Lately, I’ve become obsessed with the concept of what I like to call ‘beer service’. Taking place at the point of a beer being served, it goes beyond what happens in a brewery, or even in a pub cellar. Beer service is when the utmost care is taken by a server when pouring your beer so that it looks as good as it tastes, thus enhancing your overall beer experience to its maximum.
There are a few key facets to good beer service. The first is that the glass being used must be sparkling clean, so that no dirt or oils cause bubbles to cling to its side. And so that the server can build a healthy, stable head of foam at the top of the beer. A good head of foam, for me, is an indicator of a beer that is both well made and well poured, and when a beer is served with proper care this foam should cling to the side of the glass as you sip, remaining stable for the duration you spend sipping it. Through good cellar management, staff training, plus regular glass and tap maintenance, excellent beer service can be attained easily-enough by those who would aspire to it.
Examples of good beer service are commonplace, and there are several high profile examples. The most well-known is undoubtedly the two-part Guinness serve, marketed via by its famous slogan “good things come to those who wait.” In the 2010s, while under the ownership of SAB Miller, Pilsner Urquell started to educate UK consumers on various pours including “hladinka” (a full pint with a two-finger head of foam,) “šnyt” (a half pour that’s roughly half beer, half foam,) and “mlíko” (a full pint of just foam, which is intended to be downed in one go.) More importantly, it stressed the need for a very clean glass, and the use of a Lukr-brand “side pour” tap to help produce the tight foam these pours demand.
This marketing took, as it’s still pushed by current owners Asahi, and other prominent Czech lager brands including Budvar. More recently, several US specialist lager breweries such as Cohesion in Denver and Sacred Profane in Portland, Maine have also adopted these pours. In Japan, a chain of bars called Perfect Beer Kitchen have made theatre out of various different serves and blends, including beers with sumptuous heads, and even pours with no head at all. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the videos they share is how cleaning the glass before and after serving the beer is paramount.
Here in Manchester, good beer service can be as simple as a properly poured pint of cask—something that is common, and is often taken for granted. But no one here has yet to really take the art of pouring beer and—like some of the above examples—make a big deal about it.
That is until now. Opening its doors in December 2024, The Trading Route is a new restaurant and beer hall situated within a new high rise opposite recently opened arts and music venue Aviva Studios. You’ll find it a short-ish walk from the city centre, past the London-ifed end of Deansgate that now features a Hawksmoor, Blacklock, Blues Kitchen, Dishoom, Flat Iron, and even a Caravan Coffee next door to Trading Route itself. It’s refreshing, honestly, to see an independent business operating cheek-to-jowl beside big-name brands like these.
Leading with a so-simple-you-couldn’t-possibly-fuck-it-up tagline of “Cold Beer. Hot Chicken.” Trading Route concentrates on just that: a menu centring around rotisserie chicken and beer supplied by partner brewery, Manchester Union. Still brewing at their home on North Western Street, in the middle of the red light district behind Piccadilly Station, Manchester Union is the city's only brewery to specialise more-or-less exclusively in lagers. I’ve always been impressed with their beers, and most recently their flagship lager—a decoction-mashed Czech-style 12º pilsner—has been tasting excellent. It’s full of that rich, caramel body and snappy, Saaz hop character that makes this style so deliciously satisfying.
At Trading Route this flagship lager is offered alongside Manchester Union’s dark lager, with a third option being a blend of both. Beyond this, however, I was excited to see brewery co-founder Will Evans explain in a video on the venue's Instagram page that they would be using “specially-designed taps” to produce seven-minute slow poured pints, with thick, creamy heads, claiming this would happen “even in really busy periods.”
Manchester’s beer scene is righteously comprehensive, for sure, but one thing it’s lacking is a leading lager specialist really putting a stamp on things, with Manchester Union best positioned to be that particular brewery. I headed to the restaurant excited to experience what I hoped to be an example of the city really flexing its lager credentials—beer service, in action—but unfortunately, that’s not quite what I found.
