Our annual trip this year was to Liverpool, with the feature pub being The Lady of Mann. As keen followers will know, we usually try to fit in a brewery tour into our weekends away (except Windsor- Matt!). It wasn’t possible this time due to Caines Brewery having a fully functioning website but not a fully functioning brewery and Connoisseur Ales holding their tour/tasting weekend a week too early for us.
With that in mind, an alternative Saturday afternoon venture was sought and so we headed to Crewe for their Rail Ale Festival at the Crewe Heritage Centre- beer and a rail museum, what more could we ask for? A thoroughly good time was had by all and some great beers sampled, my personal favourite, rather unusually for me, was a stout, Cheshire Brewhouse’s Lindow– very pleasant.
Saturday evening was of course the visit to this year’s feature pub, the Lady of Mann and we enjoyed several pints of Okell’s Bitter there and at it’s sister pub,Thomas Rigby’s (even though cheese was not possible). Pub highlights for me, other than obviously the feature pub, were the Baltic Fleet and the Ship and Mitre. I leave you with the beer menu from the Ship and Mitre- note- this is the draft menu, the bottled beer menu is the printed pamphlet on the left hand side- we particularly enjoyed the fact that Penderyn Welsh Whiskey was listed under “Foreign Whiskeys”…
For more photos of our trip, visit our Facebook page.