Pub awards coming soon!

Some of you may remember we have some unfinished business celebrating pubs around our area that our members really like, with a number of awards due to be announced and presented back in April – except the Covid-19 lockdown shut all the pubs towards the end of March. It didn’t really feel appropriate to be celebrating closed pubs at the time, especially when the award winning publicans were worried they’d just lost their livelihood. There are still some serious issues about pubs surviving, such as pubs with high rateable values not qualifying for a government grant along with some property landlords and pub companies still demanding rent on a closed pub and nationally CAMRA is still working with various trade bodies on campaigns for those issues. Locally though, some pubs have been open part time for take home food and drink (we’ve listed all the ones we know of on WhatPub), some have taken the opportunity to get a refurbishment done and the signs are we are only now a few weeks away to some pubs being able to reopen, albeit with social distancing arrangements in force, so we think it is about time to start being positive about pubs again and looking forward to once again being able to drink in them! Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be announcing our Pub of the Year awards. Our members were invited to vote for their favourite pubs in each area of the Sheffield & District CAMRA branch area (North, South, West, City Centre, Kelham Island and Derbyshire) then our team of judges all individually visited each area winner to rate various aspects of the pub in order to declare an overall Sheffield Pub of the Year and District Pub of the Year. This was all concluded back in March. Before then there is also the matter of our April Pub of the Month award, voted for by our members, which hasn’t been presented yet. This will hopefully take place on Saturday, unfortunately we can’t go to the pub to see the presentation so we’ll be posting a short video online instead which you can watch at home with a beer (don’t forget a number of pubs and local breweries are doing off sales or home delivery!). Cheers!