Cloudwater’s long-awaited new taproom, Unit 9 has finally opened its doors. While Cloudwater’s Barrel Store looked like it was born out of necessity, Unit 9 has been lovingly crafted and is a welcome addition to Manchester’s thriving beer scene.
Full disclosure: on my first visit, it was a pre-opening event with free beer but I have since returned and bought my own bevs.
Manchester Beer Week returns for its third outing for 2018 and includes more events that ever before. This year, the events are more wide-ranging than ever featuring beer paired dinners, discussions about diversity, art exhibitions, wrestling as well as beer launches, meet the brewers and tap takeovers, there are huge amount of events in the MBW 2018 programme, and here’s my pick of the 15 ones not to miss.
Looking through my blog post archive, there’s various guides and lists I’ve pulled together about pubs and bars from locations across the UK and beyond – but I realised I’ve never done one for the city I spend most of my time in! So, here’s a look at some of the best craft beer bars and pubs in Manchester city centre (in my own humble opinion).
A five city beer battle is the first event announced for this year’s Manchester Beer Week.
The Danish capital of Copenhagen is one of my favourite cities, mostly down to its fantastic craft beer scene. I’ve visited the city a fair few times now and managed to explore quite a few of its bars and found some firm favourites.
So here’s a full guide to beer in Copenhagen – without a Carlsberg in sight.
I don’t like their beer, but the entry to their brewery is pretty impressive
Aarhus is Denmark’s second city and its good selection of bars and relatively small size (especially in comparison to Copenhagen) makes it a great place for a beery city break. Most of the craft beer bars in Aarhus are easy to walk between so you can visit quite a few in a short space of time, so here’s a look at some of them – including one that does a happy hour!
No longer do beer festivals mean a CAMRA-led event that takes place once a year and includes a load of local cask beer and maybe some Belgian bottles, thanks to the new breed of events that have popped up showcasing a new range of breweries and payment tactics.
Moving on from the old fashioned sheet of beer tokens, there are now more beer festivals which are offering all-in tickets – where you pay for everything up front and on arrival, all the beer is included. No faffing about with tokens, token sheets or cash, you simply turn up and drink away.
Amsterdam; the city of canals and coffee shops, but is it also a city for craft beer? Well, yes. Before visiting, I was aware of a few of the Netherlands’ most well-known breweries such as Het Uiltje, Jopen and Brouwerij ‘t IJ but I didn’t know just how many brilliant bars we’d find.
We arrived on King’s Day which is the Netherlands’ major bank holiday, so the streets were rammed with people drinking, dancing and generally enjoying themselves. As a result, our first evening was a bit different than the usual experience particularly as many of the bars closed early but it wasn’t this way all through our stay as the next day everything had returned to normal – as if the street drinking and party boats never happened at all.
Here’s a little run-down of all the places we visited during our three-night stay.
Manchester is home to a growing number of breweries, and more and more are choosing to open their doors to allow punters to drink beer right from the source. If I find myself in Manchester city centre on a Saturday, I generally end up in a brewery. As a regular brew tap visitor, I thought I’d pull together a small guide to what you can expect from each Manchester brewery tap, their locations and their opening hours. (Published June 2017, updated July 2019)
Known across the world as a party city, Berlin is also a great place for beer drinkers – as you’d expect from the capital of Germany. Being a large city, most of the bars are fairly spread out but there are plenty of them to explore. Here’s a look at the craft beer bars and traditional German inns I visited in Berlin.
The Ale in Kaleigh 