A mile-long beer festival celebrating Manchester’s independent breweries is coming to Piccadilly Trading Estate next month.
Four of Manchester’s finest brewers are teaming up to host a massive free party along the city centre’s industrial beer mile.
Taking place on Saturday 13 May, Sureshot, Cloudwater, Track, and Balance are each inviting a guest brewery, an independent food vendor and live DJS down to their taprooms for a riotous all-day block party.
Kicking off at 12pm, punters can move freely between each taproom – collecting a stamp card designed by artist David Bailey at each.
At its upstairs taproom, award-winning brewery Cloudwater will host a Friends and Family sour bar with food from Isca wines in Levenshulme and music from Andy Votel and friends.
Over at Track Brewery, meanwhile, drinkers can enjoy a tap takeover from Verdant as well as selections from founder Adam, as well as tapas-style food from the excellent Porta.
Meanwhile, Sureshot Brewery, founded by former Cloudwater boss and mash time legend James Campbell, will host a tap takeover from Burning Sky Brewery and serve food from Lily’s Vegetarian Deli.
Final brewery Balance will also be running a pop-up bar at Sureshot throughout the day with guest beers from Torn Plant, which produces modern minimal intervention ciders and blends from the north west of England, outside of Delamere Forest. On the decks, it will welcome 2 DJs including the Wizard King.
Entry for the brewery block party is free, and anybody who collects all four brewery stamps on the day will be entered into a draw to win a hamper of beer-related goodies.
Featured image – Cloudwater
Eats
New Manchester restaurant receives rave review as another is slammed as ‘torture’
Daisy Jackson
Pip, a new restaurant in Manchester, has received a rave national review this week – a review which slammed another restaurant in the same feature.
Food critic William Sitwell wrote in his review in The Telegraph that Pip is charming, refined, and fabulous.
“Bravo, Pip. Pip pip!” he wrote in the glowing write-up on the new restaurant, which stands at the foot of the new Treehouse Hotel and has the acclaimed Mary-Ellen McTague at its helm.
Sitwell’s Telegraph review particularly raved about dishes including Lancashire hot pot (‘fabulously good’), a wild garlic soup (‘a gorgeous thing’), and an apple trifle (‘a gift from heaven’).
But while it was all good for Pip, there were significantly less positive adjectives heaped on another restaurant in Manchester.
In fact, he said that Pip is ‘a great-value tonic’ for the ‘brash (and pricey) torture’ across town.
That restaurant was KAJI, formerly known as MUSU, which he said was ‘all tummies, bald heads, tattoos and heat’.
Sitwell said that while the service and sashimi are good at KAJI, the ‘place is afflicted by some overbearing cooking that cheapens the noble name of Japanese cuisine’.
He wrote: “Lamb chops fail the tender test and are properly wrecked sitting on a vulgar pond of sticky “tomato ponzu”. No beast should die to have that stuff squirted anywhere near it.
“And Kaji is a Japanese gaff without sake. Which is like opening a British pub in Tokyo and forgetting to put an ale on tap.”
Sharing the review, Pip wrote: “Thankyou @telegraph and @williamsitwell for the fantastic feature. We’re so proud of our team here.”
Milk Maids, Bolton – The family-run ice cream parlour on an award-winning farm
Daisy Jackson
Ice cream doesn’t come much fresher than those served at Milk Maids – in fact, you’ll be standing right on the family farm where the cows that produce the milk live, as you tuck into your scoop.
This unassuming dairy farm in Bolton has been in operation for decades, and in the same family for generations.
But it’s when sisters Fiona and Rebecca saw the full potential of all that award-winning milk being produced on their farm that Milk Maids was born.
This ice cream parlour on Dearden’s Farm in Over Hulton is now one of the hottest spots in Greater Manchester, especially when the weather is similarly hot.
Every month they release a whole batch of flavours, all made fresh daily (you can literally see Fiona legging it across the yard with buckets of milk to make fresh batches), with May specials including white chocolate and sea salt caramel, raspberry cookie, and passionfruit pavlova.
Milk Maids, Bolton – The family-run ice cream parlour on an award-winning farm
Cones can be filled with molten chocolate or pistachio creme before your ice cream is scooped and pressed into the cone.
Or you can have your chosen flavour whizzed up into a milkshake, served in a milk bun, or presented in an insulated take-home box for later.
We could wax lyrical about how good this ice cream is, but the queues really do speak for themselves, and you should go and get in it right now.
Georgina Pellant -
18th April 2023 
