It’s 6.30 am and Katie Cradduck, manager of The Dockyard, has gallantly climbed a ladder to the to the top of a mash tun to peer at the beer brewing inside.
We’re at the brewery to pitch in with brewing the Dockyard IPA, the first small batch craft ale by The Dockyard, before it goes live at their pubs in Spinningfields and Media City.
‘The Dockyard set out to create our own beer, made for us, by us,’ explains Katie.
“At The Dockyard pub we serve an amazing range of local beers, but we wanted to go one step further and work with a Manchester based micro-brewery to make our own.”
“We chose to work with the Brightside Brewing Company. It’s a small, family-run business that brew some of the best artisan beer in Manchester.”
The Radcliffe based Brightside Brewery is run by husband and wife team Neil and Maxine Friedrich, along with their son Lance and daughter Carley.
After running a successful bakery together for nearly 30 years, Neil and Maxine decided to branch out into brewing in 2009. Established during the depths of the recession, the family decided on the name Brightside as a token of their optimism for the future of the business.
Back in the brewery, and Lance is explaining the brewing process that they’ll use to make the much anticipated Dockyard IPA.
“First step is mashing in. The hops are put into the mash tun, and we mix this with water. It comes out looking a little like porridge, and sits in there for just over an hour.”
“That’s the first stage, then it’s coffee time. From there, we drain it off into the boiler. Once it gets down to a certain level, you start the sparge so it washes out all the sugars. All the spent grain is given away for animal feed. It doesn’t cost us to get rid of it, and this way it doesn’t have to go to landfill.”
“From there, you boil it and add the hops after about forty minutes or so. Once its had about an hour and twenty minutes in there, you chill it.”
“Then it goes into the fermenter where you add the yeast and you leave it for about a week, depending on the beer. It just sits there getting boozy, All the yeast turns the sugar into alcohol. After cropping the yeast, we can move onto casking.”
It’s rewarding work, but it's pretty relentless, and Katie asks if the family ever get time for holidays.
Neil looks pensive.
“We had a day off at Christmas,” he recalls.
Not really then, and we start to reconsider the career change.
While it’s many people’s dream job, brewing beer is time consuming with tough manual labour, leaving brewers little time to actually enjoy a pint. But it’s a labour of love. Great brewers like Brightside strive for perfection, and happily put in long hours to brew the best beers possible.
Meanwhile, the conditioned Dockyard IPA casks are ready to be delivered to the Dockyard cellar, and Katie and I follow them back to Spinningfields.
Hooked up to the draft system and ready to go, the Dockyard IPA has finished its journey.
“So much more thought time and effort goes into making beer than I had ever thought!” Katie tells me, as we catch up over a well-earned pint of the finished IPA. “I feel like we’ve spent the day cooking with Heisenberg and Jessie Pinkman.”
After a long day at the brewery, the Dockyard IPA is a perfect post-work pint. Both the Dockyard and Brightside have worked together to brew a refreshing and easy drinking ale that Katie believes her customers will love.
“At the Dockyard we want our craft ale to be something that customers keep coming back for. We are confident that, with the brewing expertise of Brightside, we’ve brewed our ideal beer; a consistently clean, cold keg ale at a competitive price.”
“With the unique position of being able to track the beer right from the start until it runs from our taps and into the glasses, we hope that the customers will be as excited about this new beer as we are!”
So hop over to The Dockyard and enjoy, knowing that experience, time and skill has gone into crafting one of Manchester’s most exciting new ales.
In association with The Dockyard