July 4, 2020, 1.30 p.m. Hesitating at the kerb outside Taboo, Brighton’s premier adult store, anxiously peering across the road at the Evening Star. Someone said they were open.

Approaching the door, and that awkward, familiar, brick pillar stuck two paces inside, wondering just how you go to the pub this strange day.

An arm gestures me forward.

“We have a table.”

“I only want a pint.”

“That’s all right,” comforts Mark Hazell, manager and co-owner. He’s nervous too. But a couple of minutes later there is beer, and calm. Back in the game.

Since then, and well into August, many chose the Evening Star for their first post-lockdown pint of cask. While the pub stayed open, before tiers and lockdowns forced it to close again, it was hard to find a socially-distanced table.

“They know it’s guaranteed to be good,” Mark explains. “Drinkers understand the quality here and that’s down to all the work people have done here in the past.”

The Star has maintained that reputation with hardly a flicker over nearly three decades. It brightens a drab little street rumbling with motor traffic parallel to the main road where, on sunny days, the DFLs (Down From London) parade from the station to the sea, oblivious to the pub that hides behind the hoarding advertising Taboo.

According to Brighton pub historian David Muggleton, it’s been here since 1854, expanding into the house next door in 1868, the splicing evident in a wonky façade and that brick pillar inside the door, the remains of the wall between them. Originally owned by Smithers and Sons, which had a brewery around the corner, it became part of the Tamplin’s, which once dominated the city’s pub scene, in 1929.

Watney’s took over Tamplin’s in 1953, but by the 1980s the Star was a Courage house. And when Courage swapped its pubs for Grand Met’s breweries in 1990 the Star fell out of the deal and the freehold was snapped up by Pete Skinner and Pete Halliday. Skinner had run a real ale pub in Brighton called Nobles (now Mrs Fitzherbert’s) before teaming up with Halliday to take on the Gardeners Arms, a real ale heaven over the road from Harvey’s Brewery in the neighbouring town of Lewes.

““The Evening Star is part of my history, part of what’s made me as a brewer.””

— Mark Tranter, Burning Sky

The Evening Star reopened in March 1992 with six cask beers. Thanks to a battered red Silvine notebook we know they were: Adnams, King & Barnes Festive, Hall & Woodhouse Tanglefoot, Young’s Bitter, Brakspear and a mild, brand name obliterated by yellowed Sellotape.

Alongside each a number in red ink counts the different beers they would sell. By the end of the century, the figure was to tick up to nearly 3,000, and the Star could justifiably produce a T-shirt proclaiming: “Brighton’s Permanent Real Ale Festival.”

And, in 1994, the Evening Star would start brewing and selling its own.

***

Rob Jones made his name as a brewer in Hoxton with Pitfield Dark Star—the surprise Champion Beer of Britain in 1987—before setting up microbreweries in Stourbridge and then Lancing, a few miles along the coast from Brighton. Skinner knew him because he’d been a customer of Pitfield Brewery, and he invited Jones to build a brewery in the Star’s cellar.

To fit the cramped space, he devised a “Russian doll” system, the different brewing vessels ingeniously fitting inside each other. The first brew, Skinner’s Pale Ale, was on the pumps for Christmas 1994.

“A few months later we realised Jonesy was too good to lose, so the three of us formed Dark Star as a separate company,” Pete Halliday tells me. “The Skinner’s brand continued for a while but eventually everything became Dark Star.”

In fact, Rob says he hadn’t realised till then the Dark Star name was still registered to himself.

“In those days it was the stereotype CAMRA drinkers forming a barricade at the bar,” he continues. “Other people in Brighton thought of it as ‘that weird place.’”

“The regulars were into their hops, and wanted to try different types, so we formed Skinner’s Hophead Club, a series of single-hop brews using a different variety each time.”

In March 1996 Halliday returned from one of his regular trips to California—he has a day job as a flight simulation boffin—with a suitcase full of pelleted Cascade hops he’d smuggled through customs.

“I’d never seen anything like that before,” Rob admits. “But he asked me to brew with them. The Cascade version became the most popular of the Hophead Club beers and later became Dark Star Hophead. So we had a lot of influence on what people are drinking now.”

