Crate Brewery, London E9

PINT TO PINT

Chris Whitty, perched on your right shoulder, says you shouldn’t really be going out at all, let alone to the pub. Have you of transmission chains? Are you

going to stick to the rules when you’re three pints deep? Don’t you even

to protect the NHS and save lives? Rishi Sunak, whispering into your left ear, tells you otherwise. “Eat out to help out,” he says seductively. “That includes the pub. Get binned to chip in… Flash some cash on the lash… Get wobbly for the economy. Go on…” murmurs Rishi, “go to the pub.”

What’s a fella to do? How best to serve these two masters? Well… how about a waterside pub? Lots of fresh air, plenty of unoccupied open space, and if you’re sitting at the water’s edge, you have an entire 180-degree radius into which to safely cough.

I have spent most of the past four months confined to a small and congested segment of Hackney, which made a trip to Crate Brewery, a bar that sits beside the Lee Navigation alongside a couple of similarly enjoyable hostelries, feel like an evening by the seaside. Boats chugged by, birds called across the water – and we jealously guarded our riverside seating.

Crate brews and serves beer in its big white warehouse, but in the sunnier seasons of the year its visitors spill on to the waterside seating and order drinks from Alfred Le Roy, which is – to coin an ugly phrase – a bar-barge. This bar-barge is run by the brewery and saves its Covidfearing patrons a trip indoors.

The price of all this health and safety is that, to speak to the bartender, whose boat floats low on the water, you must adopt an undignified crouch or kneel, an act that makes the hallowed tradition of Carrying Every Drink Back to your Table in One Ungainly Trip even more precarious.

With a bellyful of Crate’s deliciously thin and crispy pizza, and a couple of drinks down, I almost forgot we were in a heinous pandemic. For just a moment, I could even have sworn I could see Chris and Rishi raising a tipsy toast to one another.

Unit 7 Queen’s Yard, London E9 5EN 0208 533 3331; cratebrewery.com