Hive mind
Manchester has always been a crucible of change, but few breweries are as qualified to comment on the chaos of the city as Marble Beers
Robyn Gilmour
Saturday 08 February 2025
This article is from
Beer Cities UK
issue 114
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It was naive to think that a clear cut answer would come from asking Marble Beers — a now 28 year-old brewery — how Manchester’s beer scene has changed over the years, and whether anything about it has stayed the same. The city has such a strong identity — the unofficial motto of which is famously “this is Manchester, we do things differently” — that one has to be forgiven for thinking that said identity can be felt, understood, and described.
Founder Jan Rogers, who has been running The Marble Arch pub since before the brewery was born, has seen that in enough time everything and nothing changes. Trends go out of fashion then come back around, lacking the longevity to be definitive of the city’s beer scene. Head brewer, Joseph Ince, sees more diversity within Manchester’s beer scene than similarities that define it. Beyond trends, he has seen breweries thrive by developing a signature style — which could be anything between barrel aged sour beer, and technically brewed hoppy IPAs — with the result that Manchester now enjoys a mix of breweries so eclectic that it resists categorisation. For director Nick Bennett, to think about an area as big as Manchester and hope to find a common thread between what’s being consumed where, and by who, is a false start. Trends, traditions and opinions, all as prevalent as one another, coexist across various parts of Manchester.
“I’m south Manchester based, Joe is north Manchester based; our locals are completely different,” Nick begins. “In Stockport, the first bleed-out point from the city centre and the Northern Quarter, we’ve got a couple of taprooms near the middle. There are plenty of craft beer bars, but the loyalty in Stockport is to drinking in 200-year-old Robinson’s pubs. The trend is very much that people from Stockport drink a pint of Unicorn, which used to be Robinson’s best bitter, and that’s it. The other side of it is that in places like Chorlton and The Northern Quarter, are so dominated by ‘independents’ that people get swept up in the idea of what that means. So, when you talk about trends, it very much depends on whether you're talking about the very affluent pockets, or sort of Manchester itself, and within the city center.”
This mention of "independents" of course refers to the recent debate about the difference between craft and independent beer. In October of 2024, the Society of Independent Brewers launched an Indie Beer campaign, aimed at directing drinkers towards independently owned brands and breweries, which they distinguish from craft breweries that may be owned by international conglomerates, or private entities outside the beer world. Joe, a ferociously curious and technically minded individual, doesn’t discount the value of marketing, but he says that for him, who owns a brewery is separate to the quality of the beer it produces. On the other hand, Jan sees first hand, over the bar at The Marble Arch, how seriously people take these considerations, and for exactly how long they stick around.
“I didn't think I'd ever see the day where The Arch wouldn't sell Guinness and the branded cider,” says Jan. “I always kept them on, just in case I ever lost out on that group of six because one of them only drinks Guinness, you know? Anyway, 15 years ago, people in the industry used to sneer at us, saying ‘you’re not a real craft bar if you’ve got Guinness on’. We’re not great at keeping up with trends, but eventually we did make our own stout, and Ascension Cider stepped into the market with a great range of really accessible products, so we almost always had something from them on, and both sold wonderfully. But now people are coming into The Arch asking for Guinness again. I find it hilarious. Maybe people have gotten older and don’t care so much any more, but it’s come back around again.”
Jan also adds that while “Manchester is sometimes seen by our [the craft beer] crowd as home to all these small, independent, free thinking enterprises, it’s not always as cute as you might think”. The city enjoys a wealth of craft, independent, and family owned breweries, but it’s also home to bigger players, behind which there is often wealth and resources that many independents could only dream of. Nick says that with this coming April schedule to see a lowering of employers NIC threshold, and the changes to business rate relief for hospitality, his worry is that “both from the bar scene and from the general scene, these bigger cash-rich organisations will be able to buy up independents, and still feel like a local Manchester base, when actually the money's going to some multinational.”
While the inner workings of Manchester’s craft beer industry might be a crucible of constant change, Jan, Joe and Nick all agree there are some things about the Mancunian consumer that haven't changed over Marble’s lengthy career in beer. “You might get away with charging six quid for a mediocre pint in London, but that won’t float here,” says Nick. “I think there's a deeper level of cynicism in Manchester towards quality. If you can't get two pints for a tenner now, that feels expensive, so you have to be able to justify that with quality. There's a discernment in the market now that people aren't prepared to pay four quid for a pint of rubbish when they could pay like five or six quid for something really good. So there's that balance to strike.”
To this, Joe adds that “I like Manchester, because there's a freedom to be quite experimental here. You can have the guys up at Rivington knocking out incredible hop-forward beers. There's obviously Cloudwater and Track doing something similar, but then you've got Balance Brewery doing just sour beer.
“None of these breweries were the first in the city to do these things — Manchester Brewing Company came before them, and Chorlton Brewery was doing wild and sour stuff 10-15 years ago — but there's a forgiveness to just to cut your own path here, Manchester is very rewarding of that. You can have ten different breweries doing ten different things, and they can all hold their own and do reasonably well.” Perhaps then, the instinct to create, reinvent, and forge ahead is what Manchester does differently. Even if everything in and around it is changing, something essential to the city will keep it moving.
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