The Great Northern Hotel

The Great Northern Hotel stands on the corner of Rathdowne and Pigdon Streets in Carlton North, a red-brick boozer that has held the site since 1883. It is not a cocktail destination and never pretends to be. The reason to come is beer. The publican, Alistair Carragher, co-founded Feral Brewing in Western Australia before he took the pub over in 2008, and that brewer's instinct shows in a tap wall that Broadsheet rates among the best beer lists in Melbourne.

This is a pub for people who want a properly poured pint, a parma, and room to breathe. Drinkers chasing a polished small bar with a list of house spritzes should look elsewhere in Melbourne's cocktail rooms. Anyone who reads the tap badges before they read the menu will feel at home inside a paragraph.

The front bar kept its original timber panelling through a 2016 refit that modernised the once seventies-style bistro, so the building still reads as a neighbourhood local rather than a renovation. The headline space is out the back: one of the largest decked beer gardens in the city, the kind of sprawling, heated, part-covered yard that fills on a Friday and stays full. Dogs are welcome in the garden on a leash, entering from the Pigdon Street side.

The crowd is a Carlton North local one: nearby residents, a steady run of beer-minded regulars, and dog owners parked in the garden. Weekday evenings stay easy and conversational. Friday from late afternoon the beer garden does the heavy lifting and the whole pub lifts a gear, so come early if you want a table out the back rather than a spot at the rail.

Stay on the beer trail with The Local Taphouse in Melbourne, push into the inner north for Stomping Ground in Melbourne, or close at the brewpub source with Temple Brewing in Melbourne. The full picture is in our guide to Melbourne craft beer bars and the wider Melbourne bar guide.