Port Street Beer House

Port Street Beer House opened in 2011 on a quiet side street in the Northern Quarter, launched by Jonny and Charlotte Heyes and the team behind Common bar. It arrived as one of the first venues in Manchester to bring together the full breadth of modern beer — cask, keg and a deep bottle-and-can list — under one roof, and quickly became a cornerstone of the city's craft-beer revival. The same team went on to found the Independent Manchester Beer Convention (Indy Man Beer Con) at Victoria Baths, and the bar now sits within the Common & Co hospitality group alongside The Beagle and The Pilcrow. Two decades of Manchester beer culture run through the place, and it is routinely named among the best beer bars in the country.

The bar itself is small and characterful: a traditional, wood-lined ground-floor room built around the main bar and its bank of taps, a larger and quieter first-floor space upstairs, and a semi-hidden yard at the back that stands in for a beer garden. Behind the bar are 18 keg lines and seven cask hand-pulls, plus fridges and shelves carrying hundreds of rotating bottles and cans from the world's best breweries — anything from a crisp pilsner to a Caribbean chocolate cake stout — as well as a specialist spirits list. Witty branding, genuinely knowledgeable bar staff and a mixed, all-week crowd have made it one of the Northern Quarter's most-loved drinking holes.

Crucially, that same curatorial approach extends to alcohol-free drinking. Rather than the single token 0% lager most pubs keep, Port Street runs a rotating selection of modern, crafty alcohol-free beers on tap and in cans, drawing on brewers such as Hawkshead, Jever — whose Jever Fun is a crisp 0.0% North German pilsner — and Bavaria's Schneider Weisse, known for its alcohol-free wheat beer. Manchester's Finest singles the bar out as the best place to try a proper range rather than the token one many pubs offer, and the local drinks press repeatedly points to it as the city-centre spot for genuinely good AF beer. For anyone who wants the full craft-beer-bar experience — the taps, the room, the specialist knowledge — without the alcohol, it is Manchester's benchmark.