York Beer Festival Day One
Well we were very pleased to be asked to be on the panel judging the shortlist for the LocAle awards and we had a great time scoring all the beers with York Ale Guru, Beer Hawk Maggie and Alan P, generally the consistency was outstanding, just a few that weren’t so good and we put that down to them just not being ready. Our personal top three are as follows:
- Daleside - Monkey Wrench
- Rudgate - York Chocolate Stout
- Hop Studio - XP & Brass Castle - Wallop (Joint)
The official LocAle winners for the festival were:
- Bad Company - Comfortably Numb
- Brass Castle - Wallop
- Rudgate - York Chocolate Stout.
We were stuck at the Brass Castle & Bad Seed bar for a good few hours to begin with and we highly recommend this as first port of call when you go to the festival. Both breweries putting on a superb and diverse selection. Highlights being Bad Seed’s Smoked Maple Belgian Ale and Brass Castle’s First Gold, a wet hop ale using local hops from Yorkshire Hops. Wallop was a clear favorite again, even stronger than last year, although we did prefer it aged in port barrels rather than the sherry barrels used this time. But still a great beer.
A couple of other beers we would recommend would be Rudgate - Brew No.1 Vanilla Mild, York Brewery - Moors-ish and Treboom - Myricale. It’s also worth checking out the small but wonderfully unique Foreign Beers bar, some wonderful examples from all over the world that you won’t find anywhere else in the UK!
Obviously with over 450+ beers to choose from there’ll be much more out there to recommend, we’re heading back on Friday with our programme’s all noted up for round two. Look out for more info then.
