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.
The new Chaitro beer – a smooth and creamy Porter with roast malts, chai masala and fresh ginger / Image: Bundobust
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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The home of Bundobust’s secret brewery, due to open to the public later this summer / Image: Bundobust
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.”
All new beers have been created to complement different dishes at Bundbost / Image: Bundobust
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
This Manchester bar serves a bottomless cheese fondue with endless beer and wine
Georgina Pellant
There’s a bar in Manchester serving a bottomless cheese fondue with endless wine and beer, and it honestly sounds like the perfect treat.
While it might scream cosy winter night in, with a huge outdoor terrace, The Mews is also a firm favourite during the summer months.
Add in a board of melt-in-the-mouth charcuterie, springy pieces of garlic sourdough and a host of crunchy cheese biscuits, and you’ve got yourself the ideal afternoon if you ask us.
But there’s more. Alongside all that cheese and meat and bread, included in the price of The Mews’ bottomless fondue, cheese lovers can also enjoy 90 minutes of non-stop drinks.
Bottomless cheese fondue at The Mews on Deansgate in Manchester. (Credit: The Manc Eats)
Costing £37.50 each, included in the deal is a huge pot of melted Italian Fontina cheese served with homemade garlic croutons, sourdough crackers, and slices of British charcuterie.
You’ll also get to enjoy an hour and a half of endless pints of house pilsner and carafes of red or white wine to enjoy alongside.
Serving up to six people, the bottomless cheese fondue is available only when you pre-book, so make sure to get in touch ahead of your visit to let The Mews know that you’re coming.
If you’re not on the sauce, you can opt for the cheese fondue alone. Without the booze, it’s quite a bit cheaper at £25 for one, and £2.50 on top for any additional people who want to get stuck in.
Housed up on Deansgate Mews, just behind the main hustle and bustle of Deansgate, there’s plenty of space inside as well as a large, secluded terrace that is quite the suntrap (when the Manchester sun is shining).
Popular Manchester restaurant bar to give out FREE sausage rolls to people called ‘Greg’
Emily Sergeant
One of Manchester’s much-loved restaurant bars is doing a free sausage roll giveaway next week… but there’s a catch.
The catch being you have to have a certain name in particular.
It was only last week that popular high street chain Pret A Manger announced it would be slinging out free sandwiches to any Mancs with ‘Nic’ in their name over the late May bank holiday weekend, and now Tariff & Dale is getting it on the giveaway action, and it’s all to celebrate the iconic event that is National Sausage Roll Day.
In case you didn’t know – which is very likely, let’s be real – next Thursday (5 June) is the day dedicated to all things sausage roll.
So what better way to mark the occasion than with free portions of Tariff & Dale‘s legendary meaty treat?
The popular Northern Quarter restaurant bar is known for its creative comfort food, craft beers and cocktails, and laid-back industrial vibe, with one of the cult-classic dishes on its menu having always been the honey pork sausage roll – which just so happens to be a whopping 15-inches long, by the way.
Resembling something more of a pork wellington than a sausage roll, if you will, the dish is crispy, golden, and glazed with honey on top.
But to celebrate National Sausage Roll day, instead of parting with £9.50 for a portion or £48 for the full 15-inch thing, people with one specific name can actually get a slice for completely free of charge.
Tariff & Dale is giving away FREE sausage rolls to people with this name next week / Credit: Supplied
And that name is ‘Greg’, because if we’re honest, when it comes to sausage rolls, we all tend to think of Greggs.
So whether your surname is Gregory or Gregson, or you’re simply just called Greg, then all you need to do to claim your complimentary slice of sausage roll heaven is head on down to Tariff & Dale next Thursday 5 June from 12pm up until 9pm.