Last week was spent in the Greater Manchester area. I flew in on Sunday morning, and spent the afternoon cherry picking a few pubs to visit around Manchester. I didn't quite make it to the Marble Arch, but after a couple of pubs I settled into the Circus Tavern for a few pints.
Sunday evening the Metro brought me to Bury for the real reason I travelled over - a four day brewing course with Porter Brewing Company[/url:jt50r43d] (I decided to buck the Brewlab trend). Dave Porter has been in the business of brewing for fifteen years or so, and as well as running the courses, and installing breweries he also brews under the banner of the Outstanding Brewing Co.
Similar to Brewlab this is a three day course, with an optional fourth day of bottling/filtering, which I stayed on to do.
The first day was mainly 'classroom' based, going through the whole brewing process.
Day two was a lot more hands-on, where two beers were brewed in parallel. This was the day I was looking forward to. Dave has a 15bbl and 2.5bbl set-up, ant a wheat beer was brewed on the 2.5bbl system, and a bitter on the 15bbl. This was a chance for those who wanted to get really stuck in, helping to mash in or mash out etc.
Day three was a recap of the day before, a little on marketing etc. and a demonstration on cask washing and filling, and bottle conditioning.
Day four, for the three who chose to stay on covered filtering, carbonating and bottling. For this we bottled a lager, starting the process on the Monday evening, which also covered chill haze, infections etc.
All good things had to come to an end, and we left with a couple of bottles of freshly bottled lager as a souvenir of the week.
" title="Very Happy" /><!-- s:D -->