You're in an unfamiliar town on a Tuesday afternoon with an hour to kill before the train. You want a real ale pub with decent food — not a sports bar, not a chain, not somewhere that serves the same four Carling variants as everywhere else. You have no idea where to start.
Except you've been here before. Three years ago, you rated a place two streets over. You just can't remember the name, and the pub is nowhere on the map you're looking at because you entered it in a note app that you've since deleted.
The database should have that.
The Classification Fields That Filter a Real Pub
Pub type is the first filter. The taxonomy matters: traditional free house, gastro pub, brewery tap, hotel bar, sports bar — these are not equivalent experiences for a real ale tourist. A free house with a rotating guest cask list is a destination; a branded chain serves a purpose but it's not what you drove forty miles for.
Food choice — assessed as a quality tier rather than a cuisine category — separates the serious gastropubs from the bar snacks-only establishments. For a pub crawler whose circuit includes long drives between market towns, knowing whether a venue serves a proper ploughman's or just crisps is a logistics question, not a preference.
My rating is the aggregate personal assessment — not a review platform score, but your own judgment relative to everything else you've rated. After sixty entries, a 4-star rating calibrated against your full dataset is a meaningful recommendation you can give to someone who trusts your taste.
The Geospatial Layer
Pub location with Google Maps integration is what distinguishes this template from a flat list of pub names. When you're standing in an unfamiliar city center, the map link opens directly to the pub's location — no copy-paste, no searching a name that might have a dozen near-matches.
Address stores the human-readable location for contexts where the map link isn't the right tool — giving directions verbally, confirming you're at the right building, or checking a postcode for navigation. Website links to the pub's own page, which is where you verify current opening hours before making a dedicated trip.
Date records when you visited. This matters because pubs change. A place you rated five stars in 2019 may have changed ownership, lost their cask ale selection, or closed entirely. The visit date is the freshness indicator on your data. A record from eight years ago is history; a record from last month is a recommendation.
Integration with the Tasting Notes
This template is the venue layer of a two-part system — it links individual pub entries to the primary beer tasting database, where specific ales consumed at each venue are rated on nose, palate, and finish. The relationship between venue and beer is preserved: when you want to know where you had that exceptional Timothy Taylor Landlord, the pub record and the tasting note point to each other.
My comments and Other features capture everything that doesn't fit a structured field: car park, dog-friendly, garden, beer garden heated in winter, the barman who knew the local brewing history better than the brewery's own website.