A red walled Victorian wine merchant's shop on a cobbled New Town corner, now pouring seven real ales and fifty malts.
Kay's Bar holds the corner of Jamaica Street West, a cobbled mews street in Edinburgh's Georgian New Town. The building sold wine and whisky as John Kay's merchant shop in Victorian times, and the pub keeps the red painted walls, gas lamp scale, and barrel relics to prove it.
The Edinburgh Evening News calls it an award winning hidden gem serving some of the city's best pints, and CAMRA members have voted it a Real Ale Quality Award winner. It sits in the Good Beer Guide year after year.
Who would hate it? Anyone arriving in a group of six. The front room seats perhaps twenty people on one long bench, and that is the entire point.
A single red room with a long bench wrapping the wall, five or six round tables, and a coal effect fire doing the winter work. Edinburgh Pub Reviews notes the closeness gets strangers talking within a pint. The tiny back library room seats six under shelves of old books and takes the best table in the New Town.
Seven handpulls run permanent lines like Timothy Taylor Landlord and Theakston Best alongside rotating Scottish casks from breweries like Loch Lomond and Orkney's Swannay, per Yelp reviewers. Pints sit near £4.50.
Order whatever Scottish guest cask is freshest and follow it with a malt; the gantry runs past fifty whiskies. Skip lager entirely here, the casks are the reason the room exists.
Afternoons belong to New Town regulars and their newspapers; evenings squeeze in ale travelers who found the cobbled corner on purpose. The banter from behind the bar carries the whole room, per Tripadvisor reviews.