So, the boring but relevant context is now over & I’m on a holiday of sorts so let’s change the mood!
I spent part of this Tuesday driving to Salford & helping some folks lug beer kegs, pins and glasses around while some other folk built a makeshift mega-pub that will serve 60 keg and 23 cask beers, all of which won’t have ever been served in Manchester (some, anywhere) before. All brewed by amazing breweries. It’s ludicrous to try and do that!
This is #ISBFX – Independent Salford Beer Festival 10, the twelfth time this has been held in some form or other, I think. Yep, I know – 12 or 10?
Anyway, it was an eventful day!
I got up, but as I was heading out, I poured my usual many espressos (using coffee imported from Colombia by a nice bloke in Stockport who runs a cracking cafe, and that may feature in a later blog) into a travel mug, headed out to my ‘Van and set off.
A quick nip into my workplace to buy some work gloves because I have cuts and bruises on my hands from ‘tinkering with vehicles’, a splash and dash of diesel and then off to Salford Crescent.
Somewhere near the end of the A34 two things happened – my clutch pedal went ‘weird’ and as I took a swig of a quad of double espressos (I did say I drank a lot of coffee), the top of the cup burst, and I got covered in expensive Colombian product. Thankfully, not scalding hot (or white!).
By the time I got to the A57M, the clutch pedal was almost redundant with little resistance. By Hemsley House on Salford Crescent, my destination, it was sat on the floor. Ay well! Jim (the Head Honcho in the ISBF Family) had ok’d it with the venue that I could camp out for the event. It may just need to be a tad longer than anticipated!
So how come I’ve ended up being a volunteer, a Beer Sponsor and (as of a few weeks ago) even involved in the brewing of one of the beers at this year’s event? For that we need to go back in time…
I mentioned in the last blog that I met up with an old school friend and some of his mates. I was walking past what used to be a Merc showroom near the Etihad back in 2017, saw Noz & we said hello. We chatted and I ended up having a found that they have a passion for “good beer”.
In fact, between Noz and Dan they don’t just know about good beer, but they also know a lot about Manchester pubs and their history (well worth clicking on the link, btw). So much so that they had written up what I believe is something that was a “before its time” level of underrated brilliance. A pub guide that was honest and useful. Check out the articles that are numbered 001-205 as they visited them all! It must have been a right chore!
We arranged to meet up again after a game or something along those lines and my hazy recollection is that somehow on a cold and wet early Spring night in March 2018, we ended up huddling around electric bar fires in a damp-smelling railway arch under Piccadilly Station tracks in the original Cloudwater Brewery, drinking beers with styles I was only just starting to understand – NEIPA, TIPA, DIPA, DDH IPAs (lots of IPAs it turned out!).
This was the relatively early stage of Manchester becoming one of the most influential Cities as far as ‘Craft Beer’ was concerned, albeit a lot of the breweries had been around a while. This was a time when Alphabet, Blackjack, Cloudwater, Marble, Track et al were growing and leading a drive forward for good beer, made with care & quality ingredients, rather than meeting taxation thresholds and duty brackets and stifling any potential competition from start-ups.
It turns out that Noz, Dan and a few of the others had been to a beer festival and got to know Jim (the aforementioned organizer) of Independent Salford Beer Festival. He was running the festival again and this time he was moving it to a bigger, better venue – Hemsley House on Salford Crescent. As soon as we all could, we bought tickets for the Saturday evening and that was when my love affair truly began!
At the Independent Salford Beer Festival 5 – “Revenge Of the Fifth!”.
We all went into town early and headed to the Etihad to watch Manchester City play and beat AFC Bournemouth (3-1 Final Score, Bernardo Silva – 16′, Raheem Sterling – 57′, Ilkay Gündogan – 79′ and for AFCB, Callum Wilson – 44′) before sneaking off a touch early and assembling nearer the centre of town so we could all get taxis to Salford. We then reassembled in Bexley Square at The New Oxford pub, had a pint and began the short walk west down Chapel Street onto the Crescent.
One of the many superb folks that were part of the very eclectic group, Vinny, provided me with a genuinely interesting and also very entertaining history of the parts of Salford that we passed, starting with the 1931 “Battle of Bexley Square,” a violent clash between police and 10,000 unemployed protesters demonstrating against the means test, and also the now dilapidated The Crescent pub, the location where Marx and Engels are thought to have met and discussed ideas for works like the Communist Manifesto. He made it more entertaining than that, though!
We presented tickets and were welcomed into Hemsley by Jim & the team. We picked up our glasses, programme and sheet of tokens and found a cracking table for us all to settle at. You head to the bar, where beers are in alphabetic brewery order (Amity Brewing will be to the left and Wander Beyond will be to the right-hand end of the bar).
I have no idea now what I had to drink but I know that the quality of beer and the friendliness of the team of volunteers made it special. So special that it became evident very quickly that even the attendees seemed to be like-minded and friendly, even at the end of a long session of supping. And it was all for charity!
The only negative was that I put my glass down on the doorstep to unlock it when I got home and heard a ‘clink’ sound. It was in pieces.
So tomorrow, I will head back to Hemsley, hopefully without issues with the campervan clutch pedal (there inevitably will be, so watch this space), help set up for the first session and then meet up with a load of familiar faces who will be regular attendees at an ISBF bash, and try some incredible beers – one of which I mashed in!
But that’s for tomorrow!