Indian street food favourite Bundobust has been secretly brewing its own beer in Manchester for eight months – and now the creation is about to be revealed to the public.
The restaurant has always had a strong reputation for sourcing excellent craft beer, but this new batch has been made to certain specifications.
Head brewer Dan Hocking has been quietly working away at the new brewery on Oxford Road for the best part of a year, using the lockdown-forced reopening delays to play around with new specialty ingredients.
To kick things off, he’s created three new bespoke house beers – a coriander lager, a masala chai porter and a tropical pale ale – that will be available exclusively at Bundobust restaurants.
Now they’re about ready for drinking, meaning they will all be available to try in Manchester at Bundobust’s Piccadilly restaurant from tomorrow, Thursday 24 June.
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The new beers will also be available at Bundobust restaurants in Leeds and Liverpool.
New drinks set to be revealed include their 5 percent Chaitro beer – a smooth and creamy Porter with roast malts, chai masala and fresh ginger.
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Then, there’s the Peela – an easy-drinking 4 per cent hazy pale ale with tropical fruit flavours.
And last but not least, there’s an adventurous coriander lager the Dhania Pilsner is available at 4.8 per cent.
The popular Indian restaurant’s new brewery is housed in a site on Manchester’s Oxford Road, with construction first starting in 2019.
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Initial plans for the venue included a second restaurant and brewhouse, with a small private room in the brewhouse for paired dinners and events but these were postponed by the pandemic.
This delay, however, has given the head brewer time to experiment with more adventurous ingredients.
“It’s been really great to have that time, with no deadlines or pressure, to just focus on the beer and how we can make it exactly how we want it,” said Dan.
“Not a lot of breweries can say they had eight months of practice on the kit before they sold a single beer, so in that respect, I feel really lucky to have had this time to play around.”
Previously at experimental Dutch brewery Uiltje, Dan knows a thing or two about working with weird and wonderful ingredients.
This will come in handy at Bundobust, where the plan seems to be to mix up traditional beer styles with more unusual flavours that will complement their food.
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Housed in a unique 100-year-old space within the iconic Grade II listed St James building, the brewery is a custom-built 10-hectolitre facility capable of producing 20,000 pints a month.
Bundobust plans to open its Oxford road brewtap and restaurant in late summer 2021.
Feature image – Bundobust.
Eats
Electrik Bar in Chorlton is giving away 100 FREE frankfurters to celebrate their latest kitchen collab
Danny Jones
We all love a freebie, so we thought we’d spread the good word of the scran lords by letting you know that Electrik over in Chorlton is giving away 100 free frankfurters to celebrate their newest menu takeover.
The popular neighbourhood bar and kitchen on Wilbraham Road in the South Manchester suburb has had a couple of different foodie collaborations over the past couple of years, with local residents Paramogeddon and Four Side Vegan Pizza being the most recent, but now they’re doing hot dogs.
Welcoming their latest vendors Tisch Und Teller, Electrik will be giving away a total of 100 free frankfurters to the first century of people there this evening.
Bringing a taste of Berlin, Bavaria, Frankfurt and more (with a Manc twist, of course) to the popular pub for the Thursday launch party, all you need to do is order a drink upon arrival to get your hands on a free frankfurter sandwiched between a lovely fluffy roll.
Who doesn’t love a hot dog? Especially when they’re giving them away.
As for Tisch Und Teller (TuT), they’ve been serving up German-inspired favourites from the likes of The Shakespeare in Manchester city centre and Nip and Tipple in Whalley Range since September last year, including some very impressive brunches and Sunday roasts.
But the brand just keeps gaining more traction and now they’re setting up shop in Electrik, we’re sure the word will continue to spread – and fast.
Better still, as advertised on the promo poster, not only will TuT now be serving up their delicious food from Electrik every Thursday-Sunday for the foreseeable but the launch party will also live music by local legend and DJing veteran, Abigail Ward of Ghost Assembly.
Free food, pints and top tunes – what more could you ask for on a random weeknight?
The offer will be available from 6pm tonight and, once again, you have to be among the first 100 people to buy a pint to be eligible for a free frankfurter.
Manchester’s new Instagrammable coffee shop is giving away FREE drinks tomorrow
Emily Sergeant
One of Manchester’s newest Instagrammable coffee shops is giving away free drinks tomorrow ahead of the bank holiday weekend.
With another long weekend right around the corner, and much of Greater Manchester and the UK fortunately looking set to bask in the springtime heat, popular coffee chain, Blank Street – which is one of Manchester city centre’s newest residents, with two sites in Piccadilly Gardens, and on the corner of King Street and Cross Street – has decided it wants to help the country “beat the 3pm slump”.
Ahead of the upcoming bank holiday weekend, the chain is inviting Mancs to “meet for matcha” tomorrow afternoon (Friday 3 May).
The exciting freebie offer is all said to be “inspired by data” that shows that almost half of office workers aren’t taking a break from their desks during the day, even despite research showing that this can boost productivity.
Hundreds of iced matcha lattes will be served up at Blank Street‘s Manchester branch on the corner of King Street and Cross Street between 3pm and 4pm tomorrow.
For anyone “ice cold pick-me-up ahead of the long weekend”, but keen not to tip their employers off, the coffee shop chain has created an online tool to allow workers to discreetly add a matcha moment to their diary.
The brand-new online tool will apparently help to “distract calendar snoopers” by creating a cleverly-named meeting and adding it automatically to Outlook, Google, or Apple calendars – with potential meeting titles that include plenty of corporate jargon to “provide the perfect alibi”.
So, all matcha fans need to do tomorrow afternoon is show the Blank Street team at their chosen branch a meeting in their calendar, and in return, they’ll receive a free small iced matcha latte of their choice from the chain’s delicious spring menu.
Blank Street’s popular matcha offering includes the Classic Matcha, the viral Blueberry Matcha, the silky-smooth White Chocolate Matcha, and the brand-new sumptuous Golden Matcha, so there’s something to “inspire every matcha lover to take a little time out”.
As matcha allows a slow release of caffeine, Blank Street says it’s the “perfect drink” to keep energy levels up throughout the afternoon when you’re stuck at your desk on a Friday.