Drinking late is as much a part of the Edinburgh Fringe experience as its theatre, music and comedy. As the festival starts, Tony Naylor searches out the city’s best craft beer bars
It may look like a classic old-school Edinburgh pub (it is, in fact, a painstaking, late-1980s recreation), but the Bow Bar is resolutely forward-thinking when it comes to beer. Beside that mahogany bar – the Bow Bar is also the newly-crowned Dram Magazine Whisky Bar Of The Year – you will find an extensive bottled beer menu, whose contemporary tone is in sharp contrast to the surrounding decor of vintage cigarette advertising and historic pub-trade memorabilia. As well as Belgian and German classics, the menu takes in lesser-spotted craft beers from trendy Scandinavians (Mikkeller, To ØL), US trend-setters (Alesmith, Odell) and the new, creative UK breweries which they have inspired, such as Bear Hug, Elixir and Ticketybrew. Meanwhile, eight cask pumps (three permanents include Alechemy’s Bowhemia Pale and Cromarty’s “new wave pale”, Happy Chappy), and several keg lines dispense beer of a similar seriousness and variety. Bow Bar also runs several, seasonal mini beer festivals. Its summer festival finishes on Sunday 3 August.