I don’t know who invented the “slow pour” but I do know I first experienced it in Denver's Bierstadt Lagerhaus sometime in 2016. The brewery had been open just a few months, but I was intrigued by its painstakingly brewed Slow Pour Pils, which is reportedly produced using an 18-hour decoction-mashing schedule. Not content with it taking ages to make, they also make you wait what feels like an eternity when ordering one at the bar. Using a side-pour tap, instead of throwing the beer into the glass quickly like a Czech tapster, they pour it in stages, allowing it to settle for a minute or two each time it's topped up. Eventually you receive a glass of beer with a large, cartoon ice cream head of foam, with a lot of carbonation knocked out of it, making it sublimely easy to sip. A banked pint, in lager form.
It's a lot of pomp for something you drink in just a few minutes, but it's good, and there’s theatre, so you come back for more. Over the years I’ve seen other breweries around Denver, and further afield in the US offer the same, but I had never seen it advertised in the UK until now.
Arriving a few minutes before the friend I’m meeting for lunch, I have a moment to take in the surroundings at the Trading Route. Despite essentially being a glass box they’ve made it feel really cosy, with long, beer hall style tables, bench seating, warm lighting, and a bit of greenery strewn about the place to soften it a touch. At the entrance is a small deli (Will Evans also owns a similar bar/deli in the Manchester borough of Monton called the Wandering Palate) selling various beers, wines, meats, cheeses, posh olives and fancy bags of crisps. The air is thick with the umami-scent of two dozen-or-so slowly roasting birds.
It's the start of lunch service so not too busy, and when my dining companion joins me we immediately head to the bar. Ordering a pint of the standard Manchester Union Lager, I watch with anticipation as my server takes a chilled pint glass, covered in a misty film of condensation, from the fridge. There’s no rinse to rid the glass of said condensation (which, fellow nerds, would help with the development of a stable head of foam) as it's held straight under the tap. Should I sit down and come back when it’s ready, I wonder? No need, the beer is thrown into the glass at a distinctly normal speed with a very normal amount of foam, and served. There is no slow pour as advertised, no theatre, and definitely nothing I would class as ‘beer service’.
My friend, feeling more optimistic than me, orders a pint of the mixed. Seeing it as an option on the menu moments ago we had wondered if this would be served as a řezané pivo, or “cut beer.” In Czechia, this is when a dark lager is floated perfectly atop a pale lager, which looks fantastic and tastes great, even if it is a little gimmicky. Not here at Trading Route, however. The beers are, again, poured quickly, blending to form a strangely murky (thanks to the condensation) light brown, and distinctly unappetising pint of beer.
I don’t blame the server. It was a slow Sunday and we didn’t ask for our beer to be poured in any particular way—as I doubt any other customer did with the bar being so far from the end of town where dedicated beer drinkers usually convalesce. But there was, at the very least, an expectation that something special was about to happen, and when it didn’t, we returned silently to our table and waited for our food feeling a little disappointed. The beers were fine, good even, but we wanted a bit of drama, and not a drop was offered.
On the other hand, the food was excellent. Expertly cooked and seasoned chicken, tender and moist with a perfectly bronze-crusted skin and a brothy pool of light gravy. Roast potatoes arrived covered in parmesan with a piquant green sauce that gave them a bit of zip. The highlight, though, was the caesar salad. I know it takes a lot to get excited about a simple salad, but done well they can be spectacular and this was. Covered in a moussy, delicately acidic dressing, laden with chunky croutons and thick, deep brown hunks of thigh meat, and topped with snowy peaks of parmesan, I could’ve polished off the entire plateful by myself.
But I still left feeling like I didn’t experience Trading Route as advertised. I just thought when it came to my beer, they’d do something, anything, but I might as well have gone for a Pilsner Urquell at Albert’s Schloss down the road where at the very least they use an oversized glass so they serve you a proper, foamy hladinka from a Lukr tap. A healthy row of what looked like these were present at Trading Route, too, but I didn’t see them used as they could be, so really it's just an expensive row of wasted potential. Full marks for hot chicken, nil point for cold beer.