Bundobust Brewery

Bundobust was started in Leeds in 2014 by Mayur Patel and Marko Husak, who met over a Bradford street-food collaboration in 2013. Patel's family run Prashad, one of the UK's most highly regarded Gujarati restaurants, while Husak came from the craft-beer world of The Sparrow Bier Cafe; together they built a group that pairs modern, all-vegetarian Indian street food with serious beer. Bundobust Brewery opened on Manchester's Oxford Street in 2021 as the group's own working brewery, carved out of a former multistorey car park inside the grand Edwardian St James Building on the Oxford Road corridor.

The room is a casual, open-plan taproom and restaurant seating around 150, with communal beer-hall benches, huge chrome fermentation tanks visible throughout the space and the building's enormous skylights letting daylight pour down through the atrium above. Sixteen keg lines and two cask lines pour Bundobust's own beers alongside collaborations and guest pours, and the kitchen sends out sharing-plate Gujarati street food that is entirely vegetarian and vegan.

The non-alcoholic offer is a real part of the taplist rather than a token gesture. The headline pour is KOPRA, a 0.5% ABV alcohol-free double-dry-hopped pale brewed as a collaboration with Manchester's Cloudwater, where Sabro hops give a creamy coconut character over bright lemon-lime citrus and a finish of blood orange. Beyond the AF beer there is a proper Desi soft-drinks programme: an in-house iced masala chai shaken with Oatly Barista oat milk and topped with whipped oat, a house mango lassi made with sweet, creamy Alphonso mangoes, and a rotating run of Desi soft drinks and Indian sodas. The kitchen-led bar can also build mocktail versions of its cocktails, making this one of the stronger low-and-no options in central Manchester.