This Saturday we travelled to Manchesterⁱ & I went with Stuey & Andy to the NWAF in the city centre. We met up with Aidan & Gillian and had a good stab at the beers on offer.

The beers are mostly darker and stronger as you would expect from a winter ales festival, but not all of them. Whilst I looked along the casks I started on a Fullers ESB. Difficult to get hold of on draught outside of London. A good, solid strong bitter. Some toffee and loads of malt flavour. All the Hawkshead beers had gone - Brodie's Prime is an excellent porter (or is it a strong mild?) and Lakeland Gold is about my favourite beer in the world at the moment. Okell's Aile was a porter with bags of flavour; lots of roasty, smokey and some burnt flavour. Not one for necking. Phoenix Porter was good example of porter. All the Purple Moose Brewery beer had long gone, but seeing as it had won a gold medal it was no surprise. Currently one of my favourite breweries Saltaire had their Winter Warmer. I'm not such a fan of more full bodied sweeter beers but this wasn't bad at all. Spitting Feathers Farmhouse Aleⁱ was one of the few I wasn't so keen on. Mostly it just wasn't to my taste with a muddy sort of flavour to it. The same breweries Old Wavertonian was a different matter - a stout with tons of roasty, chocolate and coffee flavour. Wychwood's January's Ale was just what I expected from them - a reasonable beer with the distinctive Wychwood malty-sweetness and frugality of hops that I'm not such a fan of and Andy really likes. It was a surprise to see that West Berkshire had a beer there but it had sold out by the time I arrived. Another brewery that can do no wrong in my book. A new brewery to my taste buds was Elland (E&S) with their 1872 Porter and a perfectly good pint it was too.

Amongst the none cask beer we had were: Boon Kriek & Mort Subite Kriek. Both excellent Belgian cherry beers - not too sweet, not too sour. No Cantillon beers were left at the bottle bar - their Rose de Gambrinus is one of my favourite beers and one of the sourest I've ever tried. Augustiner Oktoberfest was a perfectly reasonable malty lager and Wernecker Weiss was a good stereotypical cloudy German wheat beer. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is a classic American pale ale brewed with cascade hops which stand out a mile. My favourite hops at the moment (I know I've mentioned it before) and go excellently with pale beers.

There were one or two others tasted but none so bad I remember them and I wasn't really keeping track. Strangely I didn't meet anyone from Wolverhamptonⁱ CAMRA even though I was told there were several of them there. Unlike last weekend where I met the one who was there just walking down the street on his pre-match pub crawl.