Our Story
Two friends, a building firm, and a Grade II free house they had no intention of changing.
It started with the school run…
Andrew Powell and Max King have been friends for more than ten years, since their children started at the same school. A landscaping company sideline grew into a partnership at construction firm, Steel Build Masters, that they still run together, and years of working side by side taught them they made a good team.
They were keeping an eye out for buildings with potential when the Brewery Tap came up for sale. They knew it the way you know a good local, a handsome country pub with a quiet name for its Sunday roasts. For Max, owning a pub had been a dream since he was a boy. They went for it.
Custodians, not owners
From the start, the instinct was to protect the place rather than reinvent it. The Brewery Tap is Grade II listed, which settles the question of sweeping change anyway, but Andrew and Max never wanted to.
Andrew and Max talk about themselves more as custodians rather than owners, minding the place for whoever comes after them and keeping its character intact. They’ve watched too many pubs scrub that character away, sanded back to a tasteful blank, and thinks it a small loss every time. Their instinct runs the other way.
The brewery across the road
The pub takes its name from Rayment's Pelham Brewery, which brewed just across the road from 1860 until 1987 and poured its ales here, for well over a century. Andrew and Max have been quietly hunting down old records, signs and fittings through the history society and the auction listings, the better to put that story back into the rooms, so anyone who walks in feels they have sat down inside a piece of it.
And there is one plan, mentioned almost in passing, that tells you where their heads are. They are in talks with local brewers about reviving the brewery's old BBA and getting it back on the pumps, in the pub that first served it. A village that lost its brewery in 1987 might yet get its beer back.
Fussy, in the best way
The food is in the hands of two chefs who have cooked alongside each other for years. It is classic pub food done well, with seasonal plates and specials moving around the edges to keep the regulars curious.
The lads are refreshingly blunt about being fussy, not about variety but about quality, and they have happily eaten their cooking for years, which is recommendation enough. What they want, in the end, is simple. That you feel among friends the moment the door shuts behind you, and that you eat well enough to come back.