Things are much more regional than that - Oxford is right on the edge of Fuller's territory in terms of their pubs. However they're pretty widely available in supermarkets - if you want to take some back, Waitrose has a particularly close relationship and will usually have things like the porter and Golden Pride, and Vintage when in season (ie about now). Historically the big local brewers were Morrells (beers ended up with Marston, most of the pubs with Greene King) and Morland of Abingdon (bought by Greene King). So as you can see a lot of the pubs have ended up with Greene King, who make soso beer (although controversially Abbot did get a prize at the last GBBF) and more importantly don't keep it that well in general. Fortunately they usually make it clear on the sign that it's a Greene King pub (not always true of some of the other chains) so you can walk on by...
The thing with cask beer, particularly trad brown beer, is it's so fragile and throughput is critical - a beer can be enthralling at 7pm on a Friday night, but a pint from the same cask at 11am on a Tuesday can be dead. So bear that in mind, although if you're only here for a weekend then that is less of an issue. But November is one of the quietest months for pubs - the weather is usually some of the worst of the year, and people are saving for Christmas. One tip at a quiet time is to discretely look over the bar at the driptrays to see which beer has the most throughput.
Beer quality is also hugely dependent on skill in the cellar, so a place that is good for beer can go "bad" overnight due to a change in publican or supply arrangements. So be wary of recommendations that are even 6 months old, they can be out of date. And don't believe any opening times in third-party sources likes CAMRA guides, the pub's Facebook is the only reliable source of opening times and even then not always - things got particularly bad during Covid-19 but have settled somewhat since. The CAMRA Good
Beer Guide (voted by CAMRA members, 2025 edition has just come out, not to be confused with the pay-to-play Good
Pub Guide) is a good starting point, but you're lucky that Oxford is the sort of place that has a pretty active local branch and for beer quality I would stick to
the shortlists for their Pubs of the Year :
City : The Grapes, Lamb & Flag, Mason’s Arms (Headington), Rose & Crown, Royal Blenheim, White Hart (Headington), White Hart (Wolvercote), White Rabbit
Outlying : Abingdon Arms (Beckley), Brewery Tap (Abingdon), Broad Face (Abingdon), Crafty Pint (Witney), Eagle Tavern (Witney), King’s Arms (Kidlington)
The Blenheim and the (former Morland, so it's a real pub and not a shed in an industrial park) Brewery Tap are the current champions. I hadn't realised Titanic had got down that far - I'd say that (given you should get a good one there) their Plum Porter is probably the kind of thing you are thinking of. It's a cult favourite that has spawned a whole genre of dark-fruit-in-dark-beers that you just don't really get in the US. Some people think it's too synthetic, but it's perfect for a wet November night by the fire. The rest of the Titanic range is a bit meh - the cherry dark is a decent attempt to create another hit like Plum Porter, Anchor's OK and I've a soft spot for the seldom-brewed Lifeboat which is a sort of tawny bitter - but if you're only passing through then Plum Porter is the one to have. They share the Blenheim with White Horse - Show Pony and Black Beauty are probably the picks there.
The CAMRA branch have a slightly out of date (2022) map of the main city centre pubs :
https://oxford.camra.org.uk/wordpre...2/10/City-centre-pubs-with-times-Oct-2022.pdf
The Eagle & Child is the famous one where Tolkien used to hang out with CS Lewis and others, it's been closed since the pandemic but is meant to be opening some time soon, which would normally mean either in time for the Christmas trade or not until Easter. The Lamb & Flag is also good for literary connections if that's your thing, Thomas Hardy and Graham Greene.
The pretty pubs tend to be owned by the big chains which doesn't normally correlate with the best beer or cellarmanship. And Oxford for me doesn't quite hit the spot - lots of perfectly nice pubs, but they tend to have been either gentrified or touristified-into-pastiche, they don't quite have the character of say York. But the
CAMRA list of heritage interiors is useful if you're looking for "pretty" pubs somewhere you don't know - in Oxford there's the Bear, the Rose & Crown and King's Arms.
If you're there for the weekend then for "pub experience" rather than necessarily "best beer", you want to have a bit of a walk around late Sunday morning - ideally out in the countryside but in town will do - and then go to a nice pub for Sunday lunch (the heritage list can be great for finding pretty ones out in the country). It's a thing.
You probably won't have time, but if you want to experience the full range of modern British pubgoing then you should try and find a
micropub converted from an old shop. Oxford's too prosperous to have many, but if you're in Headington the Tile Shop looks a classic example of the genre. They tend to be very stripped down and tiny, so you have to talk to people, they're not places to bury your head in your phone.
