Open It! Live in Leeds (Part 2)

I don't think there's any doubt that Open It! Live in Leeds was a great success, thanks in the main to the Rick Furzer for organising it, but also to all of the attendees who brought along a mind-boggling assortment of rare beers (and a 75cl of Leffe Brune) to share.

I was going to give a write-up of everything that I ate and drank, but that has proved too Herculean a task even for me. Instead, some things that made me think the most on the night, in chronological order.

Up until last Saturday, I held a certain belief that some beers just don't go with food. Orval is one - it's a great beer, but it's simply too dry to go with anything in a symbiotic way. It's a perfect aperitif, and hell even a great beer for just drinming (imagine that!), but it's not a "food beer". Lambics too sort of rested on that list, although now I realise that what I really think is that Cantillon beers aren't food beers. Indeed, the glass of St Lamvinus (thanks Gav) that I tried merely served to reinforce my opinion that I just don't anything that Cantillon make. It's all too wild, too stinky, and just plain wrong. What threw this into sharp relief was the appearance of a couple of American "wild" ales (although termed wild, they aren't spontaneously fermented, but rather innocculated with certains strains of yeast and bacteria).

Upright Brewing Sole Composition #7 (disclosure: I brought this beer along, and it was sent to me by Jeff Alworth of Beervana), and some post-prandial bottles of various Russian River wild ales clarified this belief. These had all the tartness and complexity that I enjoy in a lambic beer, but without the sensation that they'd been strained through a farm-hand's underpants before being bottled. I thought the same of the aged bottle of Fraoch 20 (mine again) - it was tart and funky, but didn't smell of pigshit and compost.

Food match of the night for me was the crispy belly pork, black pudding, celeriac and mustard salad with Mikkeller Stella 1 porter (thanks again, Gav). The sweetness of the pork and the savouriness of the black pudding played off against a similar set of sensations in the beer, making a match that was truly greater than the sum of its parts. Somehow these combined to take what on paper (or screen) sounds like hard work, and turned them into something that could quite happily have eaten all night in place of the rest of the meal. And the magnum of Stella 1 would have been a worthy accompaniment.

Another highlight was, or course, the generosity of everyone. I was particularly touched by Tyler showing up with a bottle of Pretty Things Jack d'Or, grinning as he handed it to me, knowing that it was one of my favourite beers of last year. Andy and his better half for bringing along a box full of Russian River beers. Another Andy for the brilliant and scurrillous industry gossip. And everyone else who came and shared beer, ate great food and made a fun evening happen.

The fun carried on into the night, rolling on to Mr Foleys and North Bar. I bowed out at about midnight, after (and I don't like this phrase, but there's no other way of putting it) smashing down a couple of devastatingly fresh pints of Ska Brewing Modus Hoperandi and demonstrating why I'm one of the UK's foremost beer communicators.

The food at Create was excellent, and the staff are great too. I'd recommend it without a second thought

I also did a tumblr blog for the evening - if I could figure out how to reverse the order of the photos and edit the title, it might add a bit more to it, but I appear to be showing my age with regards technology these days.

Open It! - Lexington Brewing Co. Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale

I promise this won't degenerate into a lot of virtual willy-waving about who has the most interestingly-stocked cellar, but I've just been down to mine and crikey, I've got a lot of old tat down there.

Sure, I have some interesting bits and pieces. There's some of the last vintage of Gales Prize Old Ale from the Horndean Brewery, a couple of aged Orval, a Marble Decadence, and so on. Arguably, any of these would be a better choice of beer for Open It! than the bottle in front of me. But in some ways, I have more curiosity about this beer than anything else in my cellar. I sort of know how the Orval will be, and that the Gales POA is going to be a disappointment - horribly flat and sour, a shadow of the great vintages that Gales produced through the 1990s.

The only thing I know about this beer is that it came from Andreas Falt at Vertical Drinks, after a trip to the USA. He handed it to me and said that he thought I might find it interesting. I even had to look up the brewery on RateBeer, although I didn't look at any tasting notes (although I couldn't help but notice the score - 65 overall, and 92 for the style). And so because I knew nothing about the beer, I kept looking at it wondering when I was going to open it, until Open It! came along.

Straight from the freezing cellar, it pours golden and pin-bright. As it warms up, a little vanilla oak and spirit lifts from the glass along with a faint hint of something bacterial - lacto? aceto? The palate is - as the admen love to say - clean and crisp, and the finish is vaguely plasticky, reminiscent of sucking air in through an old chewed Bic biro. Mercifully, the finish is fairly short.

Maybe I should go and grab that Marble Decadence?