– Black Iris Tap Takeover + vegan street food
BLACK IRIS TAP TAKEOVER
Thursday 17th August 2017 / 5pm-late
Port Street Beer House
Nottingham’s BLACK IRIS make tracks to Port Street with a selection of cask and keg for your enjoyment. Every time we’ve had Black Iris on at Port Street recently its gone down a storm so we can’t wait to have a spread of the good stuff. Full line-up to be announced.
In exciting news, we will also be joined by vegan Mexican kitchen LOS ANTOJITOS ~ Manchester street food pop-up dealing in the sweet sweet business of tacos, chilli, nachos and more. Feast on their menu below.
– Burning Sky Takeover Port Street / IMBC 17 Fringe
BURNING SKY TAKEOVER PORT STREET
Thursday 28th September midday – Sunday 1st October 2017 midnight
Port Street Beer House
We are excited to announce that the excellent Burning Sky, masterful brewers and blenders, takeover Port Street for a full FOUR DAYS during the course of IMBC 17.
Look out for wall to wall Burning Sky across cask and keg. There will be specials galore, tasting pop-ups, vintage numbers, and basically all things Burning Sky. Further information on specifics coming soon.
Happening as part of the Independent Manchester Beer Convention Fringe. Facebook event page for our Burning Sky takeover HERE.
Artwork by David Bailey
– Lines Tap Takeover
LINES TAP TAKEOVER
Thursday 20th July 2017 / 5pm-late
Port Street Beer House
Really quite excited to welcome Caerphilly’s farmhouse brewery LINES to Port Street Beer House for a tap takeover. Here’s the line-up…
1.Acid oats on citra 4.5 abv – blended juicy session, 6% sour blend, leaving room for hops and fresh summer tart flavours
2.Citrus grisette 3.6 abv – Lemon zest infused and pink grapefruit conditioned, this summer grisette was brewed using Belgian yeast then blended with a farm sour at 20%
3.Primary brett Imperial Stout 9.5 abv – Now 18 months old, the brett is really doing its work on this imperial stout, fresh lactobacillus, brettanomyces and sacc.
4.Double barrel blend 4.8 abv – 18 month french oak brett saison, blended with pinot barrel 6 month saison, blended back with 40% farm sour. Blended to give funk aromas of a thick lambic, but to drink with summer freshness
5.New Zealand New England (‘session’) IPA 3.8 abv – Just as it says, its hoppy, juicy, made from clean borehole water. Use it to water down and hop up the tongue
6. Double IPA blend 8.1 abv – Release of Double IPA blend – The beer had a whopping 80 kgs in dry hop of amarillo, citra, nelson and chinook and was blended back at around 5% with our neutral sour to make the large mouth-feel more palatable.
7. Phat Firkin ‘Acid Mosaic’ 4.3 abv – Oaty Session IPA, dry hopped heavily with Mosaic and lightly blended with a sour
8. Green line – Fyne ales collaboration – Last ever keg of this wild foraged mint saison.
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And here’s everything you could ever want to know about Lines, direct from the horse’s mouth…
LINES
“We are blenders of farmhouse beer lines, with a vision of becoming fully sustainable, locally sourcing produce and brewing using renewable energy. We are incorporating global flavours from international beer folklore and mixing with current innovation to bring a different dimension to the increasingly global and constantly expanding market of craft beer.
All Lines beers are brewed from natural ingredients using fresh water from the borehole aquifer underneath our brewery. Each beer is tasted at maturation to adjust for acidity changes, and finished by blending back with one of our sour backs or other styles for a consistently unique, ever- evolving range of beer. All our beers are blended, unfiltered, unfined, and unpasteurised.
