Guide5 April 2026 · Chelmsford, Essex

The Chelmsford Beer Mile: A Live Guide to Essex's Best Craft-Beer Crawl

Chelmsford has quietly become one of the most interesting craft-beer towns in the UK. Eight specialist venues sit within a mile of each other — from a Moulsham Street bottle shop to railway-arch taprooms — and the route between them has been mapped out by the people who actually drink there.

This guide is the live companion to that crawl. The grassroots route originates with Chelmsford Beer Mile, a community project by locals who quietly do the unglamorous work of keeping the city's beer scene visible. We're not replacing their site — we're adding the bit they don't cover: what's actually on tap at each stop, right now.

The route at a glance

Start on Moulsham Street. Walk north, cross the river into the city centre via Duke Street, then finish in the railway arches off Viaduct Road — which dumps you at Chelmsford station for the journey home. Roughly a mile of walking, eight stops, plus one short detour to Voodoo Keller.

Moulsham → city centre → the Arches → train home.

Stage 1 — Moulsham Street

A recent casualty: Hopsters Beer Store (47a Moulsham St) was the second Moulsham stop on earlier versions of this crawl. It closed in January 2026. The fridge lives on at Hop Beer Shop and at Hopsters' surviving Leigh-on-Sea location — worth the trip if you're making a day of it.

Stage 2 — City centre

Stage 3 — The Arches

Footnote: Chelmsford Brew Co and a brewing tradition that almost vanished

It's easy to think of Chelmsford's craft-beer scene as a 2010s phenomenon, but the city has been brewing in some form for two centuries. The clearest single example is Baddow Brewery Co. Ltd, founded in 1798 on Church Street in Great Baddow by a Mr Crabb and run by the Crabb family through most of the nineteenth century.

At its peak Baddow Brewery held 53 tied houses across Essex, shipped ale and porter, and had a bottling store distinctive enough that when it was demolished in 1989 the developers rebuilt it using the original gargoyles. The company was acquired and closed by Seabrooke & Sons in 1927 — and with it, local brewing in Chelmsford went quiet for the better part of a century. The main brewery building still stands on Church Street, now a furniture retailer, with Henry George Crabb's 1868 foundation stone still in place.

Chelmsford Brew Co — whose beers you can drink at Voodoo Keller Bar mid-way through the mile — is the most visible modern-era answer to that long quiet. A local brewery, producing locally, with a city-centre drinking venue where the crawl actually runs. Not the same outfit as Baddow Brewery in any legal sense, but the spiritual heir: brewing in Chelmsford again, for Chelmsford drinkers, after a hundred-year gap.

The Baddow site itself sits a short drive outside the walking mile (worth a detour for the historically-minded), but Voodoo Keller keeps the thread alive in the city centre. If you want one moment on the crawl that ties the whole thing back to Chelmsford's brewing past, it's a half of the Brew Co house beer in the basement at Voodoo.

Practical notes

• When to go: Saturday afternoon works best — Moulsham peaks early, the Arches peak later.
• Train home: Radio City is ~3 minutes walk from Chelmsford station. Last fast train to Liverpool Street runs past midnight Fri/Sat.
• Half-pints are your friend. Eight stops is still a lot of pints. Most venues will happily pour halves or thirds.
• Food stops: Brewhouse & Kitchen (full menu) and United Brethren (garden pub food) are the best sit-down options. Most other stops focus on the beer.
• Live tap data: Every stop above deep-links to its live tap list on PINtPOINT — open the app and every one of these venues appears on the radar.

Why we wrote this

PINtPOINT's whole job is helping people decide where to drink next. A grassroots crawl like the Chelmsford Beer Mile is the perfect use case: eight venues, each unique, all well-run, and a route curated by people who know the city. The only thing missing was live information about which pints are actually on tonight — and that's the gap this page fills.

We'd rather link to and complement chelmsfordbeermile.co.uk than compete with it. The best thing we can do for Chelmsford's beer scene is drive more drinkers toward those venues, and the app's radar view does that directly.