The malting barley in the beer at Wildcraft's tap room is grown within fifty metres of where it is brewed. The brewery sits at Church Farm on Knowles Lane, having moved to Smallburgh in 2022 and opened the tap room the year after. Inside is a small, comfortable room with rotating taps: usually at least six of Wildcraft's own ales in cask, with the odd guest beer and keg alongside. The core range runs to IPA, lager and pale ale, all of it vegan and gluten-free, and there is a garden for when the weather allows. Dogs are welcome indoors and out.
Food here often comes from pop-up stalls, so what you eat depends on the day, and the larger summer events bring a wider choice. The shop next door sells the beer by cask, keg and can, along with the brewery's own coffee blend and locally sourced spirits, and runs tutored tours.
A short way off, A. G. Meale & Sons runs a farm shop, plant centre and pick-your-own at Wayford Nurseries. They grow their own: tomatoes from April to October, then strawberries, raspberries, sweetcorn, pumpkins, beetroot, courgettes, kale and runner beans as the season turns. Cromer crabs sit in the farm-shop chillers, and a fish van calls twice a week with fresh and smoked fish and shellfish.
Vera's Coffee Shop is on the same site, doing breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and cakes made on the premises from the nursery's own produce; the same "Baked by Vera's" goods turn up in the farm shop. There is table service, a covered patio facing the garden and a lawn to sit out on. Dogs are welcome in the outdoor areas but not indoors; the one in the photograph explaining the rule is Tia, who belongs to Harvey Meale. For everyday needs, Fairview Garage keeps a Premier convenience store.
The Crown Inn has closed. It was a thatched, timber-framed building that began as a fifteenth-century coaching inn, and in 1845 White's Directory listed Jeremiah Hannant as its joiner and victualler. Three pubs served the village in 1864; after the war the Crown was the last of them, which leaves the brewery tap as one place to drink in Smallburgh.
The church of St Peter stands in flint with ashlar quoins. Its medieval tower fell in 1677; the west end was rebuilt in 1902 with a bell-cote. Inside are a fourteenth-century octagonal font, a fifteenth-century timber south door and four painted saint panels on the dado of the old screen; the rebuilt west end carries crossed keys, St Peter's emblem.
Smallburgh is a dispersed, low-lying village straddling the A149, its northern and eastern edges drawn by the River Ant and its dykes; the name means the bank or hillock of the Smale, an older word for the river. Mill Lane runs out to a public footpath and the site of an old staithe on what was once Smallburgh Broad; the broad is gone, and the staithe now falls the far side of the parish boundary in Dilham. At Wayford Bridge, where the A149 crosses the Ant, the parish staithe has a slipway and mown grass, and free twenty-four-hour moorings lie on the Stalham side.
The North Walsham and Dilham Canal opened here in 1826, Norfolk's only artificial locked sailing canal, running from Antingham Bone Mills to Wayford Bridge. When the first laden wherries set off in June 1826 they went with "music playing and flags flying". The coal trade it was built for never came, since carting coal inland from the coast was cheaper, and it carried corn, timber and cattle cake instead. The four-storey brick tower at the bridge is a drainage mill of 1847, converted in the late 1970s and now a private house.
The nearest station is Worstead, unstaffed and single-platform, on the Norwich–Sheringham line; Sanders buses 6 and X6 stop on The Street, about fifteen minutes' walk from the brewery. Stalham, close by, has the Museum of the Broads at the Poor's Staithe, with river trips and family trails; East Ruston Old Vicarage opens its thirty-two-acre garden and tea room a few miles north, and BeWILDerwood's treehouses and rope bridges are over at Hoveton.
The village hall and its playing field are held by a local charity, and the parish council looks after the staithe, the moorings, the burial ground and the war memorial. They are the working parts of a village spread thin across its low ground.