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!
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| More Michael. Style! |
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| Tasty bits. |
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| Shiny stuff! (Mash tun) |
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| Mmmmm, hops... |
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| Brew lab. |
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| Sam. Getting thirsty. |
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| More shiny things. |
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| Bottling line, for about 30% of the beer. |
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| More tasty bits! |
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| More shiny stuff. They've got something like 300 awards! |
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| Some fizzy keg rubbish... |
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| ...we found hiding in the cold store. |
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.
Sounds like a grand day out. I haven't visited enough breweries... really should make more of an effort.
ReplyDeleteI've seen some of the Thornbridge Hall beers around but have yet to sample any... be sure to let us know how you find them.