Gout & About: A Slow Walk Through the Northern Quarter

Pictured: (L-R): James Campbell (Marble), Kelly Ryan (Thornbridge), Colin Stronge (Marble), Dave Bailey (Hardknott)

Gout is a particularly painful condition, consisting of a build-up of uric acid crystals (or urates) in the joints. Gout can affect any joint, but classically it appears in the second joint of the big toe. I have classical gout. It was painful last week, but this week, it's eased up a bit, and I'm almost normal. Going for a walk through Manchester's Northern Quarter last weekend wasn't a great idea, but throw in a brewery visit and a great pub, and I'm powerless to resist, gout or not.

Marble Brewery have been brewing for over a decade, and brewing damn good beers at that. Until recently, all their beers were certified organic and vegan, happily defying my assertion that organic beers are always compromised on flavour. Marble's beers have flavour packed into them - in fact, they clearly have too much flavour, because as soon as their beer is poured, the excess flavour leaps out of the glass, filling noses, rooms, cities with happy hoppiness. The organic certification has been allowed to slide for a few beers, mainly due to hop scarcity and pricing. The brewery has moved from its (by all accounts) homespun location at the back of the pub to a smartly whitewashed railway arch just down the road. The beers are still great, and their pub, The Marble Arch, is a jewel.

If one thing characterises Marble's beers, it's the extraordinary hop characters they coax into their pale beers. Manchester Bitter (4.2%abv), Summer (4.5%), Lagonda IPA (5%) and Dobber (5.9%) are stuffed beyond belief with exotic hop flavour and aroma. Dobber is the apogee of how much hop character you can stuff into a pale beer - lime, mango, grapefruit, mandarin, lychee. If Dobber wasn't so good, it would seem ridiculous to shower it with so many descriptors, but it's totally justified. My experience is that this beer is slightly more intense in bottle than in cask form, but your mileage (and ideology) may vary. Marble make other beers too - their Ginger is roundly praised, Chocolate is a rich delight, and get comfy, because there's a great tale attached to their latest release (sadly now all gone) Vuur & Vlam.

Vuur & Vlam is a beer originally brewed by the Dutch Brouwerij De Molen. It's a hearty American-style IPA, all resinous hops overlaying toffeeish malts. For this year's Borefts beer festival, festival organiser (and brewer at De Molen) Menno Olivier made the recipe for Vuur & Vlam available to all the invited breweries, and the challenge was to brew the best version they could. Marble's version came second. You might think that there's no shame in coming second to a brewery like De Molen, but in fact, De Molen's version came third. Talk about beating someone at their own game....

The visit was part the latest Twissup organised by Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg. The brewery and pub were the highlight of the Manchester leg. Being of sound mind but unsound body, I sat out the Huddersfield leg, where The Grove will have undoubtedly been the other highlight. You can read other reports on the full event here: BeerReviews.co.uk Pencil&Spoon Tandleman IMHAGOB Oh Good Ale

The Michelin Guide uses its star ranking system to rate restaurants. These stars originally had a specific meaning. One star indicated "a very good restaurant in its category, worth a stop." Two-stars meant "excellent cooking, worth a detour," and three stars reserved for "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey". Without even trying the food (which looked great), I'd pitch the Marble Arch somewhere between a two- and three-star rating: Great beer straight out of the brewery, an incredible tiled interior, and food that made me hungry when it went by on a plate. I'll be making a special journey back there soon.

Roosters American IPA Meets the Twissup

How great a brewery are Rooster's? Let me count the ways. Actually, let's not, let's just mention a few of them. I don't know why I was surprised to see them turning up time and again in all my favourite beer books - you know, the biggies by Michael Jackson, Garrett Oliver and, latterly, Ben McFarland. Maybe it's because they're local to me, and have a (relatively) modest output, I think of them as small. Relatively small they may be, but you don't get feted in classic beer books and win gold medals at the World Beer Cup without being on top of your game.

This beer is a great example of what Rooster's do. Head brewer Sean Franklin has a wonderful philosophy, saying that pale malt in a beer is like a blank canvas upon which hop character can be projected. Or, in a more prosaic mode, he's described his beers as being just one single flower standing alone on a lawn - your attention is drawn to a singularity, rather than overwhelmed by lots of different things going on.

They have a lot of projects going on at present, some of which I get the impression that they would rather I didn't talk about too much, so let's just talk about the beer in the video. It's a beautiful pale golden ale, combining all the attributes of this youngest of English ale styles with an American approach to hopping. The result is unmistakably English, and unmistakably Rooster's - soft, rounded, balanced, but with a pungent hop character that never overwhelms the aroma or palate.

So it is with their American IPA, which brewer Sam describes as 'just something Sean and I did so we could have something nice to drink'. You flash git - what about the rest of us? Bursting with tropical fruit and floral aromas, there's a big spike of bitterness that quickly subsides, leaving the fruit and flowers to blossom on the palate, before a little bitterness creeps back in at the finish, making it a particularly moreish beer.

We don't normally have draught beer at the shop. We used to sell a few, but we couldn't get the throughput to make it work preoperly, and anyway, cask ale is what pubs are for. But when the rolling pub crawl that became known as "the twissup" (a cross between a tweet-up and piss-up) made it to Leeds following a beerathon in Sheffield, I wanted to make sure that there was some proper refreshment for them at the shop. Thanks to Rooster's generosity, the Twissup arrived looking rougher than a badgers tongue, and left looking a tad more sprightly (the beer was donated for this purpose).