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Two nights ago, as part of our brief national tour, Julian and I visited the Moxy hotel bar and it was frankly a positive and well thought through operation (the hotel, not Julian and I). They’d made an effort to work through the service, the environment and the drinks selection. Last night, we tried the Hilton Metropole bar to add some variety to proceedings. This is the slightly dirty environment that greeted us and it’s fair to say when I looked at the online food and drinks menu, I was not surprised and delighted. Well, I was surprised actually, but not for positive reasons.

The drinks selection was very poor and I don’t think I’ve pitched my expectations too high here. Even Travelodge, Ibis Budget, the YHA and Premier Inn offer some form of craft beer options, even if just in cans. The Hilton is a 795 room hotel, so they can easily offer a micropub, a whisky bar and indeed anything else they wanted. In this hotel, they’ve gone for some generic keg beers, with the nearest vague effort being Camden Pale. There were no real ales, craft beers, ales in bottles and no nod towards anything local. It feels like it’s a venue which seeks to make no contribution towards the local community in terms of its food and drink supplies, and that runs across all of their menus in the hotel.

The pricing is also hideous, a half pint is not much off the price of a full pint, which is just unnecessary greed and promotes excessive drinking. Pints are around £7 to £10 each. The service was clumsy, Julian’s pint was short measured and when they topped it up, they topped it up with the wrong beer. It’s that entire level of attention here that was evident throughout the service.

In fairness to the team members, who seemed to be doing their very best, the venue was cleaned up during our long visit. The manager and team members were apologising to customers as their order system had gone wrong and they couldn’t track orders to tables, which all felt a little sub-optimal.

This was the nearest drinkable beer or cider available, and it’s OK, but any hotel of any size should be doing more than this. Let’s read the exciting text on the Hilton’s website:

“We have specially selected craft beers, cocktails, and wines.”

That’s very likely written with AI, the Oxford Comma is an indicator but not a guarantee of that, but the rest of the text has an AI fake feel to it. But they do not have specially selected craft beers, let’s just leave it at that, unless a manager really believes that Becks is something they’ve specially selected for its quality.

As mentioned, the team members were evidently doing their best so I have no negative comment about that, although I suspect there are some training issues that could be easily resolved. However, the general product was horrendous, if they’re going for premium pricing then they need to keep the venue cleaner, there has to be a choice here about their aspirations. Thinking about the hotels I’ve visited over recent months, the beer selection here is one of the weakest and, on a wider level, for a venue of this size to entirely disengage with local suppliers is terrible. If I might humour my two loyal blog readers, this situation is really sub-optimal, I’m reminded of the number of Accor hotels that deliberately stock local beers, ciders, spirits and soft drinks, because they are proud of the community that they serve.

Julian and I are on tour at the moment, I’m volunteering at GBBF all week which is being held at the Birmingham NEC and Julian is practicing his drinking (I accept he doesn’t need much mroe practice). After the festival closed for the day, there aren’t really that many options at the NEC (well, no options) so we decided to pop to the Moxy Hotel bar despite me staying at the Hilton and Julian at the Premier Inn.

How sweet. We weren’t sure whether the hotel bar would be open, but it transpired that it was open until 02:00 and I think they’d only just finished serving food at 22:00.

Moxy Hotels are the Marriott chain aimed at millennials, so I consider that to be me, so I obviously liked it. I’m a bit confined to the Accor brand so I’ve never stayed at this chain, but I like the general concept and laid-back approach that’s offered here.

There were a fair few beer festival customers about, I’ve just chosen photos without people in them.

Motivational messaging.

I like this a lot and it’s designed to be a common area for guests, or indeed anyone, where they can work, drink, eat or relax. These things can easily slip into formulaic, but it seemed to be on the right side of quirky to me.

It’s design driven and I did wonder whether my excitement might fall when I reached the bar and saw the beer list.

It transpired that there were two beers from the Attic Brew Co and they’re an exhibitor at GBBF, so I assume they’ve had the foresight to go and place some of their cans in the hotel. This met my expectations as I didn’t want the excitement of a late-night Carling.

For the hard of hearing.

The Intuition from the Attic Brew Co and I rather liked this, tastes of stone fruit, juicy and quite punchy.

The Rollin Waves from the Attic Brew Co, I didn’t like this quite as much as it was rather dry, but there was still plenty of flavour.

The Gold Brummie from the local Birmingham Brewing Co, which was hoppy, light and fluffy (the beer, not Julian).

I think this was really quite an agreeable place. Their beer list is as long as their wine list, they’ve making an effort to try and not limit themselves to generic beers and the place did feel on-trend and comfortable. And it’s a handy place for anyone to visit after GBBF closes in the evening, or indeed, after any NEC event.