A few weeks back, we were trying to find a new venue to meet some friends for a drink. We wanted somewhere with ambiance, a good range of beers for all tastes and somewhere not in the middle of nowhere or in the awful s**t holes of London.
After racking our brains and coming up empty, we did the very modern thing and asked various AI LLM’s – Claude, ChatGPT and Manus. With the criteria of “Good Craft Beers (including Sours), Ambiance, Outdoor space and decent Transport links.
Each AI came up with a small list of various places and valid reasons as to why. Amongst them were some crossovers (mostly places we had been before) or a bit too far out of the way. The only one that fit all criteria was Mother Kelly’s in Bethnal Green.
On Saturday night we headed in that direction, finding that the transport wasn’t that great! Google Maps suggested 2 trains, 3 buses and a helicopter. Instead, one of us walked and the other biked.
We found our way to the venue, which is in a rather weird place, behind a Petrol Station down a dark cobblestone alley where a few railway arches have been gentrified with a lot of fairy lights.
When we got there, our friends were already there, so while he went in to greet them, she chained her bike up to the bike rails just outside of the bench seating area. There are four or five venues that share the same outdoor space; it was pretty busy with quite a lot of people outdoors enjoying the warm evening.
You enter through slide-away glass doors to find a large open space with metal container-box walls, an arched ceiling, wooden floors, and long wooden benches and seats. On the right was a wall covered in graffiti and a couple of posters, etc.
Along the left-hand side is a row of fridges, which all the AI’s said were overflowing with sour beers. On tap were 22 beers: 6 Lagers, 2 Wines, 1 Cocktail, 2 Porters, 2 Sours, 3 Ciders, 4 Pale Ales, and 2 IPAs – of which one of each of these categories was not on for the night.
For us, a lot of these options were either disgusting, nondescript, or undrinkable for us personally (Allergies and whatnot).
We took our seats inside and perused the beer menu. So this left us looking at the fridges and the way more expensive beers.
In all, we ended up having a few drinks, nothing overly remarkable, but it was pretty decent tasting if expensive!
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