'Why Manchester is the best city when it comes to pubs'

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

For the last 18 months, Matthew Curtis has been trying to visit as many pubs and bars throughout Greater Manchester as he can with a camera on his shoulder and a notepad in his hand under the guise of being a ‘beer enthusiast’.

In that time, freelance writer and photographer Matthew has visited more than 180 different pubs, bars, and venues in an attempt to come up with a definitive list of the best places to find good beer in the city-region right now - and he’s finally at a point where he can share his findings with the rest of us. “I’ve drunk a lot of pints in pubs on my own recently,” Matthew, who is also the co-editor of independent beer magazine Pellicle Magazine, tells the M.E.N. “I didn’t want there to be any bias, so I was telling people I was a beer enthusiast.

Thankfully, there’s plenty of those in Manchester so I managed to get away with it.” READ MORE: ‘I went to the charming country pub less than an hour from Manchester named the best in Britain and was blown away' READ MORE: Five wine bars in Manchester named among best in the Britain Matthew, originally from Lincoln, now lives in Stockport with his partner having moved to Manchester three years ago.

In those three years, he’s discovered an affinity for Manchester’s beer scene and says it's unlike anywhere else in the country. “The beer and pubs scene in Manchester is the best in the UK, I really do believe that,” he explains. “There are some amazing cities in the UK for beer - there’s Sheffield, Liverpool and Newcastle who all have so much going on - but Manchester has this great mixture of the old and new that most other cities don’t seem to have the same balance of. “There are some amazing traditional pubs like the Peveril of the Peak, The City Arms