At that time, though, few outside the walls of the Evening Star had a chance to taste these beers. Rob increased capacity by adding a couple of fermenters but they needed another brewer. One of the less vociferous customers was a shy young punk sitting in the corner. Pete Skinner had tasted his homebrew and suggested they take him on. It was Mark Tranter, and he was to work for Dark Star for 17 years, becoming head brewer before launching his own brewery, Burning Sky, in 2013.

“I’d never thought of brewing as a viable opportunity,” Mark says. “My beers were probably pretty disgusting, but Rob offered me a job. He trusted me.”

To Mark, the peculiar equipment in the cellar looked “hugely industrial, but I didn’t find it difficult to work on. It was strange down there, but fun,” he says. “The customers had a burgeoning interest in pale, hoppy beers, the paler and hoppier the better—though they wouldn’t taste hoppy by today’s standards. We started using a lot of American varieties and I grew to love them as well.”

“The Evening Star is part of my history, part of what’s made me as a brewer,” Mark continues. “It’s like a village pub in a town. You go in once and you’re a local. Other good pubs were turning into bars, but the Star never changed. The beer was key, the beer and the people.”

He’s still bemused by some of the characters who frequented the pub: the chap with a mackerel in his top pocket, the man who used the gents as his water supply because he refused to pay for “something that fell from the sky”.

A slightly less eccentric regular was punk poet Atilla the Stockbroker, now usually found at the Duke of Wellington, Shoreham-by-Sea, which happens to be owned by Rob Jones. Atilla featured in a memorable moment in the Star’s history, a ten-and-a-half hour gig in 1997 that raised “thousands” for the campaign to save Brighton & Hove Albion FC, (which now plays its football in the English league’s top tier.)

“It really was non-stop,” Atilla remembers. “I took a radio mic into the toilet with me when I needed to go.”

He started drinking in the Star when he heard Alex Hall was working there as cellar manager. Now resident in Brooklyn, Alex was responsible for bringing in the unusual beers that made the place a destination for the tickers who collected them, and Rob recalls occasional conflicts between satisfying the scoopers and keeping the regulars happy.

“But the great thing about the Star was that even when it became a brewpub it didn’t just sell its own beers,” he says.

***

In 2001 the Dark Star Brewery expanded into new premises in the village of Ansty, 15 miles outside Brighton, and Pete Skinner departed. As did the Russian doll kit, sold to a hotel near Dounreay in Scotland, where it provided cask ale for English workers decommissioning the nuclear power plant.

““We could reopen as a coffee shop tomorrow—though obviously we won’t!””

— Mark Hazell, The Evening Star

Janine Garrott had taken over from Geoff Brown as the Star’s manager, and in 2003 she gave way to part-time bar staff Matt and Karen Wickham. Over the next 11 years, they made an indelible mark on the beer range. Dark Star’s wheat beer Spiced Vice had already sold well on keg, but the Wickham’s installed more taps and introduced American brews.

“It’s fairly unique that a brewery-owned pub that would serve all those beers, but Dark Star just let us get on with it,” Matt, who now works for Bristol’s Lost & Grounded Brewery, says. “There were cask drinkers who’d complain about the keg, but it meant we could appeal to so many different types of people.”

When Dark Star was acquired by Fuller’s in 2018, the Evening Star again fell out of a deal, and to make sure it kept going Pete Halliday, who still owned the freehold, went into partnership with Mark Hazell, who drank there in the 90s and later worked for the Wickhams. Right now his priority is survival. Small pubs like this, with no food, haven’t been given much of a chance in the post-Covid world.

Social distancing allows space for only half-a-dozen tables, plus a couple more out front, and no vertical drinking. Yet, since reopening at the first opportunity, Mark found business “better than expected.”

“At first, I thought, ‘table service only? No chance. We’d lose character.’ But lockdown was an opportunity to reopen exactly as we wanted it,” he says. “People were drinking at different times. Tuesday was our busiest day, now. But mostly they were just happy to be here.”

Mark tells me how he used the enforced downtime to install new keg fonts, repaint the cellar and deep clean the toilets. And, he continues, one advantage in a pub this size is you can see everything from the bar, making it easier to manage social distancing.

“I’ve seen a lot of changes here over the last 25 years, but it stays the same pub,” he continues. “That’s testament to how people hold it in their affections. There’s criticism of any whiff of change.”

“We’ll have to be adaptable in future, and because we’re small and independent we can do that. We could reopen as a coffee shop tomorrow—though obviously we won’t!”