On January 5th 2018, I was with my Dad driving round the M25, heading back from an unsuccessful job interview, I was working as a team leader in a coffee shop for two years and really wanted to do something different, I didn’t know what though.

 

We were chatting about how Gosport could really do with better places to get a wider verity of beer and ale, we love going to the Fallen Acorn taproom and across to Portsmouth to Staggeringly Good, and travelling further afield around Hampshire to brewery taprooms, but we couldn’t get all these great drinks in one place and very few of the new craft beer bars in Portsmouth and Southampton had local ales

 

So, I decided to try and solve this problem. “how hard could it be” we asked ourselves whilst heading south on the M3 back home.

 

By the end of January, I had my personal license to sell alcohol and by early March we had found what I think is the ideal location, just off the end of the main high street in Gosport and easy walking distance to both the ferry and bus station, it’s not very big, but then it is a micro craft beer bar!

 

Planning and licenses followed, training and building, gathering all the funds together (all my own savings) and then the fun of working out what we want to sell, obviously cask ale and we really want Hampshire and Sussex breweries for that, it really is good fun doing research! Me and my Dad have different tastes in beer which complemented our selection process, my Mum likes her gin, so she was tasked with another fun job, the main focus will always be the beer, a small selection of soft drinks and pub snacks, again locally produced, plus a bit of wine and prosecco.

 

With the exception of the floor and electrics (which need professionals) everything else in the bar was done by us

 

That brings us to June 9th 2018, almost 6 months to the day from the initial idea and I opened my own bar, and in answer to our question of “how hard could it be” well I did it!