We always say we’ll have a break from the beer for a month until the Festivities, but November presents us with a couple of local beer festivals within the Greater Manchester area we find hard to say no to. Bury and Salford play host to a couple of festivals right on our doorstep, each with their own ambience and offering.

The Met venue is perfect host for Bury Beer Festival, which is fairly cask led. The set up is mainly brewery bars provided by local breweries, although the addition of a Marble brewery bar (all the way from Manchester!) was not the only one serving great keg beer. We attended the early Saturday session where we enjoyed a mix of new beers. On a note for Ruth, she enjoyed the large variety of Best Bitters, something which is scarce at festivals of late. Beers which stood out for us included Brightside Beer ‘Early Doors Bitter’, Deeply Vale Brewery ‘Optimum’, The Juggernaut Brewing Co  ‘Traditional Amber Bitter’, Northern Whisper ‘Blimey’, Red Rose ‘Bowley Bitter’ and ‘Treacle Miner’s Tipple’, We Are Wolf ‘New World Red Ale’. All simply delicious and recommend giving these a taste test. The munchies getting the better of us, we popped into McD for their special Philly Cheese Stack. We weren’t impressed and decided to make our own a few days later – which was much better.

This weekend we attended Independent Salford Beer Festival at Hemsley House, again opting for the early Saturday session. In contrast to Bury, ISBF is much more craft led, with a long keg bar and smaller cask bar. We settled ourselves in the back room by the casks, which was quieter (showing our age!), and ran through the booklet selecting beers for our hit list.

We did a Red IPA experiment, each very different in taste, some on the malty side, others, floral or fruity – Torrside Brewing Red Moon was a hit. Yogi, Ampersand’s Brown Ale was a firm favourite for Ruth, and I really enjoyed Bostin’ Mild (Mild) from Green Duck Beer Co. But, the stand out beer for both of us was Black Light, a delicious Black IPA from Mysterious Brewing. If you haven’t heard of Mysterious, they are in their first year, I can highly recommend them – really nice buys and I’ve enjoyed every beer I’ve had from them. To keep us going we shared a plate of half chips half rice with chilli. I’ve never heard of half and half, which apparently is a thing up North. Tasty though.