Pitcher's Pub

On the side of a non-descript road in sleepy Cumberland, Rhode Island is a little bar with a tiny parking lot. From the outside, it looks like the kind of bar you’ve driven by a hundred times: dark, walls grey with pre-ban cigarette smoke, exactly three taps of American rice-heavy beer, NLCS playing on the fuzzy television in the corner. The name — Pitcher’s Pub — is even a beer/baseball pun. But despite its unassuming outward appearance, this bar is different. You sit down, yes, next to the Golden Tee game. You shout your order to the waitress over, it’s true, the Tom Petty cover band that non-traditionally includes a banjoist. But when you start scanning the twenty-some taps and realize you only recognize half of them, you’re willing to admit that your first impression might have been hasty. And the orange bottled-beer menu packed with microbrews, barley wines, and bocks makes you glad you didn’t judge this book by its cover. In fact, you realize dizzily, you can only think of one bar in Boston with such a broad offering.

I felt the need to opine this morning because there’s not a lot out there about this hidden gem. There are some moderately positive reviews on Beer Advocate that convinced us to give it a try.