If you’re looking for the best pints in Manchester, turn your ass around at the door of the pub and head to the ‘Beermuda Triangle’, a corner of the city centre where taprooms are king.
Our city has a great rep for craft beer and microbreweries, and a lot of these are concentrated in one brilliant, unexpected stretch of industrial estate.
Head beyond Manchester Piccadilly and you’ll find yourself in an area nicknamed the ‘Beermuda Triangle’, where tucked among tool shops and warehouses are breweries welcoming in thirsty punters.
These are places where you can sip on the freshest lagers, ales and sours, straight from the source.
As you kick back in one of these taprooms, you can see the brewers hard at work on their next creation, and see beers being canned before your eyes.
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There are, of course, plenty of other taprooms and brewery-operated bars all over Greater Manchester, but if you want to minimise your step count and maximise your drinking time, this is where to head.
So we’ve gone out exploring the current residents on the Beermuda Triangle (I know, tough job) to give you the low-down for your next pub crawl.
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All the taprooms on Manchester’s Beermuda Triangle
Cloudwater
When you think of craft beer, you probably think of these guys.
Since being founded in 2014, Cloudwater has gone on huge things and is now listed among the largest craft beer brands in the UK.
They’ve got their own pub (The Sadler’s Cat), a taproom down in London, and a huge brewery next-door to their taproom on the Piccadilly Trading Estate.
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In here, it’s a stripped-back, Scandi-style interior upstairs, with a few extra tables squeezed in amongst oak barrels downstairs, plus a decent suntrap terrace out the front.
Our order? A pint of Fuzzy pale ale.
Track
Track TaproomTrack Taproom
Another big player in the craft beer game, Track’s taproom is comfortably one of Manchester’s coolest bars.
It’s a huge space, split between the actual brewery and the taproom, where beers are displayed on a rainbow-hued menu board and their own merch lines the walls.
With loads of plants, a leafy little beer garden, and a small kitchen that’s home to Slice Culture pizzeria, this one is the least rough-and-ready of all the taprooms on the Beermuda Triangle.
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The most logical order here has, and will always be, Sonoma, they’re easy-drinking session pale ale available on both cask and keg – but there are always tonnes of other beers beyond their core range that are worth your attention.
Sureshot
Sureshot proves that you can take the art of brewing seriously but still have a laugh, with silly beer names and a giant bear mascot manically grinning at you as you sip your beer.
What’ll it be – a pint of ‘Wait… What?’, a schooner of ‘Small Man’s Wetsuit’, or a third of ‘Be Polite and Comb Your Hair?’.
They’re known for their hop-forward styles but are always dreaming up new creations and collaborations, like a recent sour with Bundobust, and collaboration with inclusive football club Manchester Lacesm with a donation of each ‘I Thought She Was A Pisces’ sold going to the club.
This one’s off the Piccadilly Trading Estate and is under the railway arches, handily with Nell’s next door who will deliver you a pizza while you’re on your taproom crawl.
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Balance Brewing & Blending
The final stop on the Beermuda triangle is Balance, who specialise in barrel-fermented sours.
The taproom itself is a real looker, with fairy lights festooned overhead, a deep burgundy bar, and persian rugs thrown all over the concrete floors.
The beers here are all funky and punchy and well worth ordering a few testers of before you make your final decision.
Whatever you order, it’s going to have good British roots and a beautiful flavour.
Starting off life as a little coffee trike back in 2021, and now based inside a bright-yellow shipping container in Levenshulme‘s Cringle Park, Grounded MCR CIC is a social enterprise that does more than just make you a brew.
Set up with the idea of creating a welcoming space for the whole community to gather, with a key focus on sustainability, Grounded serves up specialty coffee, lots of other hot and cold drinks, and yummy homemade food – much of which is grown by hand, on and around the container.
