Cloudwater Brew Co.

Cloudwater, for want of a better phrase, have leapt with both feet into the Manchester pool of beer brewing. If you hadn’t heard of them before they’ve been regularly micro-​blogging and posting superb images on Twitter and Instagram of their renovation of an industrial unit in Piccadilly Trading Estate, just 10 minutes’ walk from Piccadilly Station.
Expectation in the local beer community (I follow a lot of breweries and fellow beerhounds — on Twitter, not stalking them in the streets) has been gathering apace what with the brewhouse they now have at their disposal and talk of how they’re going to produce seasonal beer, with four distinct line ups each year. They currently have eight on the market and three more on the side lines.
When it was announced that they would be partnering up with Port Street Beer House to organise a brewery launch and tour, for free, index fingers were at the ready to bag ourselves one of the limited number of tickets for it. Needless to say they disappeared faster than a toupee in a hurricane, but a friend and I were lucky enough to get two.
Meeting in PSBH we were each given complimentary thirds of Cloudwater’s Session and IPA beers — both tasted very good indeed. Soon afterwards a coach picked us up and drove us the few minutes to their brewery for the tour.
It’s safe to say their photos didn’t do them justice. Grown men near-​on wept with joy on entering. Before us stood a Premier Stainless Systems brewery with lauter tun (a vessel used for separating the liquid from the residual grain), six 4,800L fermenters, two 2,400L fermenters, and a conditioning tank in each size and a whole host of digitised kit from compressors to boilers. It was beer geek paradise.
They also plan on opening a bar inside the unit, ‘The Barrel Store’, which will be serving natural wines, lambic beers and small plates of fermented food — whatever that entails…
A fantastic new brewery that’s kitted out to the max with strong ambition and capability only a stone’s throw from Manchester city centre — very exciting times lie ahead me thinks.