The Deer's Headand Bell's Brewery

The Deer's Head has occupied 1-3 Lower Garfield Street since 1885, when wine and spirit merchant John Donnelly founded the pub in a street once known as Bell's Lane, after brewer John Bell, who established Bell's Brewery in 1778. The single-site pub closed for refurbishment and reopened under its historic name in 2020, restoring its Victorian saloon bar and installing a working brewery within it, said to hold the only copper Brewiks brewing tanks in Europe. Beers including Black Bull Stout, Monkey Shaving the Goat IPA and North Star Lager are brewed on the premises and served at the bar. The Deer's Head has no other branches. Its combination of an 1885 building and an operating brewhouse in full view of drinkers makes it, by its own account, Belfast's original brewpub, reviving a name and function last associated with the site more than a century earlier.