Best pubs in Edinburgh: the local's guide
Edinburgh: pub crawl 7 bars with 6 free shots
What are the best pubs in Edinburgh?
Deacon Brodie's Tavern on the Royal Mile is famous but tourist-facing. For genuinely good pubs, head to The Bow Bar (West Bow) for real ale, Café Royal (West Register Street) for Victorian grandeur, Sandy Bell's (Forrest Road) for folk music, or the Stockbridge Tap for neighbourhood atmosphere. Leith's King's Wark is the waterfront option.
Pubs in Edinburgh: the landscape
Edinburgh’s pub scene exists in several distinct zones that cater to quite different drinkers. The Royal Mile has a string of historic-looking taverns that trade on atmosphere and location but offer indifferent beer and tourist prices. The Grassmarket and Cowgate are Edinburgh’s nightlife heartland — loud, young, and lively, particularly late on weekends. The New Town has quieter, more neighbourhood-oriented pubs that attract a local professional crowd. And then there are the scattered gems that require slightly more effort but reward it handsomely.
This guide separates these zones and gives honest assessments of the pubs worth visiting in each, plus a few that are worth a specific journey.
The Bow Bar: Edinburgh’s best real ale pub
The Bow Bar at 80 West Bow, just off the Grassmarket, is the clear answer to the question of where to drink if you care about the beer. A single room with no music, no fruit machines, and no distractions — just an exceptional selection of real ales on cask, a very good Scottish malt whisky selection (over 300 bottles), and an atmosphere that is genuinely convivial without being artificially jollied.
The staff know the beer. When they recommend a pint, they are right. The prices are honest and the condition of the ale is exemplary — the Bow Bar regularly appears in Good Beer Guide selections and has done for decades. It is neither the biggest pub in Edinburgh nor the most photogenic, but it is the best in the most meaningful sense.
Go mid-afternoon on a weekday for a quiet dram and a read; go early evening for a pre-dinner pint with good conversation from the bar staff or the regulars. It gets busy on Friday and Saturday evenings — not unpleasantly so, but it can feel full.
Café Royal: Victorian magnificence
The Café Royal at 19 West Register Street, just off the east end of Princes Street, is one of the finest Victorian pub interiors in Scotland. The main bar has elaborate Doulton tiling, stained glass, ornate plasterwork, and a long mahogany bar that has been serving Edinburgh since 1863. It is a proper pub — you can drink a pint of real ale at the bar — but the grandeur of the space is beyond most pub expectations.
The beer selection is decent without being remarkable; the food in the adjacent oyster bar is good (the oysters, logically, are worth ordering). The Café Royal is simultaneously a destination for the architecture and a perfectly functional pub, which is a combination Edinburgh does better than almost any other British city. Go in the afternoon when it is less crowded to properly appreciate the interior.
Sandy Bell’s: folk music and atmosphere
Sandy Bell’s at 25 Forrest Road, near the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, is Edinburgh’s most consistently good live music pub. The folk session culture here is genuine rather than staged: musicians show up because they want to play, not because they are being paid to entertain tourists. Wednesday evenings, Thursdays, and Sunday afternoons are the most reliable for live sessions.
The pub is small and gets very busy when the music is on. The beer selection is straightforward rather than exceptional, and the atmosphere is everything. Sandy Bell’s is where Edinburgh’s folk music community meets, and a session here — particularly one that has been going for three hours and has acquired additional musicians along the way — is one of the most authentically Edinburgh experiences available for under the cost of a concert ticket.
See the live music in Edinburgh guide for more on Edinburgh’s music scene across different genres.
The Stockbridge Tap: neighbourhood perfection
The Stockbridge Tap at 2 Raeburn Place, in the heart of Stockbridge, is the best example of the neighbourhood pub that Edinburgh does well. A good selection of cask ales, a simple food menu (pies, sandwiches), comfortable seating, and an atmosphere that is almost entirely local — you will not encounter a stag party or a bus tour at the Stockbridge Tap. It is exactly what a local pub should be, and it is where the people who live in Stockbridge actually drink.
Go on a Saturday afternoon after the Stockbridge Market, which runs on Sunday Saunders Street mornings nearby. The combination of market browsing and a quiet pub lunch is a good Stockbridge half-day.
The Oxford Bar: the Rebus connection
Ian Rankin’s detective John Rebus drinks at the Oxford Bar (8 Young Street, New Town), and the real pub that inspired the fiction is still there, still small, still unglamorous, and still serving a straightforward pint to a local clientele that has remained remarkably consistent through the decades of the novels’ success.
