The increased numbers of commercial breweries around the region has been matched by a growth in the popularity of home brewing. The city has two successful home brew groups in Manchester & Chorlton where amateur brewers regularly meet up to swap tips and recipes and try the beers of their contemporaries. Although brewing kits still adorn the shelves of supermarkets, many of these home brewers are brewing “full mash” beers from raw ingredients and many of the resulting beers easily stand up against commercial beers.
These beers normally only reach the lips of a few friends and family but we’ve challenged the two groups to put a beer in front of 13,000 people at #MBCF16 by brewing their recipes on full scale brew-kits at a commercial brewery.
Chorlton Home Brewers normally meet at The Font in Chorlton, but today (3rd January) they are at Beer Nouveua brewery mashing in a pale ale which will be on Bar 1 at #MBCF16 in just over two weeks time.
Torrside Brewery in New Mills will be the host for the Manchester Home Brew club tomorrow (4th January). We hear the club, who normally meet on the third Thursday of the month, downstairs at The Beermoth, Tib Street are planning an English IPA which will feature on Bar 3 at the festival.
Once their work is done, it will be for you, the drinking public to decide which is the best beer. We’ll have just over 400 third pints of each beer so the method of competition will be easy. We won’t do any blind tasting or anything fancy – just a simple judgement on which beer do you drink the most of. Will one, or both of them even be so popular you drink it all?
You’ll also be able to judge their efforts against the country’s very best homebrewer. Manchester can proudly boast being home to the current National Homebrew Champion, Matt Dutton who won the Best Of Show award in the 2015 UK National Homebrew Competition with his Coup D’Etat Brett beer.
Matt is a mainstay of the Chorlton Homebrewers group which meet up at Chorlton’s Font Bar and also a regular attendee at meetings in Manchester. he’ll be brewing up one of his own recipes for the festival with Sam Dyson at the Track Brewing Company. The beer will also be on Bar 3 when the festival opens at Manchester Central on 20th January.
Chorlton Homebrewers gather at Beer Nouveau
The brewers prepare to brew
Mashing In
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