New category "Tap Rooms"? But what even is a tap room?

[rowleybirkinqc]

Some places in RGL are said to be tap rooms, so I'm wondering whether we should have a dedicated "Tap Rooms" category. If we do, how should we define a tap room? Personal gut feeling? A scoring system based on how it meets given criteria? And what criteria?

My feeling is that a tap room is it's typically operated by and on the same premises as a brewery its purpose is as an outlet for its products, and the primary purpose of the premises is to brew beer.

An example of what I think is definitely a tap room: Southey Brewing's tap room off High Street Penge. It's a small bar in the same building as the actual brewery, even with an interconnecting door through which the actual brewers flit hither and thither. The bar is essentially functional, with rudimentary facilities, serving as an outlet for their own products.

And an example of something I think is definitely not a tap room: the Euston Tap. Although it has "tap" in its name, that's only because the Euston Tap is part of a chain which puts "tap" into their pub names.

How do other people define a tap room? There's this old blog post which suggests it's a room with a large number of beer taps, but I do think this is simply a misunderstanding, as does a commenter on that post; I wonder though whether the meaning of "tap room" has shifted over time, and perhaps it did once mean the room where the taps were (see "more example sentences" here on a site which seems to use a very dated corpus). I do like this definition from a brewery outside Chicago: "a place to taste and sample product from a microbrewery [typically] that produces its own beer in-house". Wikipedia has "A brewery tap is the nearest outlet for a brewery's beers. It is usually a room or bar in the brewery itself, although the name may be applied to the nearest pub. The term is not applied to a brewpub which brews and sells its beer on the same premises."

If there's a scoring system, criteria could include:
- Location (how near it is to the brewery, whether it's on the same premises, and whether the primary purpose of the premises is to brew beer)
- Products sold (how much of the drinks sold are produced by the brewery) (but would be perverse to include Sam Smiths)
- Operation (whether operated directly by the brewery, perhaps with crossover of brewery/bar staff) (unsure)
- Not a brew-pub such as the Florence in Herne Hill

...but one could get carried away with an ever more complicated scoring system, and just go by gut feeling after all.

What do you think? (I'm not confident I can construct a poll that could usefully discriminate between answers, so am being open-ended here!)

New Featured Article - Hopper And Bean, N10 3DU

[rowleybirkinqc]

This week's featured article is Hopper And Bean, N10 3DU, a cheerful yellow cafe in Muswell Hill that is easy to access and work in.

A new article: Langley Quarter, BR3 3DE, a cafe in Eden Park where the food side is a bit hit-and-miss, and there are accessibility issues, but it's a good place to work on your laptop.

Updates to Tooting Daily Fresh Naan, SW17 7ER (now shawarma too), Poached, BR3 1AZ (new visits,photos of menus), and Category: Central Line (no longer direct trains to Chigwell et al.).

Square, W1J 6PU, a French restaurant in Bruton Street, Mayfair, has closed after the parent company went into admin, though we're hoping someone will take it on (it has a Michelin star after all). At Adam's Cafe, CR0 2TD, a greasy spoon in London Road, Croydon, the shutters have been down for weeks, but we don't know why.

Now, tap rooms. The Orbit Beers Taproom, SE17 3HD was, as its name implied, the tap room for the Orbit Beers brewery which operates from railway arches in Walworth. Or rather, the tap room attached to their brewery has closed. But they tweeted that a nearby cafe would be "hosting" their tap room. What does this mean though? Beer lines snaking through from the brewery to taps on the cafe counter? Or a few cans on a shelf? Whatever, could one call the cafe a "proxy taproom". On the subject of taprooms, do please opinionate on my blog post about what tap rooms are and aren't, and whether there we should have a dedicated category for them.