Anon, A Giant Monster Roams — Torrside Brewery in New Mills, Derbyshire
In the depths of the Torrs, in the drop of the gorge, in the rushing of the rivers Goyt and Sett—here is where you find the shadows of monsters, the coiling scales of dragons. Here is where beer finally—finally—gets interesting.
Photography by Matthew Curtis
Clouds hang low in the grey of March midweek, obscuring the peaks of New Mills’ surrounding cloughs when we arrive. Through a hollow of rich black soil and slippery rocks is a barely-contained river, pouring its peat-bronzed waters white over weirs, down past the Victorian mills that gave this town its name.
Across this gully is where the monsters of Torrside dwell, by the still channels of the canal marina, restless and glimmering in the gloom.
The owners of Torrside—a brewery founded here in Derbyshire’s High Peak in 2015—are also its brewers, a team of best friends and their partners. Chris Clough, Peter Sidwell and Nick Rothko-Wright have brewed together since finding each other at Manchester Homebrew Club in 2013, sharing their delight in subverting classic and historic styles—or simply making them up.
Torrside Brewery has always been a place for Chris, Nick and Peter to make beer that inspires and excites them, rather than beer they think will sell, carving a niche as deep as the gritstone valleys it was born in.
“I’m glad we don’t have a business manager,” Chris tells me. “Because they wouldn’t let us make smoked barleywines that might only sell a few bottles. But that’s what we want to do.”
These strong, smoked beers are perhaps what Torrside have become most well-known for—sumptuous, barrel-aged, high ABV beers made with little regard for the stale rules and regulations of the standard style guide; conversely, with a close and guarded eye on the traditional methods of brewing that have brought such beers from the past into the 21st century.
““We thought, who would want to come to a festival specialising in smoked beers?””
Like wandering through the Black Forest during the times of Rumplestiltskin, with a Torrside beer, you never quite know what twists and turns in the road lie ahead. The team never experiment for the sake of trend, however. You will find no cakes in their mash, no trademark infringements on their labels. Their joy is finding gold while trekking deep amongst the original styles of Britain and Europe: the wheat beer, the Baltic porter, the rauchbier.
To match the dark whimsy of the beers, artist Emma Sidwell, Peter’s wife, designs the intricately detailed labels for each new release, summoning spirits and changelings among steepled towns, grasping tentacles, and swirling abstractions.
This commitment to making the very best beers out of the wild ideas they dream up has provided them with a die-hard fanbase of people that truly understand their lore on a deep and passionate level. They travel across the country to drink at their brewery tap room, and Smokefest, their annual beer festival, sells out of tickets every year.
“Smokefest was a joke at first,” Chris says. “We thought, who would want to come to a festival specialising in smoked beers? Then all these people turned up to drink smoked beer. It’s a mad and brilliant thing.”
Co-host of the Beerlonging podcast and beer writer Mark Johnson has been a Torrside fan for years, and explains that his love for the brewery goes beyond the beers they make—Smokefest is and has always been important to him.
“Only Torrside could have made this happen in this country,” he says. “The way that it has grown in popularity from the first year is, as a smoked beer fan, a pleasure to see.”
“They still feel unique within the industry—a more playful side of brewing that is becoming increasingly rare.”
It’s not all smoke and barrels, though. Torrside toy with beer styles to forge delicious imperial milds, red IPAs, rauchwines and Cascadian dark ales. If you’ve never heard of these styles before, it’s because some of them don’t exist. Not outside of the Torrside realm, anyway.
Their IPAs and Pale Ales are first class too, and are often the beers that get newcomers into the brewery’s fold. One of the first Torrside beers I ever tried was I Am Curious Oranj, a delightfully fresh and zesty pale ale packed with non-conformist spice and warmth. Of course, it was the name that drew me in (who doesn’t love The Fall?)
This beer, and I Am Curious Lemon, a riff on the original Oranj, show Torrside’s refusal of normality—peppercorns and citrus zests are added to the brew á la weissbier, creating a superbly refreshing and sessionable pale ale. When served on cask, it’s an absolute dream.
Torrside doesn’t exist to appease the villagefolk.
***
Like all good lairs, Torrside Brewery is heavily laden with treasure. Barrel after barrel of soundly-slumbering beers lay in rows across the floor and up the walls, with pallets of bottles and kegs filling in any spaces.
To hoard beautiful things during a time of national financial instability could seem unwise, but Peter says it's just the normal way of things in the brewery. They keep making beers they want to make, and eventually they sell them. It’s like hope. A manifestation.
“Once these beers are made, they last,” he says. “So by making and then storing these beers we’re not technically losing any money we’re just… holding on to stock. And we like them, that’s the main thing.”
Peter’s interest in historic beers takes him to some unusual places to find recipes and ideas for his next brews.
“You have to go to the nerds about it,” he says. “Every now and again you just find links to an old thing about beer somewhere off the back of something totally unrelated… Like chefs who’ve just been investigating stuff and they go, ‘and then we found this about beer’ and share a picture of a page from a book or something and it’s like, okay, that’s at complete odds to everything the beer world’s told me.”