The Oxford Bar is not a tourist attraction in the usual sense — it is a quiet New Town local that happens to be famous. There is a small shelf of Rankin books behind the bar. The pint is fine. The atmosphere is exactly what Rankin described. If you have read the novels, visiting is a particular pleasure; if you have not, it is still a good quiet pub that most visitors miss entirely.
The Jolly Judge: subterranean Old Town classic
The Jolly Judge at 7a James Court, off the Lawnmarket, is a Low-ceilinged, beamed pub that has been here since the seventeenth century and has the atmosphere to prove it. It sits at the bottom of a close off the Royal Mile and is easy to miss if you do not know to look for it. The bar is small, the fire is almost always on in winter, and the low ceilings give it a genuinely subterranean character.
This is one of the few pubs in the Old Town that manages to be both genuinely historic and genuinely good — the beer is looked after, the food is honest pub fare, and the setting is the real thing rather than a themed reproduction. A worthwhile stop on any Old Town walking day.
The King’s Wark: Leith’s best pub
The King’s Wark at 36 The Shore in Leith has been mentioned in the Leith restaurants guide for its food, but it is worth visiting as a pub even if you are not eating. The building is among the oldest pub premises in Edinburgh, the real ale selection is good, and the atmosphere of a Leith waterfront pub in the evening is different from anything you will find in the Old Town.
Go early evening in spring or summer when you can stand outside on The Shore with a pint and watch the Water of Leith.
The Royal Oak: late-night folk
The Royal Oak at 1 Infirmary Street, near the Southside, runs folk music sessions late on Friday and Saturday nights — often until 2am. It is a small basement pub that has been a focal point of Edinburgh’s folk community since the 1970s. The sessions are informal and genuinely excellent at their best. Not for everyone, but for visitors with a specific interest in Scottish folk music, it is the right answer.
Organised pub experiences
For visitors who want a structured introduction to Edinburgh’s pub culture, particularly on a limited time budget, an organised pub crawl covering seven bars with six free shots covers the range of the Old Town drinking circuit efficiently and includes entry to some of the livelier venues at reduced cover charges. These crawls are unapologetically social rather than connoisseurial — the right choice for visitors who want to meet other travellers and have a high-energy evening rather than a quiet tour of the best real ale.
For something that combines walking with whisky, the Edinburgh whisky and folklore tour visits historic drinking establishments alongside its whisky narrative, which gives a more substantive sense of Edinburgh’s relationship with spirits than a pub crawl.
The honest note on tourist pubs
The Royal Mile has a half-dozen pubs that look excellent from the street — Scottish flags, tartan decoration, advertising haggis on boards outside — and are consistently disappointing inside. Deacon Brodie’s Tavern (435 Lawnmarket), named after the real-life criminal who inspired Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, is the most famous of these. The history is real; the food is adequate; the atmosphere is entirely tourist-facing. It is fine for a quick pint on a rainy afternoon, but not worth seeking out at the expense of the pubs above.
For a full picture of where not to waste your money in Edinburgh, see the Royal Mile tourist traps guide.
Practical notes on Edinburgh pubs
Last orders: Most Edinburgh pubs call last orders at 11pm Sunday to Thursday and midnight (sometimes 1am) on Friday and Saturday, though many venues are licensed until later.
Cash vs card: Edinburgh pubs are now almost entirely card-friendly; cash is rarely required.
August: During the Fringe, popular pubs in the Old Town become very crowded from early evening. The neighbourhood pubs in Stockbridge, Marchmont, and Bruntsfield are much more comfortable options if you are not specifically chasing the Fringe atmosphere.
Age verification: Scottish pubs use the Challenge 25 policy — be prepared to show ID if you look under 25.
Edinburgh’s pub history: from taverns to bars
Edinburgh has been a serious drinking city for as long as it has been a city. The Old Town’s medieval closes and wynds contained dozens of taverns that served the population living in vertical tenements — Edinburgh’s Old Town was among the most densely populated urban areas in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its public houses were the social infrastructure of that density. Robert Burns drank in Edinburgh’s taverns during his celebrated visit to the city in 1786–87; Robert Louis Stevenson used them as background for his fiction; Deacon Brodie, the inspiration for Jekyll and Hyde, ran a cabinet-making business by day and a criminal network involving Edinburgh taverns by night.
The Victorian era brought the transformation from basic tavern to the ornate public house with engraved glass, mahogany panelling, and tiled interiors — of which the Café Royal is Edinburgh’s finest surviving example. The twentieth century brought American cocktail culture (which Edinburgh absorbed more slowly than London), then the craft beer revolution of the 2010s, which changed the city’s drinking landscape significantly.
