Thirty Years and Two Durham Breweries to Work Out I Like Pale Ale

I didn’t know what I liked. Not really. For thirty-odd years.

Started at sixteen with lager, because that’s what you drink at sixteen. Hated it. Tasted like fizzy water with a grudge. Kept drinking it anyway — that was the job at that age.

At seventeen, still not legal, I moved on to bitter. The Yorkshire stuff, because that’s what everyone around me drank. Smoother, better profile, no argument there. Can’t say I actually liked it though. I drank it to be sociable, which is a different thing entirely.

That went on for about fifteen years. Not tasting anything. Just running the process.

The beer that broke the pattern

Then I’m at a market in Durham, four or five pints deep into an afternoon, and I try something from a local outfit called Hill Island Brewery. And it’s brilliant.

Hill Island isn’t a brewery in the commercial sense at all. It’s one bloke down in Fowler’s Yard, on the riverbank below Silver Street, running a very small plant since 2002. He doesn’t supply shops. He sells from his own place, on set Saturdays — the first, second and fourth of each month — and that’s the whole distribution network. If you want the beer, you go to the beer.

The name’s the best bit, and I only found this out recently: Hill Island is a literal translation of Dunholme, the old name Durham is derived from. Hill. Island. That’s what the whole city is — a lump of rock in a loop of the Wear with a cathedral parked on top. Thirty years in the place and it took a brewery to explain the name to me.

Every batch is different. When I was last in it was something infused with lemongrass and ginger — sweet and bitter in the right balance, tangy, dangerously easy to drink. That beer is the one that actually did it. Not “getting drunk,” not “being sociable.” The first time I registered that beer had a flavour I cared about.

Then I found the benchmark

Durham Brewery sits a few miles south of the city on an industrial estate at Bowburn, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds and matters not at all.

It was started in 1994 by Steve Gibbs and his wife Christine — both full-time music teachers at the time, brewing round the day job — and it’s now the oldest working brewery in County Durham. Seventy-odd awards in thirty-two years. They went from a small plant to a ten-barrel one in 1999 and haven’t stopped since.

They run about ten beers at a time. Pale ales through to bitters, stouts, porters infused with chocolate, and at one point one with Turkish delight in it. I have no idea how they land half of what they attempt. It works.

That’s been my brewery for fifteen-plus years and I’d still put it up against anywhere in the country. The taproom’s open Friday evenings in spring and summer, and Saturday afternoons, ten taps on the wall — five handpulled, five keg — with usually six or seven actually pouring on a given weekend.

The bit where I look stupid

My regular order is Magus. Low strength, perfectly balanced, easy drinking. 3.8%, 28 IBU, gluten-free, hopped with a mix of UK, Czech and American hops that lands somewhere between lemon and tropical fruit.

I spent about fifteen years calling it an IPA.

Then I actually read the board. Pale ale. Been drinking pale ales the entire time and calling them something else, with total confidence, out loud, in front of people.

So I started reading properly. Trying to work out what actually separates a pale ale from an IPA from a New England IPA from a West Coast IPA from whatever sub-genre someone invented last Tuesday. The honest answer is that the lines are blurrier than the labels suggest — but I now know where I sit: somewhere between pale ale and New England IPA. The fruitier end.

West Coast IPA is a hard no for me. That’s the American approach of “we’ve got a bag of hops, let’s tip the whole thing in and see what happens.” Too bitter, every time. It’s the brewing equivalent of solving a design problem by adding more bolts.

Thirty years. Turns out I like pale ale. Who knew.

Next up: I’ve since worked my way round the rest of the county. The County Durham brewery trail, rated honestly — five breweries, and I’ll tell you which ones aren’t for me.

Hill Island sits in Fowler’s Yard, down the steps off Silver Street. Olesia has written about those steps: Durham’s Old Streets covers the vennels, the Market Place and the three bridges, and Durham Cathedral and Castle covers the bit on top of the hill. Worth knowing the brewery is named after the city — Dunholme, hill island — before you go looking for it.

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Addresses

Hill Island Brewery
7 Fowler’s Yard, Back Silver Street, Durham DH1 3RA
No official website; updates go out via their Facebook page. Open as a pop-up taproom on the first, second and fourth Saturday of each month. Reached by the steps down from Silver Street — check Facebook before you set off, because the schedule moves.

Durham Brewery
Unit 6a, Bowburn North Industrial Estate, Bowburn, County Durham DH6 5PF
durhambrewery.com
Taproom Friday 5–9pm and Saturday 2–9pm. Shop Tuesday–Friday 9am–4pm, then Friday evening with the taproom. Closed Mondays. Brewery tours are bookable on the site.