Bristol pub to give away free pints of Foster’s today but you’ll have to be quick

A Bristol pub is giving away free pints of Foster’s lager today (July 19) as part of a campaign to celebrate the tradition of pub banter.

The Fishponds Tap is giving away two pints per customer and the offer closes when the £1,000 bar tab has been used up.

A third of pub goers admit to exaggerating tales they tell in the local – with many bending the truth about how fun a night out actually was and how often they get chatted up.

A nationwide poll of 2,000 adult pub-goers found 53% of those who have gone over the top have done so to get a laugh from their mates.

Bristol was found to be one of the top ten UK hotspots for the best pub banter.

Nearly a quarter of pub-goers polled have overstated how much things cost them, 16% haven’t been totally honest about the number of former lovers they’ve had, while 12% have claimed their spicy food tolerance is more robust than it actually is.

Men were more likely than women to exaggerate their tales in almost every category (and twice as likely to exaggerate their salary), except when it came to overstating how fancy their holiday hotel was.

Londoners, meanwhile, were much more likely to overstate their sporting prowess (27% vs 14% nationally) or say they’d snogged a celebrity (one in 12 Londoners claimed this).

Amongst all respondents, more than a quarter (27%) have been called out for exaggerating their tales, and of these, 39% are adamant that what they were saying was totally true.

The research was commissioned by Foster’s, who created the ‘Cock and Bull Detector’ with the help of a professional polygraph examiner to help pub goers’ prove the incredible stories they tell down the pub are true, rather than a load of cock and bull.

To launch the Foster’s Cock and Bull Detector, TV personality Tom Skinner tested the machine for himself.

He said: “I’m often called out for telling stories that people think are cock and bull when in fact they’re 100% true! I was thrilled that Foster’s have created the Cock and Bull Detector to show that I was telling the truth once and for all.”