Thornbridge Brewery Tour

A few of us went for a tour of the Thornbridge brewery yesterday, along with  a stop at the Monsal Head Hotel, or at least the Stable Bar bit, somewhere I first visited for a bit of refuelling on my way to my stag/beer and walking weekend in the Hope Valley. If you've never been up there then you're missing out. You might be be prepared to accept indifferent beer because of the view, but you don't have to, the Buxton Moor Top was amazing; session beer for hop-heads, with a great supporting cast courtesy of the Wincle brewery. Frankly, even if the pub was horrible it'd probably still get a good review from me by virtue of a couple of Michael Jackson books being scattered around as reading matter.

I won't go into details of how the beer is brewed - there are people far better qualified than me talking about brewing on many a blog, so I'll just put a few photos below so those of you who want to have a bit of a look at the shiny stuff can do so. It's certainly an impressive site, wearing its modernity and its craft beer credentials with all the pride, if not all of the volume, of one of its ex-employees.

As for the beer, well we got to try the Lord Marple there and then, and all of their regular lines are available bottled form the brewery shop. I also bagged myself a few Thornbridge Hall beers, which is the brand they are labelling their experimental brews under - reviews of those to follow anon. They're brewed at the older, original brewery site. After finishing the tour we headed over to the Sheffield Tap to make sure we got the whole Thornbridge experience - we're nothing if not dedicated - Jaipur and the superlative Kipling on hand-pull rounding off the afternoon's tasting experience nicely.

Thanks very much to Thornbridge for a fun and informative tour and some excellent beer - I'm looking forward to the Thornbridge Hall beers and a return trip to the Tap. Cheers!

More Michael. Style!

Tasty bits.

Shiny stuff! (Mash tun)

Mmmmm, hops...

Brew lab.

Sam. Getting thirsty.

More shiny things.

Bottling line, for about 30% of the beer.

More tasty bits!

More shiny stuff. They've got something like 300 awards!

Some fizzy keg rubbish...

...we found hiding in the cold store.

Kelham Island 'Pale Rider'

I've had to put my oak exploration beers on hold for a few days. I'm full of cold and I wanted to do it properly - if you can't use your nose you can't taste anything, it is after all 'the most acute human tasting instrument.' *

I do have a beer to write up though, while I'm waiting for my olfactory receptor cells to recover and reading about Nobel prize winners.  I had a bottle of an old favourite of mine, Kelham Island Pale Rider, last week. A mate of mine used to run the New Barrack Tavern in Sheffield, and this is a beer I fell in love with on returning from a year of fizzy lager (with some rare but very notable exceptions) in Australia. Going back to beers you have a nostalgic fondness for is always dangerous, but I didn't have the expectation levels I would if I'd seen it on draught (which would probably lead to pant-wetting levels of excitement), and so I thought I was pretty safe.

In the end I suppose I was right, it's simply not the beer I remember it being on tap. However it's got a decent hoppy bite that grabs the side of the tongue, a good fruity complexity, showing lemon sherbet and a touch of soapiness in the mid-palate, all polished off with a moreish bitter finish.

It's still a good beer, one I'd be only too happy to drink again, and aside from the shift from draught to bottle, I can't help wonder how much my perception of it has shifted in the interim years while I've been refining my taste buds. (I know that sound horribly pretentious but I have sat an awful lot of wine exams since I used to drink in the NBT - and I'll concede it could be I've just been getting older and more picky!)

* The Oxford Companion to Wine