This Month In Beer: Marble & Micropubs

SUCH has been the brewery/brewtap colonisation of central Manchester it is too easy to look no further for beer kicks than beyond Cafe Beermoth, Cloudwater, the Piccadilly Beer Mile and Marble’s new look NQ HQ. 

I’m starting to warm to the reinvention of Marble’s NQ bar, 57 Thomas Street, having inspected the new upstairs bar

And while I anticipate the arrival in Ancoats of the Seven Bro7hers Brewery outlet, the launching of a third Dockyard pub in First Street and the transposition of Carbon Smith brewery from Edinburgh into the popular Ardwick arches, there has been a whole world of new, further-flung indie projects going under my radar.

But before some belated suburban revelations – Carbon Smith. If the beer Ollie Smith produces here is as delectable as the hand drawn ink label artwork by fellow Scot Megan Duncan then we are in for a treat. The brewery started in a tenement bedroom in the Scottish capital, but now with a larger site in Manchester, they “can continue to be irresponsible with hops”.

Carbon Smith have made their name by brewing a large number of one-off ales with their standard brews based on takes on ‘Carbon’. Hence Carbon Copy Pale, Carbon Footprint Stout plus, more recherche, Carbon-12 IPA, named after the most stable isotope of Carbon, and, so suitable for Manchester, Graphene Porter. Experimentation has been the norm – witness a saison fashioned from mustard seed, cress, kelp and green tea.

All of which is a world away from Prospect’s Nutty Slack dark mild, which scooped top ale at the recent Manchester Beer and Cider Festival. Classic CAMRA-approved cask ale from a traditional small brewery near Wigan. Yet brewers and Patsy and John Slevin are also responsible for Wigan Central craft beer bar, shortlisted for 'Pub of the Year' in the 2015 Manchester Food and Drink Awards. That microbar (under railway arches – it’s the trend) is to be joined shortly in the town’s Standishgate by the grandly monickered Northern Beer Temple, while over in Bolton at 393 Chorley Old Road Bunbury’s is a classic small shop space turned micropub. Fewer overheads than a pub, back to convivial ale-driven basics, that’s the template. And yet here as elsewhere in the so-called sticks there’s a sophisticated ale nous afoot. Recently they held a keg vs cask 'Rauch-Off' where the North West’s first ever German-style smoked beers – from Bolton’s own dub (drink up brewing) and New Mills newcomers Torrside Brewing– asked punters to compare their dubSmoke and Franconia Tickle.

Rivington's farmhouse ales

Meanwhile, not very far away in the shadow of Winter Hill, Rivington Brewing Company (follow @rivingtonbrewco) is devoted to producing distinctive Belgian-style farmhouse ales – check out their creamy Radical – while planning to open a brewery tap in their farm complex.

Over in Bury, it’s good to see the excellent wine shop Kwoff stocking over 90 bottles of craft beer, including Silver Street, the in-house brewery of The Clarence, 'Dining Pub of the Year' in the 2015 Manchester Food and Drink Awards. Kwoff give CAMRA members a five per cent discount and Silver Street runs brew-with-them-for-a-day courses at £45 a head to include lunch and a pint. If you want to shadow head brewer Craig Adams e-mail  Craig@silverstreetbrewingcompany.com.

Over in Ashton-under-Lyne, at 8 Fletcher Street, well-established bottle shop Browton’s is thriving in its new guise as a drink-in ‘beer parlour'. We especially like their 12pm-5pm Sunday openings only when the Ashton Farmers Market is on. The offer is bring your own bread cheese and meats from the nearby stalls and play your own vinyl on their Dansette.

Rochdale, the under-appreciated Pictish apart, has never been a brewing stronghold, but we have high hopes of newcomers Serious Brewing Company, from husband and wife team Ken and Jenny Lynch. I caught up with their Goldrush Golden Pale Ale and Blue Sky Saison at Cocktail’s, a gem of a drinks shop in Littleborough, where the Lynchs started out as home brewers. The Blue Sky was particularly impressive – the naddition of Kiwi hops giving a citrus frehness to the Belgian style. 

Ken said: "We enjoy being a little bit experimental. Like us, many people are becoming interested in different styles of beer, it is not just bitter, mild, stout and lager which are popular now. Saisons, sour beers, dubbels and trappist beers are becoming increasingly sought after and we are excited to be brewing beer influenced as much by the brewing traditions of Belgium as our own British ales."

Meanwhile over in Castleton, the town’s first ever micropub, TOPO, is taking shape in the old post office (geddit?). You do fear for the future of pubs per se as the focus of drinking. Alongside micropubs and brewers opening their own taps most of the new wave bottle shops are morphing into small bars where for a small add-on you can drink the beers you came in to carry out.

Corin Bland serving at Bottle Stockport

Heaton Hops

Epicentre of this trend must be the Heatons – Chapel, where Damian O’Shea’s Heaton Hops was named 'pub of the year' by a local newspaper supplement, and Moor, home to the engaging Corin Bland’s Bottle Stockport, the Shaw Road offshoot of his beer stall on Stockport Market.

Of the two Bottle is the more adventurous in beer terms. We drank a Zona Cesarini from leading Italian brewery Toccalmatto (a tropical IPA with a melange of hops but lacking in focus) and a 9 per cent Lupulin Maximus Imperial Pale Ale from Wisconsin’s O’So, so hop-driven it even flaunted a (remove with care) hop cone in the bottle. Gloriously excessive stuff. Both beers around a fiver. Food? Upmarket crisps, scratchings and pretzels. If that’s not enough the brilliant neighbourhood bistro, Brassica is only a few doors away. 

Look out too in the next couple of months for the launch proper of Free Radical Brew Co, brainchild of two guts who work at Bottle, Tom Rayson and Andy Quinn, who plan to utilise spare capacity at a local brewery.,

Chapel Street-based Heaton Hops, on our early evening encounter, had more of a buzz, more of a feeling of  a bar proper rather than an adjunct to a store – and two handpumps. The cask Track Mojave Rye Pale was a seriously good 4.3 per cent session beer, but the eight keg taps offered a well-thought-out range, too. We enjoyed the conversation immensely, too, in a beautifully worked shop conversion. The changing beers on offer are listed temptingly on their website.

Both bars are within a a short walk of Heaton Chapel Station, so you can complete your crawl in either well-endowed beerwise Stockport or Manchester city centre.

Marble upstairs bar

Here I’m starting to warm to the reinvention of Marble’s NQ bar, 57 Thomas Street, having inspected the new upstairs bar, which has reinstituted the long table with games, the absence of which in the refurbed downstairs aroused the ire of devotees, along with keg pumps replacing the bartop barrels. Maybe they’ll be spitting their dummies out at the introduction of a (simple but classic) cocktail list in this ale mecca. Still there is a selection upstairs of 36-pint pins, where new Marble brewer James Kemp (ex-Thornbridge and Buxton) can road test new ales in cask-conditioned form. 

The classic Lagonda has been tweaked and during my visit I got to sample a one-off 8.9 per cent Old Ale (£3 a half), all liquorice and molasses, and a test version of a new beer, Damage Plan, a dangerously drinkable hyper-tropical IPA – it is officially launched in keg only form from 2.30pm, Friday, February 19 at the Marble Arch pub on Rochdale Road. I also compared cask and keg versions of Earl Grey IPA. The more complex cask version won hops down.

With an open kitchen food is extending beyond cheese and meat boards with the canniest of consultant chefs on board, David Gale. They are still working on artwork to complement seriously good sycamore and wood in the upstairs bar fitting. A good space for events. Initial impressions were too hasty!