The Line System and Branding:
As evidenced by our name and artwork, our beers follow a structure of Ley lines, or dragon lines, as we call them colloquially. These lines are ancient, straight trackways in the British landscape, or in the newer sense, spiritual and mystical alignments of land forms. All of our art is created by Kef, a brilliant street artist from Berlin, who in himself encapsulates harnessing raw energy and embracing your space with his live, free-flowing, and non-repetitive technique to achieve soulful and simple inspiration in his work. Tracing the lines and flow of technique, tradition, and innovation lends itself to an overriding structure we aim to implement in our brewing:
The Lines
a) Myrcene Line – Yellow: Hops (IPA/ Pale)
b) White Line – White: White beer (Wit/ Weiss)
c) Belgian Line – Red: Of Belgian or French origin (saison, abbey, biere de garde)
d) Foudres Line – Brown: Varying age in wood foudres, barrels or locally harvested yeast (sour or barrel aged)
e) Fruit Line – Green: Beers brewed or aged with fresh fruit (fruit beer)
f) Black Line – Black: Dark beers (Imperial Stout/ Bourbon aged Stout)
Eco Brewing
Environmental consciousness and attention to ingredients are primary in our focus. So far, our eco-minded brewing initiative has seen us tap into and harness the natural water available to us to use in our brewing.”
– Verdant Tap Takeover review by Cameron Steward
On Wednesday 17th May 2017 we held a Verdant tap takeover at Port Street. We asked Cameron Steward to come down and taste his way through the hits. Here are Cameron’s words and photographs…
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One of the most striking articles should you choose to visit the Verdant Brewing website is a blog post entitled ‘High Level Sink’. The declaration from January 2017 begins, “Today was a bad day” and outlines how Verdant had to dispose of a staggering 800 litres of their Pale Ale High Level Kink (4.8%), due to contamination issues.
You may think this an odd confession; why announce such a colossal failure? What good can come from planting that seed of doubt regarding the level of professionalism in such a highly competitive field? On the other hand, it’s refreshing to acknowledge such a calamity and certainly reassuring to see that Verdant demand only the highest quality, ensuring the product they put out is their best.
Sadly HLK isn’t present at the Port Street Beer House tap takeover, but their Pale army is solidly represented with Light Bulb (4.5%), Headband (5.5%) and the brilliantly titled Roy, I Want A Hilux (5.5%). They’re reassuringly hazy, bitter and very fruity – just what you’d expect from a brewery whose manifesto is a hop-forward reaction to a lack of juicy, bitter bombs from this side of the pond. It’s evident Verdant are heavily inspired by the New England IPAs and Pales, which have gained more mainstream recognition in the UK over the past couple of years. They cite Treehouse, Trillium, Monkish and Hill Farmstead as influences and this comes across with crystal clear clarity (although in reality, they’re pretty murk-tastic) in their IPAs, Putty (8%) and Even Sharks Need Water (6.5%).
Both these beers are showcased at the takeover and Sharks is a damn-near perfect example of a smash-able, juice-splosion IPA. It’s packed with tropical lushness and plenty of bitterness. That NE profile is equally palpable from the soft mouthfeel that head brewer James clarifies “comes from wanting to meld yeast, malt and water profiles to enhance the hop experience”. It’s also worth mentioning that these beers pair fantastically with the sticky and sweet Pork Bao buns provided by the master chefs at Common Bar.
It’s not hard to tell that these guys have worked hard, each of the offerings at the takeover represents the tastes and demands of Verdant’s tireless brewers – there are just the 3 of them. This didn’t happen overnight of course, they began piloting brews in 2013 before moving to a 1bbl kit in a shipping container in 2014. “Test, assess, change and test again” James tells me and by August 2015 the beers were ready for public consumption. A mere 10 months later they moved to their current premises in Falmouth, Cornwall, equipped with a 10bbl kit that went live in September 2016. From there on it’s all been a haze (pun intended), with popularity seeing Verdant become increasingly more visible in the north of England, having already infiltrated the South West, Northern Ireland and London. Their next target, Scotland, is so direct in their crosshairs that the day after their Port Street takeover, they’re invading one of Edinburgh’s finest, The Hanging Bat, to bring the hop pain.
Future aspirations include obtaining their own canning line and opening their tap house for summer sessions. They also hope to extend their Christmas card list with a range of forthcoming collaborations that may be classified “top secret” but definitely include Manchester’s own Cloudwater, which is definitely worth getting excited about.
It’s not hard to see why Verdant have grown so exponentially; they’re fun and personable gents who offer time to answer my questions and it’s clear they’re brewing beers they crave, which happens to coincide with a reinvigorated interest in the modern IPA – see Hop City for further evidence. Their pump clips and cans glow as vibrantly on bars and shelves as the contents do in the glass, and if they’re not happy with those beers being saturated with “lush, juicy and moist hop flavours”, then they’ll reassess and try again.