Unleash the dogs of war (and other strange brews)
By Phil Mellows
I eventually found Torrside Brewing hiding behind a small blue door. It was hard to believe, on the wet and blustery Monday afternoon in March when I visited, that once spring properly arrives people will be queueing across the car park and onto the road, all for a chance to drink the beers on-site at this unusual brewery.
Perhaps there’s something about the blue doors; it opens, Tardis-like, onto a surprisingly large space cluttered with barrels and bottles and pallets. Somewhere in the distance, Chris Clough is up a ladder grappling with stuck beer. He’s supposed to be bottling today, but that’s difficult when you can’t get the beer to move.
I’ve obviously called at a bad time, but he seems grateful for the opportunity to take a break, and we sit down at one of the bench tables that will soon be part of Torrside’s seasonal tap room.
Chris, who used to be a Japanese translator, of all things, founded this brewery, at New Mills Marina on the western edge of the Peak District, with two other keen homebrewers in 2015.
The plan was to focus on smoked and barrel-aged beers, which is what Torrside is most famous for, nationally. So it’s a surprise to find half its production is cask ale, mostly pales. I’d drunk one of these at the Hole in the Wall in Brighton the week before, but it’s rare to find them beyond a short radius of New Mills.
It was during lockdown, Chris explains, that a switch to bottles grew the reputation for strange brews.
Smoked beers are most commonly found in Germany, and almost all the smoked malt Torrside uses is imported from there. At the moment he’s working in collaboration with seven other brewers on a beech, oak, maple and cherrywood smoked vanilla imperial stout, a complex beer even by Torrside’s standards, which will be ready mid-April.
There’s also a smoked barley wine on its way that’s been ageing in old Scotch whisky barrels for two years, and a Belgian plum dubbel, brewed in collaboration with the Petersgate Tap in Stockport.
“It’s thanks to the space we’ve got here that we can brew the more esoteric stuff,” says Chris. “We’ve got the room to store it, and the time. We’ve gained our reputation because we can just go on stubbornly brewing whatever we want.”
There are oak barrels, which have to be picked up from Dumfries, stacked here and there around the brewery floor, and they can be sitting there, not making any money, for a mere 48 hours or for as long as three years. Choosing for exactly how long is the art of this kind of brewing. “You have to catch them at the right moment, before the flavours from the wood start to overpower the beer.”
Torrside releases most of its barrel-aged beers under the name Dogs of War, each bottle labelled with a cartoon hound. The next series, which includes a three-year-old barley wine, will be coming out next month.
One misapprehension about Torrside is that all its beers are frighteningly strong, and it does produce a range called Monsters, few of which are weaker than 9% abv. But Chris’s own favourite is a smoked wheat beer that’s just 2.8% abv. It’s called Sto Lat, a Polish toast and also, accidentally, a fictional town in Discworld, which means fans of the Terry Pratchett novels also like it.
This diversity of strengths is made possible by an old-fashioned brewing method called parti-gyling, in which a single brew is split into two different beers of high and low abv. The latest example is a US-style strong barley wine paired with a low gravity English amber ale hopped with Jester.
Torrside’s tap room opens again to visitors on Friday and Saturday, April 7 and 8, then across the three Bank Holiday weekends before resuming monthly opening from June 24.
If you can’t wait, the best place to sample Torrside’s beers is probably the Petersgate Tap, while down south Chris recommends A Hoppy Place, a bottle shop and tasting room in Maidenhead, Berkshire, that also has a micropub in Windsor.