Making the most of your location

For any hotel the bar is an opportunity to shine, showcase and enhance your brand, says Colin Fell, co-owner, Tudor Farmhouse.

Tudor Farmhouse’s core values are quality, value for money and a sense of place. The bar is where we’ve had a great deal of fun bringing this and our 20-mile menu ethos to life; from soft drinks, beers, and cider to spirits, wines and cocktails we have sourced a range mostly from our region that gives guests a real flavour of the local area.

We stock Ragman’s Lane Farm fruit juices from just up the road. All their fruit is grown in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire and made locally. The taste is amazing and we use it across the board from breakfast juice through to our cocktail list.

The range and quality of local beers and ciders that we have access to – within a 20 mile radius – is amazing. The only downside is we are very limited on storage and bar space so have to ration ourselves. We get around this by rotating suppliers but with key brands remaining constant, we tend to always stock beers from Kingstone and Hillside Breweries and cider and perry from Ty Gwyn and Severn Cider.

For us, the key to a successful wine list was to get the basics right first. It should be balanced, offer great quality and value throughout and offer the range of wines guests would expect to see on any quality list.

We were then able to let loose and add some quirky touches that reflect our personality and diversity. Again, local products feature heavily here with wonderful Welsh and English wines, notably from nearby vineyards Tintern Parva and Ancre Hill. We also stock a few unexpected wines such as a dry Hungarian Tokaji and a Slovenian Pinot Grigio, which offer amazing quality and value for money.

For a small hotel we offer a lot of wine-by-the-glass options, around 15. We also match wine flights to our tasting menu – changing them as and when new dishes are added; this allows us to regularly alter our by-the-glass offering and keep stock rotating.

We try to use as many suppliers as possible because you never know where the next interesting wine will come from.

Our recent refurbishment gave us a good reason to expand our cocktail list, which features homegrown spirits from nearby Chase Distillery and Brennan and Brown. We’ve personalised the cocktails by giving them a local twist such as our non-alcoholic Tudor Farmhouse Pappleade – using Ragmans Lane Pear and Apple juice or a Rusty Chicken (our take on a rusty nail using Welsh Penderryn single malt Whisky).