One Billboard Outside Mereworth, Kent

Today was very overcast and grey yet again so we decided to treat ourselves to lunch at the nearby Mereworth Winery and Tap Room. We'd never visited it before but we'd passed it on several occasions, catching sight of the diverting billboard you can see in my image, and on this occasion we thought we should give it a try.
It's located at Brewer's Hall Farm Oast not far from the imposing spire of the village's St Lawrence's church. Mereworth has been listed as a settlement since the Domesday book and the current village dates back at least 500 years and boasts a long association with fruit and hop growing, with some of the first hops in the country planted here.
Brewer's Hall used to be a working farm and the oast itself would have been filled with pickers bringing in the hops from the fields to be dried, cooled and pressed, whilst apples were collected from the neighbouring orchards. It is reputed that George Orwell was even amongst the hundreds of pickers to have graced the oast, in its former days of preparing the ingredients for many of England's finest drinks.
With the scaling down of hop-growing in recent years, Kent has now made a name for itself with its suitability for viticulture - it seems the future is in grapes!
The current owner of the farm set to work renovating and breathing new life into Brewer's Hall Oast in 2017, after he moved back to his parents' adjacent farm, converting the space into a winery which sits just a stones throw from the the recently planted vineyard.
The Oast is quite unprepossessing from the outside but is a lovely, bright and open space inside incorporating a bar and cafe as well as the taproom and when we arrived we were warmly greeted by a very friendly member of staff and ordered a pepperoni pizza and a pint of Long Man lager each. The service, pizza and beer were all great. We'll definitely be returning.