For reasons that would take too long to explain, I ended up last weekend seeking a couple of days of solitude with beer (albeit which involved sending multiple photos of food and drink to my sweet lady, who likes that kind of thing..).
I didn’t quite stick a pin randomly in a map, but I knew that this was the opportunity to go somewhere that would take longer than a day trip but only just. I consulted my bucket list and the answer came to me. Bakewell. Thornbridge. So I hastily booked trains and accommodation, battled weekend trains and eventually approached the outskirts of Bakewell in a taxi. I loved it from the start. Executing my plan, I fortified myself with an amazing lunch at Piedaniels Restaurant (including a carafe of Merlot which wasn’t quite part of the plan) and then found the old railway line footpath which led up to Thornbridge Hall.
There has been a manor house on the site of Thornbridge Hall since the 12th century. The house in its current form dates from the 19th century. It passed through a number of hands until it was bought by Jim and Emma Harrison in 2002. As the story is told, Jim was an entrepreneurial businessman who came to the conclusion that beer was an opportunity and that the Hall was potentially a venue to produce it. He worked with friends who knew the industry and they helped him recruit two young brewers fresh from university. After a bit of thought and experimentation, by 2005 they had produced a 6% ABV US-inspired strongly hopped masterpiece.
Jim, being romantically inclined, decided to name it after a city that he and Emma had traveled to together and ended up getting married in. Jaipur. (I suppose we should all be grateful that we have not ended up drinking pints of “Croydon Registry Office”. Although I attended a very lovely wedding there recently, so I will not hear a word said against it.)
A word about Emma. There is a lot more about her in the public domain than there is about Jim. Clearly a strong lady with a lot of confidence and entrepreneurial flair. This translated into running the “getting people into work” business A4E. Which was eventually hit by scandals involving certain employees (not Emma) diverting funds. Emma divides opinion. I found a gushingly admiring interview with her on the BBC website. I also found some trolling. Some commentators used their dislike of Emma as a stick to beat the brewery, on the grounds that the mislaid money from A4E must somehow have made its way via the Hall into the business… anyway, it would be wrong to leave Emma out of this story, but let us now focus instead on the two young brewers.
Firstly, Stefano Cossi, who went on to work for Molson Coors (boo hiss) producing Worthington White Shield (huzzah! I have never tasted it, but I have heard proper beer gurus talk about White Shield in a suitably misty eyed way. I think it may now have been discontinued). He now appears to be head brewer at Peroni. Not bad.
Then there was Martin Dickie, from Aberdeenshire. For those beer lovers who have been living under a rock for the last twenty years, Martin moved on from making a success of Jaipur to starting a brewery with a childhood friend called James Watt (which they called “BrewDog”) and followed up Jaipur with another strongly hoppy IPA called “Punk”. Yes, that one. Read my various “Dog” blogs if you want more of the story. But you probably already know it.
Anyway, word spread in the local area that this beer was special. Then, in a key moment, the highly influential beer writer Pete Brown happened to come across it while visiting Derbyshire. He had recently started banging the drum for US hops and proper IPAs. (i.e. not Greene King IPA). Jaipur blew his socks off. And when Pete’s socks are blown off, the beer world hears about it. Jaipur began to pick up multiple awards. Before too long, the brewery located away from the Hall to the Riverside Industrial Estate on the outskirts of Bakewell, where they also opened a taproom.
With this story in mind, I successfully scaled the hills outside Bakewell to the Hall - alright, it was only about 3 ½ miles and the gradient was mostly fairly gentle, but I am old and fat and was full of Piedaniels lunch. I wandered around the gardens and drank in the atmosphere. The cafe was serving three Thornbridge staples - Jaipur, Lukas Helles and Green Mountain Hazy Pale - but I judged that it would be better to hold off until I reached the taproom. So I headed back down the hill into Bakewell. I looked into the “Original Bakewell Pudding Shop” but the queue was stretching halfway to London, so I headed straight out along the river to the brewery.
As industrial estates go, it was a good setting, with a pleasant walk away from the main road past some picturesque houses. The taproom was, perhaps unsurprisingly, doing very good business indeed on a sunny Saturday afternoon. For a brief moment I wondered if I had needed to book a table. But in the event I found somewhere to sit and dump my pack while joining the queue for the bar. (A single queue which moved fast, with clarity on who was in which order and with no complications about having to fight to catch anyone’s eye - all pubs please take note).
There were many beers on offer. I considered my strategy and decided to go with “flights” - wooden blocks with holes in for glasses that could accommodate ⅓ pints of three different beers. I started gently, so my first flight consisted of
Then I stepped up to a second flight, which consisted of
With Thornbridge you just know that everything they try will work. Then there was the additional factor that beer at a brewery taproom is always going to be extremely fresh. This is particularly relevant to anything in a cask - i.e. the Green Mountain and the Jaipur Noir - you have heard my views in the past on how bad cask ale can be when it is not cared for. Each of the above beers was excellent in its own category. Singling one out is invidious, but I would say that Cocoa Wonderland stands alongside Siren Craft Broken Dream in the “pudding porter” category, and that is high praise.
Finally, I saw that they were dispensing their Fonio beer. Fonio, I had recently discovered, is a grain which is common in African and which has the potential to do great things for African agriculture - for example because of its ability to deal with poor soil and drought. The excellent Brooklyn Brewery have initiated a number of Fonio beer collaborations, including one with Thornbridge. I discovered, too late to incorporate it into my plans, that Jim Harrison and Pete Brown were doing a double act at a conference in Sheffield that same day to promote Fonio beer. So I had to try some. Watching them pour, at first I thought that the cask was off - frankly it didn’t look very alluring. But it tasted good - a bit like a lighter version of a wheat beer. I could happily have drunk several pints of it.
I was happy. I had partaken of Thornbridge in full, and yet done so with only 2 ½ pints inside me. So time to head back into town (via the Wye Bakehouse and their “Gugelhupfen” - a delicious cake with almond, raisins, orange and lemon peel coated in vanilla sugar…) to my bus and back to Chesterfield for the night.
Chesterfield Town Centre took a while to wake up the following morning. I ended up with a newspaper outside the famous “Twisted Spire” church, and then decided to grab a couple of lunchtime pints before catching a train home. I chose the “Pig and Pump” and was very satisfied with this choice. A pint of Olicana Pale from Ilkley Brewery started me off. Then, the only possible way to round things off was a pint of cask Jaipur.
I had recently drunk a supermarket can of Jaipur and been underwhelmed, wondering if I had only raved about the beer in the past because I knew no better. But this was good. I read afterwards about how Thornbridge are one of the only breweries who have managed to pull off a cask version of a strong hoppy IPA - apparently there is normally a problem with oily residues (don’t ask me to explain). I can also attest to the fact that when drinking cask Jaipur you don’t notice the strength. I can quite see how, when Jaipur first came out, the denizens of Derbyshire had a problem with drinking their usual several pints and then falling over, and how “Jai-poorly” became a standard description of the following day’s hangover. I was forearmed, had only one pint and managed to stagger to my train.
So, bucket list item duly ticked. I also came away with a couple of items from the shop - the DDH Halcyon IPA and a couple of exotic imperial fruit sours - as and when I need to be reminded of my weekend.
Next stop, maybe the new Siren Craft bar in Reading? Or the gueuzeries of Brussels if I am feeling more ambitious…