The brewery stands about fifty yards from the inn, up at Brandy Mount, where the chalk begins to give up the water that becomes the River Itchen. The bar belongs to the Flower Pots Inn, known in the village as the Pots, and it is the only pub left in Old Cheriton. The onsite brewery arrived after the pub was bought from Whitbread in 1990; the pub itself has appeared in every Good Beer Guide since 1975.
The regular casks include Pots Bitter, Goodens Gold, Perridge Pale, Cheriton Porter and Flower Pots IPA. Buster's Best is named after Buster, a black-and-white fox terrier who lived behind the bar. Hopton IPA commemorates the Battle of Cheriton, fought just outside the village in 1644. In 2026 CAMRA named the Pots its Hampshire and Southern Hampshire Pub of the Year.
The food changes daily with what is fresh. Sunday means a roast of brewery-grain-fed beef from the Pritchard family at Owslebury; Wednesday is curry made to order; the first Friday of the month is steak night with Park Farm beef, and the second Friday turns to fish. Recent visitors have praised the pan-fried mullet and the steak-and-stout pie.
There are two gardens, a smaller one at the front and a larger one behind, and in summer an adjoining field is set with picnic benches. Dogs are welcome. Inside the public bar the old well still survives, and a former landlord remembered blackbirds nesting above the outdoor-toilet cisterns and, before a cooling system went in, beer flooding the floor.
The rest of Cheriton is thatched cottages along the Itchen Valley, with the clear young river running through the fields beside them. The village shop is on School Road. The village hall was built in 1911.
The church of St Michael and All Angels stands on a mound, flint and stone, its chancel raised over a crypt. Historic England dates the surviving fabric to the thirteenth century, with fifteenth-century additions and repairs after a fire in 1744. Beneath the altar is a rare survival of fourteenth-century Flemish tiles; there is a trefoiled piscina of the thirteenth century, six bells, and stained glass of St Michael. Carved panels of the early fourteenth century were reset on the porch after the fire.
On 29 March 1644, Parliamentarian forces defeated Sir Ralph Hopton's Royalists here, ending the Royalist advance through Hampshire. The turning point came when Sir Henry Bard led his infantry off a defensible ridge and the Parliamentarian cavalry threw them back. Over the past century and a half the village has also lived on truffle hunting, watercress, and C & F Freeman's timber works, once its major employer.
Walkers can take the circular of ten or eleven miles from the village hall, which follows the Itchen Way along the river before climbing to the South Downs Way and returning past the green lanes tied to the battle. Shorter is the National Trust's five-mile battlefield walk from Hinton Ampner, a mile east, where Ralph Dutton's rebuilt Georgian house keeps its topiary garden, café and estate paths.
Cheriton sits on the B3046 just north of the A272; Winchester is nine miles away for the mainline, and Alresford four miles for the heritage railway. The Stagecoach 67 passes through, though the timetable thins in the evenings.
Brian North recalled a former regular, Charles Peeling, whose party piece "was to pop his glass eye out onto the counter."