Thornbridge Brewery

Hello potential 6 star review and hello a place I wish I could spend every Weds afternoon (if only my Euromillions would come in one day!)
I love Thornbridge beers and with Manchester being fairly close to Buxton we really are lucky to get a lot of their varied beers in loads of different pubs around the area. Having attended their meet the brewer recently at Volta in Didsbury I was determined to go on the brewery tour while I was holidaying in nearby Tideswell. As they only do the brewery tour on a Weds it was by luck rather than judgement that I could make this and hopefully they’ll start doing the tour at weekends in future so my pals can enjoy it too!
The tour has limited places and is always busy so I called up a month in advance to book (it’s £7.50 but you do get to pay on the day) and when we arrived on the industrial estate 10 mins walk from Buxton town centre we were greeted with a half of our choice of 4 Thornbridge beers they had on while perusing their pretty awesome shop selling a fantastic range of beers, merchandise and random awesome beer related goodies (I bought some fantastic Thornbridge /​Sierra Nevada collaborations)
We were taken on the tour by James (who actually did their meet the brewer a few weeks earlier) and he was knowledgable, funny and on the money with the crowd he had. A 40 mins tour of the brewery from 3.15pm had us shown around their state of the art facility, labs, bottling and kegging plant while also being able to breathe in deeply in their huge hops supply (amazing) — and then we were shown their secret project warehouse which was fully of rioja and sherry barrels which are going to be used for some very special (Brewdog Abstrakt style) beers coming your way soon!
Once getting back into the main bar and reception we were then pretty much given free reign to drink as much free beer as we wanted (I’m sure there’s a limit but we hadn’t reached it…) before they lock the doors at 5pm! Put it this way we enjoyed some damn fine Jaipur (the best I’ve ever had), Raven, Tzara and a special edition called Desert Sessions.
A bloody good 2 hours and I’d definitely do it again if I’m down this way again!