If you're a beer lover in the UK and you haven't been to Indy Man Beer Con yet, you need to rectify this immediately, because it's an amazing event, held yearly, in Victoria Baths in Manchester. This was our second year at Indy Man, and it's already a must visit event on our 2018 beer calendar!
The beer festival runs over a long weekend - Thursday to Sunday, (we had tickets to the Friday night session.) And it's at Victoria Baths which is a traditional old school swimming baths. Complete with changing cubicles with curtains, and beautiful old tiles. A lot of the festival takes places in the pools - yes, in the bottom of the pools (not filled with water, obvz) or in the nooks and crannies of what used to be the swimming pool. It's so much fun to wander about and explore what is in which room!
My only complaint would be that as we went in the evening, and the baths are sooooooooooooooo badly lit, it's super hard to take photos of your beer, the room, all of it, that look nice!
I was super excited about the amount of fruity beers on offer. I still stand by that the Lervig 'pop that cherry' beer I had last year might be my fave cherry number to date, and this year I had some more epic fruity numbers too.
Pictured above is the Cloudwater Mango Sour - it was so thick and mango-y and a little bit more like the consistency of a fruit juice rather than a beer, but we both agreed that it was one of the best fruit beers either of us have had - and we had a couple of mango-y beers that night! I also had a really great Chuckleberry Sour by Hawkshead - which was bursting with fruity berry flavours.
And I managed to get my hands on some of the Buxton x Omnipollo Blueberry Slab with the soft serve on the top. I've had the beer itself before but not with the soft serve. I was a bit gutted for Jim that they didn't still have the Maple version on soft serve still though.
We also picked up some food tokens to grab some treats - as always, if we see Dim Sum Su at an even we grab a couple - the peanut sugary stuff that they put on the top of the bao is so addictive. We also grabbed ourselves one of the most amazing cheese plates we've had in a long time, and a couple of doughnuts for the bus ride home too! I also, completely by accident, ended up with a fab, really interesting, and savoury, Lemon and Thyme beer which was, the best beer to be drinking whist we ate the cheese! Such a good pairing!
And so, in drunken order, here are the beers that I tried at Indy Man 2017!
let's play a game of drink the beer! from emma fisher on Vimeo.