Northallerton Beer Festival - the start of our holiday in't Yorkshire Dales

Mr Lisa and I took a well earned week off work.

Golden Lion, Northallerton

Our plans were a little sketchy: some biking, walking, beer drinking, cheese eating, cake munching and shop mooching.  In no particular order, with no particular priority.

Accommodation was booked on Saturday 24th (mum's house, Brompton, Northallerton), Sunday 25th - Thursday 29th at The Jonas Centre (Redmire) and finally 1 'luxury' night at The Black Swan Fearby, near Masham (pronounced Massam not MaSHam).

I was going to a big post about the entire holiday, but I won't because it'll be really long and dull, and it means I can tweet about bits of it separately, and it'll look like I've been really busy ;)

The holiday has been tagged in twitter with #YDH


Our holiday began on Saturday - a bonus day really, we'd discovered (to our pleasant suprise) that Northallerton was holding it's own (first) beer festival.  It was held in the Golden Lion Hotel, and raised money for the Ben Hyde Memorial Trust a local lad who was killed in Iraq in 2003.

Beer

It seemed sensible for Northallerton to host it's own beer festival, now that Northallerton was brewing it's own, thanks to Walls County Town Brewery (no website it seems, but you can find them on facebook)

We made our way there for 6pm, tried a range of beers, talked about which one we like the best (and why), then finished the night on our 'favourite' or in our case, finished on 3 halves of our favourite.

What's a beer festival?: you pay an entry fee, you get a glass and a list of the beers, the brewers, the alcohol % and sometimes a description of the flavour.  You then pick your beer, and buy from the bar by the pint or half-pint.  We stuck with half-pints, but they were quite generous with their measures :) Unfortunately there wasn't a beer-description, which was a shame because I tend to choose based on the flavours.

I even made tasting notes

7 halves each later (that's 3.5 pints) we decided to call it a night, until the band started up, and we stayed for another 3 halves more.

Favourite beer (for me): Wall's Brewing Co "Explorer IPA"
Favourite beer (for Carl): Wall's Brewing Co "County Best"

We then went round the corner to Aroma, Zetland Street for a quality indian meal before walking the 2.5 mile walk back to my mums house (via the village green to collect conkers) - don't ask.