"All we ever wanted to be was a nice, community place to meet and have a drink," says Ryan Pickering.
Originally from Hampshire, Ryan, 47, ran pubs in his home county before moving to the North West. He was living in Deeside when he decided to set up The Beer Lab, found on Telegraph Road in Heswall.
He took over a unit that was lying empty and had previously been a bike shop. Spotting a gap in the market for craft beer in Wirral, he opened the micropub in July 2018.
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Ryan told the ECHO: "In 2018, there weren't many craft beer pubs in Heswall. There weren't so many on Wirral even.
"But I think a combination of factors have led to micropubs and craft becoming popular. Independence brings a certain price point, independence means we can work with independent breweries and not be controlled by bigger breweries."
He added: "People's tastes in drink have changed or their eyes have been opened and the breweries are brewing much different beer to what people were drinking 10 years ago. The breweries wouldn't be able to brew that if people didn't want to drink it.
"Craft beer isn't anything that is forced down people's throats. It's not a one-size fits all. Craft beer can encompass a whole range of beers - sours, fruit beers, Belgian beers.
"That's where big breweries and the pub chains they control have been slow onto that, which has enabled the craft breweries to thrive because more and more places like ours are open."
The Beer Lab is in the 2023 Good Beer Guide. It serves over 50 beers in bottles and cans. It also has four hand pumps for real ale and six craft lines. The beers on offer are from a mix of local, national and international breweries.
Ryan wants to provide an opportunity for beer producers from Merseyside, the North West and North Wales to serve their products. He also strives to ensure The Beer Lab's drinkers can always come across something new.
"We opened with the idea in mind that it would be somewhere we would like to drink ourselves", Ryan explained. "It would sell the sorts of beers that we would want to drink.
"That doesn't necessarily mean that what you want to drink today is what you want to drink tomorrow. That's where a range comes in, we're not just selling the big lager brands.
"The choice that people have when they come to somewhere like us or many of the other fine places on Wirral can bring us back more locally. Local breweries like Neptune (Bootle) to Black Lodge (Baltic Triangle) to Polly's Brew Co. (Mold) - these places need an outlet on their doorstep as much as we want to be selling local beer."
Through offering a different experience to bigger pubs and championing independent beer, The Beer Lab has built a community of regulars. For Ryan, the most rewarding part of running his pub is the people who have made friends through drinking there.
He said: "There is definitely a community feel and that's probably been enhanced since the pandemic. Before people knew each other, but since then and in the last couple of years, people have really come together.
"I ask people 'how do you know so and so?' and they'll say 'from here'. Because the pub isn't 100 years old, that's quite a nice thing to have. People know each other from The Beer Lab.
"All we ever wanted to be was a nice, community place to meet and have a drink. Good friends deserve a good drink."
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