Port Street Beer House | Northern Quarter beer house, pub, drinking hole

– IMBC 17 Review by Cameron Steward

IMBC 17 Review
by Cameron Steward


It’s never fun queuing in the rain, but taking “pineapple selfies” whilst awaiting entrance into the North’s (perhaps even the UK’s) most revered beer festival certainly helped pass the time. To those who weren’t social media savvy our group must’ve looked like idiots, but when Beavertown take to the airwaves to plead for certain tropical plants you gotta step up, especially when there’s a mysterious prize involved… turns out that mysterious prize(s) were a can of Lupuloid IPA (6.7%), some Beavertown Extravaganza pins and a poncho. Now that’s a post-Brexit exchange rate I can get behind.

I realise the following sentence may get me blacklisted from all of Manchester’s finest bars and speakeasies, but I’ve definitely got hop haze fatigue. I’m all murked out, y’all! Thankfully, plenty of breweries have many other strings to their bows and served up slices of chop-smacking sours to satisfy my tarty tastes. Fierce Beer’s Very Berry (4.5%) and Brew By Numbers’ Cuvee 2017 (6.2%) were fantastic examples of wild ales at their biting best.

I usually keep my distance from Room 3 – it’s dark and the music is a bit rave-y. It reminds me of Laser Quest birthday parties; being gunned down by the local teenagers who would corner me until I was “back in play”, then shoot me down all over again – live, die, repeat. This year I decided to put my 90s-based traumas aside – plus my brother thought one of the DJs was very attractive… Turned out to be a great decision as Redchurch were delivering some of the best sours of the festival – Dry Hop Sour (5.4%) was ace but On Skins: Cherry (6.5%) was a face-contorting highlight. Suddenly I thought I heard a dance track I knew, and then remembered I’m old and boring so moved on to a different room.

Buxton brought along their soft serve machine, which although a bit gimmick-y, totally elevated their already great Original Blueberry Slab Cake (7%) to an astral plane. I even went a bit crazy and got soft serve Trolltunga (6.3%), their gooseberry sour IPA. Sacrilege, I hear you cry! Judge not, that ye be not judged… Or something to that affect, I would reply.

Making a lunch decision is always the hardest part of IMBC, and a last minute choice to get a Dirty Burger from Patty Smith’s turned out to be an excellent one, especially when paired with Wild Beer’s Wild Goose Chase (4.5%). Boom! Dessert was a Pecan Slab from the ever-amazing In Truffles We Trust, washed down with the frankly insane BA Imperial Chocolate Stout, Speyside Cacao (12.5%) by Dugges and Stillwater Artisanal.

Other beers were drank but haven’t been listed because they weren’t as good as the aforementioned (plus you’d get a bit bored reading about them) but the hit rate, as ever, was ridiculously high. And that also makes Indy Man a 6 for 6. Yep, 6 mother-flipping years and consistently the best thing that happens in my otherwise meaningless existence. Roll on 2018!!

Follow Cameron Steward on twitter

– 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.

—

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…

—

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.