00:00Hello and welcome to Manchester World. My name is Theo Hewson-Betz and it's another
00:04lovely day here in Manchester. And when it's a lovely day in Manchester that usually means
00:08it's a lovely day for a beer. Now last week I went and spoke to Dan, the head brewer at
00:13Bundabus, to learn a little bit about the business and how they develop their beer menu.
00:17But we also managed to talk about his journey in brewing and why he thinks beer is such
00:20an important part of Manchester's cultural identity. So let's go talk to Dan.
00:25Hi, my name is Dan Hocking. I'm the head brewer at Bundabus Brewery in Manchester.
00:31My kind of introduction to brewing came about, I was travelling on my own in America 13 or
00:3814 years ago. And at the time, the American craft beer thing was kind of getting big.
00:44So I spent a lot of time just trying new beers, going to beer festivals, trying to brewers.
00:49They were just telling me if there's nothing like this where you're from, learn to make
00:54it, which is advice I took. And then a couple of years later, I ended up just seeing if I
01:00could make a career out of my hobby, which is an opportunity that not all that many people
01:06get to do. So I'm pretty happy about that. In the UK, beer has always had like this intrinsic
01:13part. So you go back 100 and something years, it's part of the kind of industrial culture.
01:19You've got pubs and working men's pubs and stuff like that. And then before that, you've
01:23got like old, old, old beer, like the women of the house made the beer and things like
01:27that. So I guess as far as you go back in history, we're talking 10,000 years, like beers
01:32always had a part in that culture. And I think craft beer as it is now and has been for the
01:37last 10 or 15 years in the UK, a little bit longer in the US. It's kind of become like
01:44this, I mean, it's a bit of a hipster thing. But with that comes kind of this kind of focus
01:51on innovation, taking old set traditional styles, putting modern twists on them and kind of pushing
01:59the boundaries of like what beer is. Beer in general kind of encompasses the whole history
02:07and culture. And I think it's always really easy to kind of clip onto a little bit of that.
02:15Manchester's always had this kind of culture of brewing. You've got like well over a hundred
02:20years of brewers like JW Lee's, Robbie's in Stockport. There's loads of these regional brewers.
02:27So Manchester's always had it, this kind of brewing culture. And that's kind of updated
02:33with the brewers like Cloudwater Track, Sure Shop, Alphabet, which is where I started. But
02:40then it very quickly kind of grew to this really kind of collaborative community around brewing.
02:46And I think that's why the Manchester craft beer scene has ended up going from strength to
02:51strength is because everyone's kind of pulling in the same direction rather than competing.
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