Birmingham Mail These guys have been on an epic 32-year pub crawl around the UK.
West Bromwhich based Black Country Ale Tairsters (local dialect for tasters) have visited over 18,000 pubs in that time, travelling all over the place since 1984.
They’re now confident 2016 will see them pass the 300,000-mile barrier, BT News reports.
They started their quest by visiting about 300 ale houses listed on a map issued by Wolverhampton brewer Banks’s, completing the list over ten months.
The organisation’s co-founder Pete Hill, a retired engineer, said:
After Hereford and Worcester we were going to finish up and my dad said ‘Shall we go and do something different? We could go around the coastline of Great Britain and visit every county in England, Scotland and Wales’.
That took four years – we drove right round the coast and stopped at a pub where we could.
PAAnd it didn’t stop there. In 1991 the group toured 12 Midlands counties before going on a seven-year tour of every single pub in Wales.
Mr Hill said:
From here to Nottingham, I have been in every pub. To find a new pub going east we need to get to Cambridgeshire, going north it’s Chester and going south it’d be Swindon.
They are the nearest places where we can ‘register’ a new pub. Just to visit one new pub now is an 180 to 200-mile round trip.
But Mr Hill, whose dad died in 2014 after completing his ambition of ‘conquering’ Wales, thinks they’ll pass the 300,000-mile marker at some point in the near future.
The booze lover, who’s sunk about 43,000 pints during his epic pub tour, added:
I imagine we will pass it (a cumulative 300,000 miles) because we are planning visits to every pub in Nottinghamshire in aid of Nottingham Children’s hospital – with Retford in north Nottinghamshire starting our journey.
I record every type of drink, whether it’s lager, Guinness or the name of a real ale – everything is recorded and we celebrate everything!
The group don’t just do it for fun, they also raise money for various charities, raising around £11,000 during their Wales tour.
Massive pub crawl for charity? Sounds good to me, maybe not today though…
