Eats

Bundobust has been secretly brewing its own beer in Manchester for eight months

The Indian restaurant's new head brewer has been trialling secret beer test batches behind closed doors.

Georgina Pellant - 23rd June 2021

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.