It’s early Saturday evening and Burton Albion have just beaten Mansfield Town at the Pirelli. The sunshine is pouring over the beer garden at The Devonshire Arms, where I’m soaking up the atmosphere and waiting for landlady Nicki Stout to finish cooking my dinner on the BBQ Shack. My wife returns from the bar, navigating through a crowd of jubilant football fans. She’s holding two drinks, a Coke and a pint of Bass. No prizes for guessing which one’s mine.
“I’ve just seen Carl,” she says, referring to landlord Carl Stout. “My god, it’s busy isn’t it?”
The crowd breaks into a chant: “That’s the way, aha aha, we like it, aha aha…” The garden is buzzing with cheers, chants, the clink of glasses and my mind drifts back to a recent conversation with Carl and Nicki in this garden, when it was much quieter.
“We don’t really set out to win awards,” Carl says. “All we try and do our best all the time and try to give customers what they want. Now it sounds quite a simple philosophy to follow, but to do it consistently all the time, it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of dedication, not just by us, but by the staff as well.”
And yet win awards they do, plenty of them. Since taking over the pub in 2019, The Devvie has become a juggernaut in the local CAMRA scene, scooping Burton & South Derbyshire Pub of the Year in 2020, 2023, 2024 and 2025, and finishing runner-up in 2022. No award was handed out in 2021, but they’re also reigning joint champions of the “Best Bass in Burton” title, sharing the crown with The Roebuck Inn.
“We’re fiercely independent,” says Carl. “Because we can steer our own ship, it’s up to us what direction we want to go in. That comes with a little bit of responsibility, a little bit of risk but ultimately, we seem to be doing okay.”
Nicki grins. “Is it the cleanest pub in town? Best polished brass? Prettiest hanging baskets? You’ve got to tick all the boxes, it’s all in the detail.”
“And that’s before they even see the mirror and the copper tables,” she adds, referring to their gleaming tabletops, often photographed with an immaculate pint of Bass perched on top.
“I think Carl loves them more than me and Jack.”
Carl remains silent just long enough to raise eyebrows.
“He’s not saying no!” Nicki laughs.
Their son Jack, now 20, has grown up in the pub world and is clearly following in the family’s footsteps. “He just wants to be in a proper real ale pub, chatting with people,” Nicki says proudly.
Carl and Nicki’s story began in a pub, naturally. “It’s a cliché,” Carl shrugs. Since starting at Wetherspoons in 1998, they’ve managed pubs across London, Harrow, Cambridge, and finally, Burton upon Trent, where they arrived in 2000 to take over The Lord Burton.
“We came to be closer to family in Nuneaton,” says Nicki, smiling. “But not too close, for obvious reasons.”
“Where else would a Wetherspoons be the only pub in the Good Beer Guide?” Laughs Carl.
Burton quickly got under their skin, they ran The Devvie for Burton Bridge Brewery for a while before being offered the Burton Bridge Inn. “We’re obsessed with the place, in the best way,” Carl admits. “It’s got this incredible pub culture.”
During their early days at The Lord Burton, they caused a stir by shifting a barrel of Pedigree a day and being recognised by the brewery. “We had ten barrels lined up in the cellar,” Carl recalls, “plus seven other beers.”
“Marston’s pubs were livid!” Nicki chuckles. “They had to tweak the award title to ‘biggest free trade account’ just to stop the complaints.”
Shortly after they bought The Devvie in 2019, Carl had an idea that has led to a series of regional beer festivals, starting with a simple idea: get every Burton brewery under one roof.
“Once we did that, we had to do a Geordie one, then a Yorkshire one … before you know it, we’re driving to tiny breweries in the Lakes and getting turned back by flood water.”
One Yorkshire brewer North Riding proved so popular they’re now on permanent rotation. “People went crazy for it,” Carl says. “He delivers to us now.”
Carl: “We rang up these little breweries and said we are doing a festival, can we come and collect? You have a nice time away too, so it’s a bit of a jolly. It’s really interesting going round to different breweries and seeing how some people operate. You go to these most idyllic settings and you think, wow, this is absolutely stunning, and then somewhere like an industrial estate in the middle of Rochdale … keep the van running! The brewery door was locked and none of the casks were outside!”
The Devvie’s cellar still reflects its traditional roots, built for volume, not variety.
“Back in the day, you’d have a mild, a bitter, and maybe a strong bitter. Now, people demand choice,” says Carl. “We can’t go below six beers. We can’t go above seven, we just don’t have the space. We’ve tried the uprights where we stand the beers up on the vertical rods, but we couldn’t really get along with them. So, we’re down to the more traditional self-tilters, which in general work very well.”
Events like the recent Manchester Beer Festival stretched them to their limits: sixteen firkins stored alongside regular stock. “The Manchester stuff flew out, but so did the Bass.”
Their beer map is ever-expanding. “We were looking at which way we were going to go next, probably Lincolnshire or Humberside,” says Carl. “When we get to Sheffield, Nottingham area we’re going to have to be quite picky which ones we get. It requires an awful lot of hard work, logistically and convincing them to let us have the beer because you’d be surprised how many brewers say, this is too good to be true! What, you’re going to come up in a van? You’re going to pick the beer up from the brewery? You’re going to pay on collection and then you’re also going to leave a deposit for the casks? It does take some convincing because some people just think you’re on a wind-up.”
While Carl obsesses over beer, Nicki takes the reins in the kitchen. Her regular food nights are a local legend.
“Eight themes: steak, fish, burgers, kebabs, tacos, Spanish and Oriental tapas … wait, that’s seven.”
“Pie night!” she remembers. “That’s a crazy one, really hard work so it is every couple of months. We do them every Tuesday and Wednesday evening. We use the Snug, four tables, turn them around every hour. Have a seat and eat, it is very strictly timed. We can get 40 to 45 people a night. We did pie night last month and it was a record-breaker! That’s the one they go mental for.”
Nicki’s food events hark back to their Burton Bridge Inn days: “We started doing a steak night in a small room that nobody used. We were on holiday in Cumbria, just outside Penrith and we went to this pub he was having a sausage festival and that’s how the Burton Bridge Inn Sausage Festivals came about.
“I said to the guy, what’s a sausage festival? He was selling thousands of sausages,” says Carl. “I thought we can do something like that, before you know it, you’re selling 2,500 sausages in two and a half days. Smelling like sausages for weeks afterwards.”
When the sun’s out, so is the BBQ Shack, sizzling burgers to go with the pints. The whole thing feels effortless but it’s anything but. As the queue on that sunny Saturday shows, it has certainly proved a hit with the locals.
“We’ve always liked the town,” reckons Carl. “Once you get under the skin of the Burtonians, they’re very friendly people. They’re a bit cautious at first to outsiders, but effectively it’s just a small town. The reason it’s developed so much is because historically a lot of people have come to Burton for work and have stayed here. Location-wise, it’s central in the country, close to two airports, half an hour from Birmingham, and an hour and a half from London.”
“As we’ve been here more than 25 years, we’ve become an adopted Burtonians so I understand,” adds Nicki.
Carl smiles, pint in hand. “It’s just perfect. And the pubs? They’re brilliant.”