Cervecería Hops & Dreams

Hops & Dreams from the street. The warm glow is real.

The first thing we noticed when we stepped out of a rainy winter night into Cervecería Hops & Dreams was that someone had thought carefully about how a bar should feel. Beer labels cover most of the wall space, mixed with the occasional sticker for a progressive cause and a few pieces of what appears to be children's artwork. There is a comfy couch near the entrance and tables spread through the rest of the small room. This is clearly a place people come to stay for a while.

The interior: beer labels, a couch, and a bar worth settling into.

Six beers on tap, a wide cooler of cans and bottles, and a rotating list that changed several times during our four weeks in Seville. You're reliably getting something new on tap.

The moment that made Hops & Dreams something more than a good bar: partway through our first visit, we asked the bartender about other places to find craft beer in Seville. Without hesitation, he picked up a food ticket, turned it over, and wrote a short list on the back. We kept that note on our kitchen counter until we'd visited every place on it. Each of his recommendations features somewhere in this Seville guide.

Six taps, rotating regularly. The list changes more often than you'd expect.

The crowd was the usual Seville mix: locals and tourists in roughly equal proportion, all of them there for the beer and the company. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry.

Beer bottles and labels decorate the walls.

Hops & Dreams is on the northern edge of Seville's popular area, about 12 minutes on foot from Las Setas. The Alameda de Hércules, Seville's long tree-lined promenade and one of the city's liveliest evening spots, is a short walk. If you venture this far north, consider also stopping at Pastissimo (@pastissimo.bar), a small Italian pasta shop a few streets over run by a Spanish-Italian owner using family recipes. The food is primarily takeout but there are a few tables. My wife loved it enough that she made us walk over on a cold, rainy winter night just to get some. Having sampled a few beers earlier in the evening, it didn't take much convincing. She was right.