Unfortunately Taylor beers are quite fussy, they need careful cellaring and conditioning time which they seldom get in pubs that don't specialise in them - and more time requires more space, which city centre cellars tend not to have. Also Landlord has become the kind of beer that gets bought on its reputation by pubs that don't specialise in cask, and then doesn't get kept particularly well. To be fair, Taylor's are one of the few breweries that actually goes round monitoring pubs outside its estate, but it's tough when a pub doesn't really care about cellaring. It's possible there's somewhere in Oxford that's known for its Landlord in the way that say the Bricklayer’s Arms by Putney Bridge in London is. I don't know, but I fear it's unlikely. It'll probably be OK though, enough to give you an idea.
Oxford is generally south of the sparkler divide, but if you see a lineup of handpulls with the odd sparkler on for the northern beers then that's a good indication of a publican that gives a damn. Very rare down south though.
The SIBA (BA equivalent) awards give you a pretty good idea of what the good breweries are, even if you probably won't find a lot of the specific beers which will have been and gone. Oxfordshire sits awkwardly on the boundary between the Midlands and southeast, neither of which annoyingly have their keg results on a convenient page so you'll have to do with the
national ones for keg but these are their cask winners:
http://beercomp.barsbank.com/?page_id=6094
http://beercomp.barsbank.com/?page_id=6161
One brewery I would look out for is Salopian, which don't get nearly enough credit for their relentless high quality cask - over the last decade or so they've averaged over 1 medal/year at GBBF with something like 6 different beers without ever quite winning the big one, no other brewery comes close. Darwin's Origin is the epitome of modern bitter (or at least, before the haze bros took over...), Shropshire Gold is a great beer for downing by the gallon.
The two star keg breweries locally are Siren and Elusive, neighbours on the same trading estate. Siren won CAMRA's Champion Beer of Britain with Broken Dream, a 6.5% lactose coffee stout which you will rarely see on cask (nice one CAMRA) but definitely worth seeking out, particularly in rubbish weather. Elusive are instantly recognisable for their branding which is inspired by 1980s computer games, and their owner Andy Parker is sort of the British Jamil Zainasheff, a vociferous supporter of homebrewing and in fact recently wrote a book on homebrewing with Jamil for CAMRA. Oregon Trail WCIPA is their big hit, which I guess won't be too new for you other than you can sometimes find it on cask. It is great though.
Talking of volumes - remember that an imperial pint is 19.2 US floz so a half is just under 10US floz, but that sort of correlates with the lower ABVs. You don't get the range of serving sizes that you do in the US, legally draught beer has to be served in multiples of a third or half a pint. In general trad beer under 5% only comes in halves and pints, craft/keg places going into higher ABVs will tend to serve in multiples of a third, but it's not hard and fast. One side effect is that tasting paddles are not very common - they will be clearly advertised if they are offered. Pubs are generally fine with giving you tasters if it's not busy, but don't be that guy wanting to waste staff time with tasters on a heaving Friday night. In general if there's three or fewer handpumps then you're expected to know what you want and drink it by the pint, any more than that and there's more of a culture of "taste" rather than "maximum volume of alcohol" so it's fine to have halves and ask for tasters if it's quiet. Be a bit wary of places with say 10 cask beers, with a few exceptions they generally don't have the throughput to maintain quality. What little culture we had of taking draught out in growlers etc was killed off by recent tax changes intended to support pubs(!), but you can take out smallpack, and there's a bit of a subgenre developed of bottle shops that do a bit of crafty keg on draught as well.
Finally some reading - this series of articles from Jeff Alworth just before Covid-19 gives a good overview of the British scene from a US perspective :
https://www.beervanablog.com/beervana/2019/9/10/juicy-bitter-on-cask
There some hardy souls drinking in every pub in the Good Beer Guide -
"Retired" Martin Taylor has completed it and is a great chronicler of smalltown Britain, Simon "
BRAPA" Everitt (
old site) is just over halfway through. Both well worth a read for those wanting their fix of British pubs by proxy.
The guides provided by the US military authorities for GIs in WWII are kinda fun - they describe a different world in many ways, but about 25% of it still holds :
https://www.johnbarber.com/wp-conte...s-for-American-Servicemen-in-Britain-1942.pdf
.
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- and she told me they had tapped it just last night, on line with my suspicion it might be a matter of "age". (Although I do not know about the state of the cask at St Aldate's.)