This is Grounded MCR / Credit: The Manc Group
Coffee beans sourced from a local roaster that pays farmers properly, tasty bakes on offer from a handful of local makers – including bread from the incredible Stockport-based charity, Pure Innovations – and dozens of free community events organised throughout the year are just a few of the reasons why Grounded goes above and beyond your typical cafe.
Sustainability – and affordability, especially amid the ongoing cost of living crisis – are two huge driving factors for Grounded, especially through their partnership with FareShare Greater Manchester and utilising the ‘Too Good To Go’ scheme.
By delivering and using surplus food that would’ve otherwise gone to waste, Grounded is able to keep their prices low whilst still creating some delicious scran.
The Levenshulme community cafe crafting coffee for a great cause / Credit: The Manc Group
Their ‘FareShare Fridays’ are hosted each week, where that morning’s delivery is dedicated to one specific dish and served up for just £1.
To top it all off, Grounded also works with vulnerable adults in honing their barista and hospitality skills, and is also in partnership with ‘Women in Probation’ too to ensure their impact goes further than just what comes in a cup or on a plate.
”We’ve worked hard to create a space that feels safe and welcoming for all,” Grounded declares in a statement on it’s website – and we think they’ve succeeded.
Finding Emily – the hit new romcom that really romanticises Manchester
Daisy Jackson
When news broke of a new romcom filmed and set in Manchester, forgive us for an eyebrow raise.
You see, when TV shows and films choose our city as a backdrop, it can sometimes get a little slapstick, a bit gimmicky, riddled with stereotypes (see: Jack Whitehall’s BRITs gags).
Either that, or the local sets are so aggressively styled for the screen, they’re barely recognisable as Manchester anymore (see: every Harlan Coben drama).
But then we kept catching glimpses of the Finding Emily cast and crew around town a couple of years ago, taking over iconic boozers and milling around legendary gig venues, and that sceptical eyebrow came down a peg or two.
So imagine our delight after seeing the film and finding a well-researched, authentically Manc, love letter to our city that actually romanticses what it’s like to live here in the present day – not a Hacienda stripe in sight.
The plot of Finding Emily follows Owen (Spike Fearn) on his mission to track down ‘Emily’, a girl he met on a night out who mistakenly wrong-numbered him, with the help of another Emily (Angourie Rice).
Throughout the film, the duo drink, dance, and dig for clues in all corners of the city, with backdrops that will be very familiar to those of us who live here.
There’s a bar crawl all along Canal Street, including a drag cabaret show at VIA; a job hunt in Piccadilly Records; a queue joined outside Rustica.
We see scenes set inside some of Manchester’s most beautiful spaces, like the Whitworth Cafe and the Sackville Street Building, and plenty of iconic cityscapes like the view from Deansgate station and the backdrop of the University of Manchester.
They even play darts in the Peveril of the Peak.
Finding Emily romanticises the less glamorous, more authentic side of the city too – Northern Quarter alleyways, a Fallowfield house party, a proper kebab on the Curry Mile, and an all-nighter in the Central Library.
While a lot of film crews hop over to leafy Didsbury to house their characters, our lead figures in the film instead live in terraces beneath the viaducts in Smedley, or in a converted mill apartment in Chorlton Mill.
It’s not only the location scouts that put in the work on Finding Emily – there’s also a respectable number of local characters and artists who pop up with cameos.
Antony Szmierek features heavily on the soundtrack, and appears in-person in the closing credits.
There’s a video game played by Owen’s brother with graphics designed by celebrated local artist Stanley Chow.
Anna Phylactic performs on stage on Canal Street, W.H. Lung headline a gig at Night & Day, Luke Una stands behind the decks as a disgruntled ‘No requests’ type of DJ, and Stockport’s beloved Blossoms perform at the cast’s graduation ball.
I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a film or TV show so perfectly capture Manchester before, celebrating all its beauty and all its edges. It’s not performative at all.
If you’re a Manchester local, Finding Emily is a must-watch. But even if you’re not, this is a modern romcom with likeable characters and plenty of charm.
Daisy Jackson -
1st August 2025 
