Welcome to the Suffolk Real Ale Guide, brought to you by the local branches of the Campaign for Real Ale. On this site you will find information about every pub in our county, although naturally we are more interested in the 685 pubs which sell Real Ale so they are covered in more detail than the 107 which only sell fizzy rubbish. We also include a small number of selected shops where you will be able to buy bottles of craft-brewed Suffolk ales to savour when you can't get to the pub. For historical interest, we also include as much information as we have about 1676 closed pubs. We also include public transport information (bus routes and nearby stations) to help you get to pubs without driving, as well as a page of useful local public transport links. And for visitors to our county, we have a page containing some useful tourism-related links.
Translations of our pages into 21 other languages (through Google Translation) are available; click on the relevant flag at the top of the page. While no automatic translation is perfect, this system seems to work reasonably well, though navigation can be patchy.
We are trying to positively identify a number of old pubs. If you might be able to help us, please have a look at the Help needed page.
We also have a Pub history group, based at the Ipswich Dove Street Inn, which you may want to visit if you are interested in old pubs.
Unlike most online "pub guides" this isn't just a list of pubs copied from the 'phone book with an invitation for its visitors to fill in the details. And it doesn't list pubs as open when they closed or changed their names years ago. Instead it's a guide compiled by local CAMRA members who have visited each pub and reported what beers and facilities it offers. If we haven't checked a pub recently, we're honest enough to tell you we might be a bit out of date and importantly, we tell you when we last checked its opening hours. And with roughly 1500 CAMRA members around the county who can report back on changes, we hope to offer the most up-to-date and accurate guide possible. What's more, we even have photographs of all the pubs, something no other guide offers.
Each pub's page includes information about its facilities along with photographs and an interactive map which shows its location along with the other pubs in the same town or village. If there's a railway station in the area, this is shown on the map as well. (Interactive maps and a few other features need a modern browser with Javascript enabled, but this site is designed to still be usable without.)
You will also find details of all of the county's breweries, with up-to-date lists of the beers they brew (courtesy of Beermad.)
You can find Suffolk pubs in several ways:
- Type a place name in the text box to the left. As you type, a list of matching places will appear; you can click on the one you want to go straight to its page.
- Pick a town or village from the drop-down menu to the left.
- Select from the list of all pubs in the county.
- Find a list of pubs in a particular postcode area (from as wide an area as that covered by the first two letters of a postcode to an exact match for a complete postcode.)
- Find a list of pubs in a particular licensing authority area.
- Find pubs offering particular facilities.
- Use our interactive county map to navigate your way round Suffolk. Click on "interactive map", above. (Requires Javascript enabled and a recent browser.)
The locations of most pubs on the maps have been checked on the ground, however a small number were generated from postcode data and may not be pin-point accurate. Please refer to the street address to be sure of finding them.