Real Ale Reviews

A cultural trip to Cheshire

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The weekend just gone I visited my cousins in Cheshire. They are 9 and 5 years old (I think!) respectively and are bundles of noise and cheekiness. Despite spending the weekend calling me by my brothers first name in a bid to wind me up, they don’t half make me smile, especially when they (well, their dad, my uncle) took me to their newly opened local beer shop.

The Beer Emporium is a small but well stocked beer shop in Sandbach, a quirky and slightly curious town, situated straight off the M6, with a far reaching history that’s most prominently displayed in the Sandbach Crosses, a scheduled monument dating back to the Middle Ages. Despite the wood framed buildings and a posh deli stuffed to the rafters with fine foods and continental delicacies I’m assured that the town is sports mad, with barely a dash of culture amidst the football posts and cricket stumps (the last bastion of hope is WH SMith’s, the only place you can buy a book). The ancient looking pubs are beautiful from the outside but to my shame we didn’t have time to venture in them with the young cousins in tow. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Beer Shops, cheshire, retail, sandbach

Dunham Massey Cheshire IPA

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Let me start by saying I’m not sure I gave this beer a fair run (which is an inadvertent pun!). I’ve just run 8 miles, never a good time for beer tasting. I doubt it was my fastest run ever but it did entail an hour and a half of running up the hills of Morley (of which their are seven, just like Rome, and Sheffield), over the Huddersfield-Leeds train line, across muddy fields, all the way along Churwell Hill, across to Dewsbury and back over the M62. In the rain. You know that rain. The rain that soaks you reet through.

On my return, after 2 x hamstring stretch + 2 x abductor stretch + 2 x hip flexor, but before my super hot sauna style shower, I popped open a beer whilst I liquidised the soup that had been simmering in the slow cooker.

This was part of a haul from the Beer Emporium in Sandbach, one of the first I picked up because I can’t help but be drawn to anything that says IPA on the label/pump clip. It poured very well for a bottle conditioned IPA, very clear, with a copper gradient and deep amber colour. Its nose and taste belied its appearance: I would expect it to be much more yellow and thinner because it tasted pale and gaunt, despite some upfront hop flavours and a little bit of biscuit. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ber emporium, cheshire, dunham massey, IPA, manchester, Morley, parsnip, running, sandbach, soup