Craft beer in Edinburgh
Edinburgh’s craft beer scene has developed substantially since 2010. Several notable breweries operate in and around the city:
Stewart Brewing (based in Loanhead, south of Edinburgh) was an early mover in the craft beer revival and remains one of Scotland’s most significant brewers. Their beers appear on tap in many Edinburgh pubs.
Newbarns Brewery (Leith) is among the most interesting recent additions, making unfiltered lager and European-style beers in a Leith warehouse. Their taproom (open Thursday to Sunday) is one of Edinburgh’s best drinking destinations for lager enthusiasts.
Vault City Brewing (Leith) has built an international reputation for its sour beers and fruit-forward styles that are genuinely unlike anything else produced in Scotland.
Barney’s Beer (based near the Meadows) produces session ales and IPAs that are widely available in independent Edinburgh pubs.
The Hanging Bat (133 Lothian Road) is Edinburgh’s most serious craft beer bar, with a changing selection of Scottish and international draft beers alongside an extensive can and bottle list. The bar is noisy and crowded on weekends but the beer selection justifies the noise.
Whisky in Edinburgh’s pubs
Edinburgh’s pub whisky culture is strong, and most of the better pubs keep a range of single malts beyond the standard blended Scotch. The Bow Bar (already mentioned) has over 300 bottles; the Caledonian Ale House (1-3 Oxford Terrace, Stockbridge) has a similarly serious malt selection. Sandy Bell’s keeps a good range of working-class dram malts appropriate to its folk music atmosphere.
A standard single malt measure in an Edinburgh pub costs around £4–£7 depending on the whisky and the venue; the Bow Bar’s more unusual bottlings can reach £15–£20 per measure. For a complete guide to Edinburgh whisky bars, see the best whisky bars in Edinburgh guide.
Edinburgh’s pub quiz culture
The pub quiz is a significant feature of Edinburgh’s mid-week pub culture, particularly in the neighbourhood pubs away from the Old Town tourist circuit. Several of the pubs mentioned in this guide run weekly quizzes that are worth joining even if you are visiting:
The Golf Tavern (near the Meadows) runs one of Edinburgh’s longest-running and most competitive pub quizzes.
The Athletic Arms (1 Angle Park Terrace, Gorgie — further west, worth a specific journey for serious real ale) runs a good quiz that attracts a regular local crowd.
The Stockbridge Tap quiz (monthly rather than weekly) is competitive enough to be serious but open enough to welcome visiting teams. Check the pub’s social media for current schedule.
The closing time culture
One of the practical differences between Edinburgh pubs and those in most English cities is the relatively early last orders call. Eleven pm is standard; midnight on Fridays and Saturdays at the more mainstream pubs. This pushes Edinburgh’s nightlife into a different pattern than London — the pub evening finishes early, which means people either move to licensed clubs (many of which run until 3am in the Cowgate) or end the evening relatively early by metropolitan standards.
For visitors from cultures with later closing times, this can be surprising. The benefit is that an Edinburgh pub evening runs naturally through a reasonable dinner-and-drinks arc (6pm arrival, drinking, food, leaving around 11pm) without the extended late-night culture that can disrupt sleep and planning.
For the full Edinburgh nightlife landscape — including the Cowgate’s late-night venue circuit — see the Grassmarket and Cowgate nightlife guide.
Frequently asked questions about Edinburgh pubs
What is a typical pub hour in Edinburgh?
Most Edinburgh pubs open by noon and stay open until 11pm on weekdays, midnight or 1am at weekends. Some have later licences, particularly in the Cowgate and Grassmarket areas. Sunday opening is generally noon to 11pm.
Is real ale widely available?
Yes. Edinburgh has an active real ale scene and most of the pubs mentioned above serve cask-conditioned ale. The Bow Bar is the finest example; the CAMRA Good Beer Guide listings for Edinburgh identify the others.
What Scottish beers should I try?
Look for ales from Fyne Ales (Argyllshire), Stewart Brewing (Edinburgh), Innis and Gunn (Edinburgh), and Caledonian Brewery (Edinburgh). Edinburgh has a strong craft brewing scene that has developed rapidly since 2010. Deuchars IPA, brewed by Caledonian, is the classic Edinburgh real ale.
Are Edinburgh pubs family-friendly?
Scottish licencing law allows children under 16 in licensed premises accompanied by an adult until 10pm. Most Edinburgh pubs do not actively encourage families, but it is common and accepted during daytime hours. Pubs with outdoor spaces (garden areas or pavement seating) are the most comfortable family options.
Do I need to book a table for pub food?
For the Bow Bar and Sandy Bell’s (no food served), no booking is needed. For pubs with food (King’s Wark, Stockbridge Tap), reservations are recommended at weekends and advisable on busy weekday evenings.
Top experiences
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