Bakewell from a Beer Perspective

My wife and I are currently spending our holidays in Bakewell, Derbyshire, England. Even though I usually primarily blog about homebrewing, I’d like to share a few quick notes about good beer here in Bakewell.

The first impression was that the pubs are dominated by Peak Ales, a microbrewery near Chatsworth house. Unfortunately, I find all of their beers rather unremarkable, the stereotypical “boring brown bitter”. Which is unfortunate, because Bakewell is home to another brewery, Thornbridge, which has produced some fantastic and exciting beer over the last 11 years. It was surprisingly hard to find any pub that has Thornbridge from cask. Impossible, in fact. What the locals told us, most of the Thornbridge pubs are in Sheffield, and the only local Thornbridge pub we found, the Horsepack Inn in Little Longstone, had really odd opening hours. Don’t expect to be able to get a pint there on Thursday at 4pm.

Manchester is only 2 hours away from Bakewell by bus, so if you have plenty of time, it’s worth visiting Cloudwater Brewery. They’ve recently created a large hype with their rather unusual one-off brews and fantastically juicy series of Double IPAs. You need to reserve a seat beforehand to be sure to get served on Saturdays when their tap room is open. We were lucky to reserve just for the weekend after they started releasing their v4/v5 DIPAs.

If you find the trip to Manchester too boring, a good time-waster is to count pubs and what breweries run them. It looks like Robinsons totally dominates around that area, but I managed to see a seemingly defunct-looking pub with an old Boddingtons sign just before Stockport.

Talking about the better beer in Bakewell itself, we enjoyed going to a particular pub, The Manners. It’s a Robinsons pub, their food was good, and the beer was well-kept. From cask, they had five different Robinsons ales (Trooper, Unicorn, Wizard, Bonjeuros, Dizzy Blonde), from keg, the usual lagers, Robinsons Smooth (nitro keg ale) and Robinsons Dark (keg mild). My personal favourite has been Bonjeuros, a dry, hoppy, citrusy, zesty golden ale, which was quite refreshing.

Our opportunity to drink more Thornbridge beer was Peakender beer festival. It’s Thornbridge’s very own festival, so of course, many of their core range beers were available, and a good selection of other breweries’s beers. What we didn’t know beforehand: the location was extremely muddy. It’s more of a 3-day camping&beer festival. But on the Sunday when we were there, the weather was rather sunny, and a rare opportunity to get a proper sunburn in England.

Another day, we also visited Thornbridge brewery itself. It was quite interesting to see the size of the operation, which was actually smaller than I had expected, given their vast core range, and the amount of beer they sell nationally and internationally. Unfortunately, they’re currently undergoing some extensions, and thus not all parts of the brewery can be visited. We had the chance to sample one of Thornbridge’s latest releases, Serpent: a Belgian-style Golden Ale, fermented with the lees from a local cider maker and barrel-aged in ex-Bourbon casks (Four Roses), was a collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery. A pretty good beer, with the qualities of a dry, fruity white wine. I also managed to get two bottles of their sour red ale oak-aged on cherries resp. raspberries, for which Thornbridge recently won gold and silver medal at the World Beer Cup. I have yet to try these, though.

Starting tomorrow, we’ll be in York for a week. I’ll write about it next week, and I’d be grateful if anybody has any good tips regarding beer there.

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