Despite these things, Manchester is a fine city. Red brick turrets and soot covered chimneys etch the skyline, broken up by the knife edge Hilton and the famous Granada television lettering. The streets are more city-like than Leeds – wide life-threatening avenues dotted with trams and other forms of exotic transport. It seems busier too, there are more buses, more taxis, more Greggs.

Casks at the Marble Brewery in deepest darkest Manchester

Outside the city centre Manchester sprawls in all directions. Without the naturally imposed boundaries of the cities of West Yorkshire, or the nearby Pennine towns that look down on the city from Saddleworth, Manchester was stretched like a rolling pin, much like Birmingham. Vast inner city estates and buildings housing myriad industries in ever varying buildings extend as far as the eye can see.

Wandering from Picadilly station the restaurants and pasty shops of the CBD soon turn into taxi offices and warehouses. And more pasty shops. Walking northwards through this area a Loiner might assume it to be the Holbeck of Manchester – once full of industry that fuelled the city’s progress, but now old railway lines and pot holed side roads in need of repair.

Deep inside the vaulted ceiling of one of the railway arches a quiet revolution has been taking place. Marble Brewery occupies a sloping archway, stainless steel vats tucked neatly under the curves of the painted brickwork, just a stone’s throw from their spiritual home, The Marble Arch pub.

And on a grey but dry Saturday in October, a menagerie of beer lovers gather in this magnificent watering hole. Tiled retrospectively to recreate a bygone age, it’s a marvel compared to your average Wetherspoon’s decor.

Twissup starts and familiar friends mingle with new and unfamiliar faces all in search of a perfect pint, whatever your preferred taste or dispense mode. Manchester might have even more to answer for by the end of the night…

Marble Arch, Manchester

Wils Swan was £1.49 a pint whilst the footy was on - and I had one for each Leeds goal (plus our penalty save!)

There are arguably too many moments I cringe at to call myself a responsible drinker with any real level of conviction. The ones that came in the gap year before I university are mostly classified under the ‘regrets’ section of my brain. As year one of university unfolded the balance of ‘I never want to remember doing that’ versus ‘I’m pretty pleased with myself’ was evenly weighted and shifted towards to positive end of the spectrum as I matured, with a few ‘we’ll laugh at that in a few weeks’ moments thrown in for good measure.

But at 26 I thought I’d stopped doing things like singing Leeds songs in rowdy northern cities not called Leeds and waking people up in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately Saturday’s combination of Jermaine Beckford’s 95th and a half minute equaliser and Stone Ruination IPA being on draught (or draft should I say) at the last pub of our #twissup crawl, ensured the night was one that would bring back some of those youthful moments of folly.

Returning to the Hillsborough Hotel after a skinful of cask conditioned Wild Swan and a liquid supper of fancy beers from the newly opened Sheffield Tap, a bunch of bedraggled beer bloggers struggled to open the blue painted door at the front of the pub. Having no qualifications in door opening and a more general problem with late night coordination turned out not to be a career changing combination as the shiny Yale key duly snapped in the lock leaving the burning eyes of my beer chums planted firmly on my back.

I’m sure the night slowed down for a moment and the consequences of my blunder flooded through my mind: budding friendships lost, a hole in my credit card and not much chance of being welcome at the hotel again in a hurry.

Ruination IPA was a bit of a hit, despite being twice as expensive as the Wild Swan for half the measure (pic by Matt from Hopzine.com)

After suffering a torrent of despair from the group we eventually found our way in the side door and out of the cold Sheffield night. And on the landing the world came crashing down again as Pete Brissenden tried to open the room he was sharing with Mark Dredge. Of course I’d snapped his room key in the door and with that all the frustration of several countries manifested itself in Pete’s face.

I could feel Mark sharpening his pencils into makeshift darts and all the hope drain from Pete’s face as he slumped to the floor, back against the fastly locked door. At that point I was scared Pete might actually attack me with the bottle of Skrimshander he’d saved for a nightcap.

All the analogies are appropriate: floor sucking me up, ostrich head in sand. There isn’t enough analogies for the way I felt when Woolpack Ann came out to ask us all to shut up and sort out our sleeping arrangements before Woolpack Dave came out and sorted us out new… you get the picture.

Despite my restless sleep – involving a fight with myself a four in the morning apparently – it was all resolved in the morning and I can’t thank everyone enough for letting me off the hook with only gentle jibing and the acceptance of the first round at North Bar later.

There’s a moral to the story – don’t trust beer bloggers* with keys.

The broken knees refer to one bloggers intimate meeting with a hard floor earlier in the evening thanks to an involuntary tumble (too much Carling I guess!). You can’t trust beer bloggers with bus travel either…

_{*This beer blogger}