Our branch is responsible for surveying pubs in Tendring for inclusion in the CAMRA Good Beer Guide.
We prefer to make this a year-round activity but it culminates in February each year when we vote for the pubs we want to go into the guide that will be published in October in readiness for the following year.
Pubs are selected on several key factors but most important is beer quality. Beer quality however is so often a barometer of everything else and if a pub keeps a good pint it generally excels at being a pub!
To see details on all pubs in the branch, and others, visit the CAMRA Website Pubs Section.
POTY, Cider POTY and GBG Voting
Since 2026 (for the 2028 Guide) our Good Beer Guide entries have been selected based on beer scores throughout the year. The Pub of the Year shortlist will be based on the top 5 candidate pubs as at our November branch meeting, with voting taking place through to February. If we award a Club of the Year (we haven’t yet), or Cider Pub of the Year the process will be announced to members via our Clubs or Cider officers.
Members can view the full candidate pubs and target pubs lists in the members area of our website.
Beer Scoring
Scores for any pub in the country (but especially ours) can be entered using CAMRA’s website, which uses your national CAMRA login.
This website contains information on how to add a shortcut to the pub search page directly to your home screen once you’re at the site in your web browser.
If you are uncomfortable or unable to use the above site, print off this document which has space for you to enter the details, and hand it to the pubs officer at a branch meeting, or email the details.
Scores are monitored by our pubs officer who will consider whether regular high scores or low scores for pubs should change whether they are included on our top pubs list or not, and discuss any such proposed changes at a branch meeting.
Adopt-a-Pub
Continual monitoring of pubs is an important part of what our branch does. Do they still sell real ale? Or have they recently started? This can only be found out by regular visits.
To help us with this, and in addition to encouraging beer scoring as described above, Tendring CAMRA encourages all branch members to adopt one or more pubs that are near them.
If no scores are recorded for an adopted pub in any three month period, any members that have adopted that pub will get an email to let them know, with a request that they try and pop in and score a beer (or 0 if there aren’t any). Reminder emails will be sent at a minimum of 2 weekly intervals, perhaps longer.
Because popular pubs are scored frequently, it is unlikely that adopting one of those will cause any emails to be generated, so if you are willing to adopt a pub that doesn’t currently sell real ale that would be particularly helpful.
If you don’t want to adopt a particular pub, but still fancy helping, we maintain a TargetPubs document in the branch members section of this website; if you download that it is sorted by when pubs were last scored with those we’d like most help scoring at any given point in time at the top.
To adopt a pub, send your name, the pub name, and your preferred email address for reminders to our pubs officer.