Loughborough Cocktail Week Returns With £6 Drinks Trail

Loughborough Cocktail Week is returning this May, with eight venues across the town centre serving £6 cocktails to celebrate International Cocktail Day — and a free app trail giving drinkers the chance to win a £60 gift voucher just for showing up.

Loughborough’s Cocktail Week: What You Need to Know

Running from Tuesday 13th May to Monday 26th May 2025, Love Loughborough Cocktail Week spans a fortnight of discounted drinks across a handpicked selection of the town’s bars and restaurants. Each participating venue is serving a specially created cocktail at the flat price of £6 — a genuinely decent deal given what cocktails tend to cost these days.

The eight venues taking part are: S.O.A.K, Bunk, Poco Sociale, Little Love Club, Tarboush, Champs, The Phantom, and The Organ Grinder. That’s a varied line-up, covering everything from S.O.A.K’s celebrated hidden bar down a Loughborough jitty to the Lebanese flavours of Tarboush — a route that takes in a decent chunk of what the town centre has to offer on a night out.

The event is organised by Love Loughborough, the town’s Business Improvement District, and is timed to coincide with International Cocktail Day on 13th May. It is the second year the event has run, following what organisers describe as a successful debut in 2024.

The App Trail — and What’s Up for Grabs

Beyond the £6 drinks, there is a cocktail trail woven through the event that runs via the Love Loughborough App. Download the app, navigate to the cocktail trail section, and check in at any six of the eight participating venues during the fortnight to be entered into a prize draw for a £60 Love Loughborough Gift Voucher.

It is a straightforward incentive that does exactly what it is supposed to do — get people moving between venues rather than staying put at one bar all night. That is good for the businesses involved, good for footfall across the town centre, and frankly good for anyone who fancies a proper evening out rather than a single-venue sit-in.

Alongside the trail, the event includes a cocktail treasure hunt, in-venue competitions, and six signature Love Loughborough cocktails that appear across the different venues. Details of individual venue events are available through the app.

Tim Garratt, of S.O.A.K Cocktail Co. and vice chair of Loughborough’s Pub Watch, said: “Last year’s Love Loughborough Cocktail Week was a great success and we’re keen to continue to grow the event. We want to show visitors and residents of Loughborough what the local evening scene can offer, showcasing some incredible venues and their products. There are some fun events taking place, including a cocktail treasure hunt, competitions and six fabulous Love Loughborough cocktails for customers to try across the different venues.”

Lisa Brown, Manager of Love Loughborough, added: “We know Loughborough has a thriving night life and this is a great chance to explore our great venues. We are delighted that so many of our bars are participating in this promotion which we hope will continue to grow in subsequent years.”

Our Take: This Is Exactly What Loughborough Needs

Let’s be blunt: Loughborough does not always get the credit it deserves as a night out. Ask anyone outside of Leicestershire and the town rarely comes up in conversation about great bar scenes. That’s partly unfair and partly a branding problem — because the venues are there, the quality is there, and the atmosphere on a good Friday night is as good as you’ll find anywhere of this size in the East Midlands.

What Love Loughborough Cocktail Week does — cleverly — is give people a reason and a route. A fortnightly trail across eight venues, each serving a £6 cocktail, with a prize draw thrown in for good measure, is exactly the kind of thing that gets a group of friends to try somewhere they’ve walked past a dozen times but never stepped into. That’s how you build a night-time economy. Not through grand announcements, but through simple, well-organised incentives that actually get people through the door.

The fact that this is only the second year is significant. If the organisers can keep momentum — bring in a few more venues, sharpen up the app experience, and get local employers promoting it to their staff — this could genuinely become one of the better small-town cocktail events in the region. The bones are already there.

The app trail is a smart touch too. Loyalty app mechanics have a tendency to feel gimmicky, but linking a physical pub trail to a digital check-in is a natural fit — and a £60 voucher is a tangible enough prize to make the effort feel worthwhile rather than tokenistic.

Loughborough has more going on than most people give it credit for. Events like this help make that case — one £6 cocktail at a time. We’ll be watching to see how it grows. And we’ll make sure you know what happens next.

Have Your Say

Will you be heading out for Loughborough Cocktail Week this May? Which venues are you planning to visit? Let us know in the comments below — your tips and recommendations could help other readers plan their own trail. And if you want to keep up with what’s on in Loughborough and across Leicestershire, sign up for our free local news updates so you never miss a story.