“A lot of our ideas came from our homebrewing days,” Chris says. “Exploring beers and asking, okay, what’s that flavour? How did that happen? How does that work?”
“And also learning how to avoid it if it’s bad,” Peter adds. “How do I never drink that ever again?”
Homebrewing is essential in the Torrside origin story. Chris was given a kit for a birthday years ago, and shortly after he joined Manchester Homebrew Club, where Peter and Nick were already established members, and entered the club’s IPA competition. It’s hard to imagine a time when the trio weren’t thick as thieves. I like to think of this moment as a mystical alignment of some kind.
Soon after meeting, the merry band of brothers headed on a trip to Tempest Brewing, one of the first adoptees of American-style dry hopped IPAs in the UK, to see how they were tackling the process.
“They had a couple of single hopped beers in the local pub and I just thought, this is amazing,” Chris says. “I thought: I wanna brew this stuff.”
Peter, Chris, Nick, and their families all moved to New Mills at around the same time in 2009. Was there some sort of catalyst to this? Yet another mysterious celestial movement?
“It’s just somewhere nice to live,” Chris says with a shrug. I mean, he’s not wrong.
As the brewery took off, despite the team’s love for hoppy, American beers, it was deep, dark beers like their cave-black Candlewick stout and delicious Grubby Bastard porter that really set them apart. Grubby Bastard in particular is a fan favourite—known as a winter warmer and originally brewed as a collaboration, it’s a rich and chocolatey 6% ABV porter, with a puff of smoke underlining the bitterness of that dark chocolate malt. It’s a little bit devious. The stunning pump clip artwork makes me chant, “The mills! The mills! The mills are on fire!”
“I’d say Candlewick is an old-school recipe and way of brewing now,” Peter says. “Using that much dark malt in a stout… It’s just homebrewing wisdom, originally you’re thinking you need to put just a sprinkling of it in to get the colour, but I would taste it and go, well that’s not nice. You need to be able to taste it. We put 10-15% black patent malt into it to get that blackness, that richness.”
It just so happens that my favourite beer by Torrside is another stout—Valour. It is a hot bath during a snowstorm of a beer, brewed to a 1917 recipe for Courage’s Imperial Stout. It’s a satisfying 7.7% ABV (so not exactly knock-you-on-your-arse strong, but strong enough to light up your face and warm your cockles) and its notes of lightly peated whisky, long black coffee, and its sumptuous richness are unparalleled. To me, it is perfect.
““They still feel unique within the industry—a more playful side of brewing that is becoming increasingly rare.””
Complexity in the malt bill isn’t just for decadence and darkness. Depending on the roast it builds layers of rich flavours of toast, biscuits, even dark chocolate; aromas of cocoa powder, or honeyed granola, or demerara—even rum; and silky, velvety textures that many breweries could only dream of. Again, this boils down (if you’ll pardon the pun) to Torrside’s unwavering commitment to doing whatever they want, and if that means spending money on four or five malts for one beer, collecting spices, and finding more barrels, that’s what they’ll do.
“If you go to a lot of the brewery academic training, a lot of the focus is on process,” Peter says. “Chemical processes, efficiency, and cost effectiveness.”
“Yes,” Chris interrupts. “Because most people are trying to run a sensible business.”
***
It would be remiss not to include the Torrside dogs in any profile of the brewery. As much a part of Torrside lore as any of the beers, Toshi the Saluki and Kami the Shiba Inu were the original mascots of the brewery—now Yuki has joined the fold to offer Shiba Inu death stares and keep the brewery in order. Chris’ former role as a Japanese translator informs their names, and some of their beer label artwork personas.
While Kami and Toshi have sadly moved on to the great beyond, they remain the stars of Samurai Shiba and Swiss Guard Sighthound, living forever in our hearts as a barrel aged Baltic porter, and a bourbon barrel imperial stout—part of the annual Dogs Of War series of barrel-aged beers.
Kami, Toshi, and Yuki represent the connection each member of Torrside Brewery has to their beer. For Chris, Nick, and Peter, the joy of finding new ways to structure old beer recipes has never waned. It still feels like a personal project, underpinned by a value shared by each of them—to brew the best beer they possibly can, no matter the style.
What I want you to know about Torrside, with their strong sense of the weirder, darker places of the fantasy and absurdist worlds, is the joy and humour that glows within. Meet them and the swirling mists of uncanny horrors evaporate. Chat to them about, oh, anything, and you learn that even the most obscure topics can lead to sky-high, endless inspiration. They have built an enticing world of myths and monsters, but with a wink and a smile, and the most wonderful thing, to me, is the valiant unseriousness of their whole enterprise.
Torrside might be the stuff of legend to many, but at its core it is a world of three friends, their loved ones, their dogs, and their interweaving, niche interests—the ideal imaginarium for some of the most exciting beers made in the UK today. What would you do if your dreams were unbridled? What would you make? Thankfully for us, Chris, Nick, and Peter already know. And they’re doing it.
