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Good Beer Guide

Good Beer Guide 2025

Published September 2024

The Good Beer Guide is the UK’s best-selling beer and pub guide, and it continues to be the gold standard for finding the best places to enjoy a good pint.

Over 4,500 pubs, bars, and clubs are selected for the guide each year by unpaid volunteers from all over the country. This means that the guide is based on the real-world experiences of beer drinkers, and it’s the best resource for finding pubs that serve high-quality real ale.

Each entry in the guide includes a short description of the pub, as well as a list of the regular beers that are available. The beers are linked to the brewery section of the guide, so you can learn more about the local beers that are on offer. The guide also includes some of the most popular national beers.

The Good Beer Guide is compiled by consumers for consumers, and it’s the most independent and complete guide to finding good beer in the UK.

Nottingham CAMRA’s Entries in The Good Beer Guide

Nottingham Branch contributes to the Nottinghamshire section of the book. 

How does Nottingham CAMRA select pubs for The Good Beer Guide?

To be selected each listed pub must consistently serve real ale (and real cider if offered) of good quality. To help us do this, members collect beer quality information through CAMRA’s National Beer Scoring System (NBSS) in which they are asked to contribute scores for pubs throughout the year.

It is easy to score your beers. Log in to CAMRA’s online pub guide, WhatPub (http://whatpub.com), using your membership number and the same password that you use to enter the CAMRA national website. Search for the pub on the main page; (Smartphone users can use the ‘Pubs near me’ tool) and the using the ‘Submit Beer scores’ tab, enter a score for each beer that you drank. Using the Smartphone version you can score your beer in the pub while you drink it!

Having collected hundreds of beer scores over the year, a report is generated giving the average for each pub with a confidence factor based on the number of scores received. The Branch Committee uses this data to draw up a list of eligible pubs with the highest average score, for each sub-division of the branch’s geographical area.

You can help us with the selection process

To make this work better, we need many more members to enter their scores. We value the opinions of all members whether active or not and we need as many opinions as possible for as many pints in as many pubs as possible. This is so we can have confidence in the statistics. We ask members to score the pubs continually not just once or twice. NBSS works across the country not just in our branch. If you are not a member but would like your opinions of beer quality in pubs to count, then please join CAMRA!

If you manage a Pub within the Nottingham Branch area and are interested in promoting the Good Beer Guide and would like more information on the scheme or supporting materials for display in your Pub, please e-mail the Membership Secretary; 

membership@nottinghamcamra.org