As you may recall me mentioning, one of this years BackInMacc aspirations was to try and get some of the newer start-up breweries involved, giving them an opportunity to show us what they can do, and of course for us a chance to taste something new. Runaway fit that bill perfectly having only being brewing commercially from June this year.

As a one-off special, the guys at the Treacle Tap are giving over all of their keg fonts to Runaway and are hosting a mini, “meet-the-breweresque” style event to kick off the days festivities in style. Nothing too formal, just a good selection of beers and a chance for a few words and after chat with at least one of the brewers.

Speaking of which, I asked co-owner Mark Welsby to pull me together a little snapshot of how things came to be to date, which is attached warts and all further below.

Beers available from Runaway on the day will be:

Runaway Pale Ale (4.7%)

Runaway IPA (5.5%)

Runaway Smoked Porter (6.0%)

(Plus maybe a few bottles of American Brown to sample too)

Over to Mark:

“We’ve only been brewing commercially since June this year, but the beer on at the weekend will give people a good indication of the sort of thing we’re interested in brewing (and drinking) at the moment. Our Pale Ale and IPA are, I suppose, our interpretation of the American influenced style that a heap of breweries are brewing and, judging by our sales, are becoming pretty popular. Although both are based on bold hop flavours and aromas – the thinking behind them was to create two distinctly different beers. The Pale is intended to be crisp, citrus and refreshing, whilst the IPA more tropical and with a definite malt character to balance the hops to a degree. The Smoked Porter and American Brown Ale are the beers that excited us personally when coming up with our initial recipes, as both wannabe brewers and seasoned drinkers, plus both are influenced by our travels in the US and Germany. Although our beer is influenced by foreign styles, we brew it on a traditional real ale 5.5 barrel kit – and the way we brew comes very much from British brewing tradition. So we like to think the beer we’re making is modern and British in style.”

“As a quick potted history, The Runaway Brewery is two old school friends, myself and my old mate Darren. He and I both gave up our day jobs last year to set out on our little adventure (hence Runaway) to get away from the rat race and do something we could really get excited about, making beer! We’ve both been into beer for a long time, but had never brewed anything of note prior to taking the leap into microbrewing. We bought our kit second-hand from Bespoke Brewery down in the Forest of Dean (they were up-sizing) which we had adapted to allow us to make the sort of beer we wanted to make. We then set about designing and building a brewery around it, and ended up in a railway arch on the north side of Manchester city centre, dead close to a couple of other breweries (Marble and Blackjack) which has proved to be a big help to us.

So far, we’ve focused on brewing keg conditioned and bottle conditioned beer, as that’s what we enjoy brewing and drinking most at the moment. We’re excited by the diversity of flavours that keg beer enables us to play with as brewers, as well as the technical challenges it presents. That said we love cask beer too, it’s where our interest in beer stems from, so it’s certainly something we’ll think about brewing in future.”