A former retail manager, Alan has worked in pubs now for 13 years. Within a year of taking on The Brunswick , it was unrecognisable, winning CAMRA Pub of the Year for two consecutive years!
Best memory: "Our multiple wins of the CAMRA Pub of the Year awards"
Fave beer: "Tiger"
Started with Everards: 2016
A few weeks after Alan took over the troubled Brunswick Inn in Derby he attended a meeting of the local CAMRA group. Alan bided his time and stood up to make an announcement.
Hello, he said. He was Alan Pickersgill. The new landlord at the Brunswick. And the room fell silent. The Brunswick - one of the oldest pubs in the city and formerly a respected hostelry offering a good selection of real ales - had fallen on tough times.
“I told them what I wanted to do, how I’d go about it, and I ended by saying: ‘I want this pub to be the best pub in Derby inside three years’.”
And people didn’t just scoff, says Alan, shaking his head at the memory. They openly laughed. “They laughed me out of the room.” One of the top men at CAMRA took Alan to one side. “You won’t do it, pal,” he said. “It’s too big a job.”
Alan returned to the pub, a stone’s throw from Derby’s railway station on Station Terrace, and set about proving them wrong. It’s not easy turning a failing pub into a successful one. “But it’s not rocket science either,” says Alan. They’d done it before. You start at the beginning, he says. You get the basics right.
Within a year, The Brunswick Inn was unrecognisable. The Brunswick didn’t just win Pub of the Year 12 months after Alan took over. It won the coveted award the following year, too. It’s the only boozer to win the crown back-to-back.
The pub now serves food and has won back its place in The Good Pub Guide. It now offers 25 different ales and was awarded the 'Best for Cider' title at the Great British Pub Awards 2019.
A former retail manager, Alan has worked in pubs now for 13 years, “I love it. I work long hours - six days a week, 14 hours a day - but my work is my life. It’s all consuming. We’ve moved around a bit - but I think that’s it for us now. I think we’ve found our pub.”
And the chap from CAMRA, the one who said he didn’t think they’d be able to turn the Brunswick around, is now something of a regular.
“He comes in quite a lot. Whenever I see him, I like to remind him of that first meeting. ‘Remember that time I said I would turn this pub around and you all laughed at me?’ I say.”
