Sail & Anchor Tavern

Continuing our trend of recent trips down to some of Freo’s finest establishments, we stopped into The Sail & Anchor to start off what turned out to be a fairly large day of bar hopping through Freo, Subi and Wembley. Good thing it was one of our first few pubs because I will admit that the memories start getting a little fuzzy towards the tail end of our Freo adventure and from Subi onwards it’s kind of a big blur. Our time at The Sail & Anchor was definitely not forgotten and won’t be for a long time, all for good reasons.

If you’re not aware, The Sail & Anchor prides itself on being one of Perth’s best beer venues, they even won Beer & Brewer Magazine’s Best Beer Venue for 2011 and there’s good reason why. For starters there are over 40 beers on tap (a mix of local, national and international, craft and mass produced), they have beer engine (a device enabling your beer to pass through a selection of fresh hop flowers – giving your beer an extra hit of delicious hop flavouring) aswell as having three English hand pumps delivering traditional style ales. This place is to beer what Andaluz or Clarences is to wine. Don’t get me wrong I like a good red now and then but seeing a beer list eclipse a wine list definitely puts a smile on my face.

We sat down in the main bar to have our meals, food is ordered from the bar and then brought out from the kitchen. Staff were friendly and helpful at suggesting beers to try. We ordered the (monster) chicken parma and the steak sanga. While we were waiting for our food I thought I’d try a beer from the beer engine, a little creatures pale ale with an extra whack of hops, it was delicious but probably a bit too heavy for the first beer of the day. Our food came out fairly fast considering it was ‘peak hour’ on a Saturday. The parma, as promised, was huge! It was also very tasty, my only criticism is that it could’ve benefited from a bit more napolitana sauce, nevertheless it was still more than satisfying. Matt’s steak sandwich was quite good too, nothing special but a decent steak sandwich as far as they go. The chips were a bit of a let down, they lacked flavour and seemed a tad dry, nothing a bit of tomato sauce couldn’t fix.

Once we finished our meals we headed upstairs for a few more beers and to plot out the rest of our Freo pub adventure for the day. The upstairs balcony is great for watching the buzz on Freo’s busy south terrace and most of it is a non-smoking area which is good. Value-wise the pub is pretty good, drinks are quite good value for money considering the range they have and the care with which they’re poured, most pints were around the $10 mark. The food was reasonably priced too, accurately reflecting its quality, decent pub grub, nothing fancy and it’s not advertised as anything else. I’d be over the moon if The Sail & Anchor was my local, good atmosphere, decent food and most importantly an absolutely massive (and frequently changing) range of beers.