He’s right. Not just for getting a Cloudwater beer into more than 100 very traditional pubs, but for getting a new generation of beer drinkers interested in one of the town’s oldest and most important brewers. Perhaps if there’s a divide between Manchester’s beer culture it’s simply because the new generation of drinkers haven’t discovered the tradition it was founded on yet.

“Craft beer, if you want to call it that, has taken off in Manchester,” Murphy says. “It’s done so with a younger audience, and that’s people like me or maybe even younger still. You look at the Northern Quarter at the weekend now, the amount of bars that have a quality beer offering and the people who are drinking it is vastly different to how it was five years ago.”

For Peter Alexander, who has lived and enjoyed beer in Manchester for almost 30 years, the development of a craft beer scene and the boom in the general interest of beer is only a good thing. “Thirty years ago we essentially had bitter and milds, but now the whole range of beers from traditional to cutting edge can be found in Manchester,” he says. “Want a sour beer? We do it with Chorlton Brewery specializing. How about beers from the wood? Beer Nouveau will sort you out. Belgian style, hazy American style, cutting edge Double IPAs? We have them and more. Still fancy a pint of bitter? No problem. Our family brewers are still there.”

That this parallel between modern and traditional exists at all is why British beer culture in cities such as Manchester is so unique. One might even argue that this dichotomy is what held the UK back when U.S. craft beer culture began to gestate in the early 1980s—a time when folks in cities like Manchester were far more interested in breaking musical molds than beer ones. But now, this mixture of new and old combines to make a beer culture like Manchester’s one of the most rich and diverse in the world.