the key reasons pubs exist in the first place. Thankfully, one pub, just down the road from me in the Stockport borough of Heaton Chapel, seems to have changed all of that. Here I have found a place where the staff know my name (and insist, for some reason, on always calling me by my full name), where they know what I want to drink before I order it, and where I can sit down and be in full conversation with other regulars within seconds. Here is somewhere I feel safe and welcome, always.

The place? Heaton Hops, a tiny pub (you might call it a ‘micropub’ but I find it diminutive so it's not a term I like to use) just off the busy A6 that’s nestled into a neighbourhood that has collected a multitude of similar small, independent businesses. A genuine community. The pub was founded in 2014 by husband and wife Damian O’Shea and Charlotte Winstone, initially as a bottle shop that sold a limited amount of beer to drink on premise. The needs of the community, however, dictated that it should be a pub first, and a bottle shop second, and so that’s what it became; home to eight lines of keg beer, and three hand pulls serving immaculately conditioned pints of real ale. 

Me being me, in my fondness for this place I decided to pitch an article about it to BEER, the quarterly magazine for the Campaign for Real Ale I write for relatively frequently. The piece will be featured in the Summer 2025 edition, and so if you’re a member you’ll be receiving that around the beginning of June. Listening back to the interview recently, I thought wouldn’t Damian, essentially the landlord of my local, make a great podcast guest. And so I’ve edited that recording into a nice, half-hour interview for you to enjoy.

Damian and I chat about Heaton Hops itself, and how he came to own and run his own pub. But we also get stuck into what’s happening in terms of small, independent hospitality businesses at the moment, and what kind of beer gets Damian out of bed these days while also indulging ourselves in a bit of nostalgia for the early craft beer days. It’s a fun conversation, and one I hope you enjoy. 

If you’d like to visit Heaton Hops (which is also featured in my book, Manchester’s Best Beer Pubs and Bars) you can find it at 7 School Lane, Stockport, SK4 5DE. You might even find me propping up the bar.

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