Port Street Beer House — Restaurant in Manchester

My most recent experience visit here was very disappointing.

I ordered two halves of keg beer when visiting as I was only staying for a short period and I wanted to try two of the beers on offer. The first of the two was excellent, but the second on first impression tasted strange. After trying it again, and having a good smell of it, I couldn't put my finger on exactly what was wrong with it but decided that it was so unpleasant that I wanted to send it back to the bar and order something else - especially after having paid £4.25 for the half.

The barman tried some of the beer from the tap and said there was nothing wrong with it but that the taste must be from the "Eureka single hop". His assessment of the beer seemed very arrogant, and it felt as if he was unwilling to listen to my complaint about the quality of this particular beer. At one stage he proposed looking on Rate Beer to see what other people thought of it, as obviously my opinion on the matter was wrong.

When one of his colleagues arrived behind the bar he requested their opinion on the matter by mentioning that I was "discussing the properties of the Eureka hop" and then began to talk about the nuances of this particular hop variety, which felt as if he was trying to belittle my opinion and get his colleague on his side to back up his assertions on the matter.

In total 3 members of staff were engaged in the situation which ended with one of them telling me that "there is nothing wrong with the beer - that's just your opinion, if you want another beer I can sell you another but I can't swap that one". I was pretty stunned by this, and have never experienced this kind of customer service in a pub where I have been served something of poor quality, let along a pub with the title of "Craft Ale bar of the year 2017".

During this incident I did not feel the need to mention that, actually, I do know what I am talking about - I am a qualified master brewer, and have been an industry trained taster for over 5 years. I thought it would be better to be treated as any other customer would, rather than brag about my beer expertise.

In the end I left the beer, almost untouched, and decided to leave the bar. The beer and the experience left an unpleasant taste in my mouth and all at the affordable price of £8.50 a pint. This sort of dialogue with "craft" experts is what makes me not want to shout about my profession in case I am mistaken for a beer nerd who is perpetuating the exclusivity of the "craft" beer scene with their arrogance...

I have found myself in this drinking establishment on several visits to Manchester now, and with every visit have been met with nothing but sneering contempt from the fashionably stand off-ish staff for not being a beer connoisseur. Polite requests such as "Could you recommend something you like? I'm not much of a beer person!" where I'm from are generally met with a response such as "I like this one, it costs this much money" as opposed to, "Oh! You don't even know what STYLE of beer you want to drink then?" which is the common Port Street Beer House response. The majority of times I have resorted to saying "I'll take whatever my friend is having." because the staff are so firm in their belief that being a group of men in their 30s whose lives revolve around amassing knowledge of how and where a drink is made, and competing with their work comrades and patronage in cultivating the most ludicrous, obnoxious looking masses of facial hair makes them somehow superior to "plebs" like me, who frankly, have more important things in our lives to concern ourselves with than if a pint of beer will taste more "smoky" or "woody".

Now, I won't begrudge Port Street Beer House the fact that I have sampled some extremely good beers there on my visits. However, unless you truly believe that portraying yourself as a connoisseur of something most people drink before getting in fights, gives you an air of being a man about town, or you have some kind of functioning autism, Port Street Beer House is...

We went here about the time they were opening, 2 minutes before they were scheduled to be open, to be exact, and were told to come back in a few minutes. Then, after walking around and coming back, when we were asked to sign in for track and trace and realised I didn’t have the app on my new phone, I asked to sign in on paper, and while signing in, I was treated like a criminal because even though I had put two names down (one for me and my husband) and I had only enough time to write one phone number, the employee pointed out I had to put two separate numbers. If he had given me 5 more seconds I would have done so, since I had already written two separate names. Then, when our friends came to meet us, when I jokingly said that they were really strict about signing in, the employee confirmed our friend signed in on the app twice and then said that it was because of people like us that 8 of his family members died. We were following every rule and being as respectful as possible and were still treated as criminals in this venue....