Determined Welshman Breaks World Record By Visiting 56 Pubs in 24 Hours

A man from Wales has officially broken the Guinness World Record for "most pubs visited in 24 hours" — but don't expect to find footage of him drunkenly stumbling into his final stop. Despite visiting 56 different pubs to achieve this feat, he only drank two pints worth of beer across his entire crawl.

Gareth Murphy, a 29-year-old IT worker from Caernarfon, set the record in Cardiff on February 5, 2022, though Guinness only announced that the record had been verified this week. By having a drink at an incredible 56 different stops, Murphy topped the record of 51 set by Englishman Matt Ellis just last year.

But though pub crawls are often associated with excessive beer consumption, Guinness World Records explains, "For the purposes of this record, a pub is defined as an establishment licensed to sell alcoholic beverages on the premises, although the challenger is not required to consume any alcohol."

Along those lines, Murphy actually started his crawl at 10 a.m. with about a fifth of a pint of lemonade at a pub owned by the massive chain Wetherspoons. And by the end of his crawl, he had only drank two pints of beer in total. In fact, the record setter downed more orange juice than anything else. His total breakdown was 8.6 pints of orange juice, 5 pints of apple juice, 1.8 pints of beer, 0.8 pints of lemonade, 0.5 pints of Diet Pepsi, 0.4 pints of Tango, 0.33 pints of blackcurrant cordial, 0.2 pints of Coca-Cola, 0.2 pints of cranberry juice, and — since this was a Guinness World Record — 0.2 pints of Guinness. (To do the math, that's about 18 total pints of liquid.)

However, though he may not have consumed much beer, the feat is even more impressive than it sounds because he actually wrapped up his crawl by 9:26 p.m., meaning though he broke the 24 hour record, the whole crawl took less than 12 hours. That's over 4.67 pubs per hour.

"I knew the best place to do this was in the Center of Cardiff," Murphy told Guinness World Records, which explained that the area has the highest density of pubs, bars, and clubs in the U.K., with over 300 premises licensed to sell alcohol in a half square mile of space.

From there, Gareth said he did plan a route, though some last-minute changes had to be made due to some pubs being "unexpectedly closed or opening later." Additionally, to claim the record, he needed video evidence, as well as a logbook signed by an employee at each pub to say not only that he purchased a drink, but that he finished it, too.

As for those drinks, Murphy said he's a Guinness fan, but he made a tactical decision to avoid beer and stick with whatever felt easiest to drink. "I knew I had to stay off the Guinness as it's quite a heavy drink. I did have a beer in a few select pubs, but I knew I couldn't overdo it as I knew the fizz would immediately make me bloated," he was quoted as saying. "As the day went on, I did notice that apple juice went down better than orange juice."

And so, funnily enough, when he tied the 51 pub record at 8 p.m., Murphy celebrated with an orange Tango soda. "It was a long, tiring day. The hardest thing I've ever done in my life," he added. "The hardest part by far was the bloatedness of drinking so much. It didn't help that I can't make myself burp either."

There you have it: the words of a world champion.