Manchester Craft Beer Festival

This year’s Manchester Craft Beer Festival, hosted in the cavernous Mayfield Depot by We Are Beer, was once again a resounding success. 

We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: we love this format. No tokens, no messing about – guests pay a flat fee upfront for the ticket then all beers are included, all day. 

The 80 or so featured breweries from around the UK and Europe each have a stall, featuring a small selection of their best ready for you to sample. Your ticket includes a commemorative beer glass with a suggested “taster serving” of 100ml, but as one roguish brewer explains, you don’t have to stick to the limit. So don’t. 

However, if you want to try as many of the 600 plus beers as possible, go with the taster size. We recommend a “ditch if you don’t like it” policy to maximise your tasting potential. Despite rinsing stations all around with sinks and taps to enable this strategy, it can be difficult to give up on a sample with so many delicious options on offer. Our favourite was local brewery Cloudwater’s Pineapple & Lime Breeze – a tangy sour at just 4.5% ABV. 

There’s a little competition between the 80 or so breweries to jazz up their stall and give out small freebies to promote their wares. Belgian brewers extraordinaires La Chouffe have their own little grotto with their gnome mascot outside, giving away gnomic hats with bells to all and sundry. We particularly enjoyed an arcade style game by beer snack provider The Mad Butcher, offering the chance to win a pack of their delicious hot chilli salami. 

Proper beer absorbing meals come courtesy of stalls by veggie/vegan stalwarts Bundobust, Voodoo Ray pizza, char sui pork buns from Bone Daddies, and burgers from Almost Famous. Bundobust’s assertion that their okra fries are the perfect beer accompaniment, proves to be entirely correct.