Our very first pub review system all started when Patch first started Patch, Papa & Pup.

This all started in the Cribbs Causeway branch of Waterstones when Patch picked up a PubStops map showing all the pubs and bars in Bristol. All 489 of them.

Over the years that followed, him, his dad and his dog Daisy made it their mission to visit every pub on the map, giving it a colour-coded rating as to whether they'd go back there again or avoid it in the future.

On the original rating scale, Patch used a traditional red, yellow and green traffic light system – red being bad, yellow being OK, and green being good. 

However, as they made their way across Bristol, visiting pub after pub, they soon discovered that this rating scale was too simplified. They needed to add in extra colours to keep track of other key criteria, including roast dinners, board game availability, dog-friendliness – you know, all the important stuff.

After adding new colours to the original traffic light scale, the sticker-based system became rather convoluted (and colourful!).

The colour of the stickers that were assigned included: 

• Star: One of the Best Pubs

• Gold: A Pub With Quirky Features

• Green: A Great Pub

• Blue: A Better-Than-Average Pub

• Yellow: An Average Pub

• Orange: A Below Average Pub

• Red: A Bad Pub

• Red with 'X': A Closed Pub

• Pink: A Pub That Serves Food

• Purple: A Pub That Had Games Available

However, while this system provided a useful Bristol-based pub guide, it didn't exactly lend itself to offering advice to other people.

So, upon completing all 489 pubs on the Bristol map, Patch and co decided to utilise the help of Microsoft Excel and get creative with some formulas for their future pub adventures. 

As chance would have it, upon completing the Bristol map, Patch managed to find a job in Brighton. So, a few months later, he found himself living there, primed and ready to take on the Brighton & Hove PubStops map with a fresh spreadsheet-based formulae. So long stickers! 

But, as with any new system, it wasn't completely foolproof at the start and it took several iterations to find a simple, portable, Excel-based method he could easily use to to rank pubs. But, he got there in the end. 

This still largely used the traffic light system as inspiration but also introduced a new points-based system to rank pubs more effectively.

It worked a little something like this: 

• 0.0 – 2.5 = A Bad Pub

• 2.5 – 4.0 = A Below Average Pub

• 4.0 – 5.5 = An Average Pub

• 5.5 – 7.0 = A Better-Than-Average Pub

• 7.0 – 8.5 = A Great Pub

• 8.5 – 10.0 = One of the Best Pubs

Approximately 150 pubs into the Brighton PubStops map, the pandemic hit, which threw everything off kilter. Suddenly, all of Patch's rankings were out of date and it was hard to know which pubs had been affected financially or not. 

However, this gave Patch the extra time he needed to hone the Patch, Papa and Pup system even more, resulting in the forms, apps and algorithm that Off To The Local now use to rank pubs to this day. 

In doing so, this also gave Patch, Papa and Pup the freedom to rank pubs wherever they were in the world, rather than being consigned to those listed on the PubStops maps. 

With this fresh system in place, Patch, his dad and dog Daisy then worked their way across all the Brighton pubs once again. They then completed visiting all of the pubs in Brighton in August 2022.

After visitng over 1,000 pubs, Patch decided to change his approach. He recognised a need for punters to find out information about pubs both quickly and easily, as well as a lack of clear marketing from pubs themselves.

So this gave him an idea. If only there was a way to combine all he'd learned before and use it in a way to help pubs find customers, and customers find pubs.

And just like that he discovered his friends' latest project – Off To The Local.

The rest, as they say, is history.