Black Country Ale Tairsters pub crawl reaches 25,000th bar

A team that has spent 42 years on one of the world’s longest pub crawls has marked its 25,000th inn.

The Black Country Ale Tairsters have spent decades travelling across the UK and beyond, but marked their latest milestone at The Old Royal Library in Great Malvern, Worcestershire.

The West Bromwich-based team had initially planned to visit just 250 pubs for charity, based on a map issued by a Wolverhampton brewer.

“It started off with my dad,” said Peter Hill, one of the groups founding members. “He put this map up with 250 Banks’ pubs on and we said we’d visit all of them for charity in 1984 and it’s all carried on from there.”

Over the past 42 years, Hill says, he has consumed 58,730 pints, and in 2025 he travelled 2,000 miles just to visit a pub on North Uist, an island in the Outer Hebrides.

“I stopped there and had quite a few real ales,” he said. “But I did sleep in a tractor shed – which I paid £60 for and it was a mattress in a shed.”

He said he had travelled 410,000 miles in total during his challenge and in recent years had focused on visiting every pub in a Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) guide from 2020.