The best beer in the world?

No, not my home brew, even though the new one looked very promising as we transferred it into the keg yesterday (see pictures at the bottom).

As it was Ali at Craft Matters' birthday on Friday, we had a slightly belated celebration supper last night with all sorts of goodies ordered from Northern Harvest. Two of the best things they do (in addition to their veg box scheme) are cheeses from the cheese shop in Chester and meat from The Cheshire Smokehouse in Wilmslow. The cheeses we got this week were Bourne's unpasteurised cheshire, some soft pecorino and Berwick Edge, a real find that's like a good mature gouda. We've had the pastrami from the smokehouse before and it was just as good this time. I have a feeling we visited the Doddington dairy, which makes Berwick Edge up in Northumberland, many years ago. As this was 1995, my memory is too dim to be sure.

But the real star of the feast was a bottle of beer we've been keeping for a while. Before leaving Cambridge, I made several bike trips to the wonderful Bacchanalia beer shop on Mill Road, just about managing to cycle back under the weight of several 75cl bottles of Belgian beer. Last night we opened the last of our Drie Fonteinen Vintage Geuze, which was bottled on 15 April 2003. It was a wonderful beer. Lively and zesty with a real citrussy attack, mellowing out to a long, complex, honeyed finish, it's one of the world's greatest beers.

Lambics (gueuze is a blend of young and old lambic beers) represent the survival of an ancient form of brewing in which the fermentation is spontaneous, effected through wild yeasts, rather than limited to one controlled strain. Michael Jackson (I think) ventured the opinion that the beer being poured in Brueghel's Peasant Wedding must have been a kind of lambic (web gallery of art link). There are only a handful of breweries making these beers today, most of them in the Senne valley to the west of Brussels, where the beers are left open to the wild yeasts being carried by the wind. Drie Fonteinen have a good website (especially if you can read a little Dutch!), including some pictures of the brewery. If you scroll down you can see their koelschip, which is where the spontaneous fermentation takes place. One of these days we'll get ourselves over to Payottenland in Belgium to visit the home of these wonderful beers...

Significantly less wonderful, but still proving enjoyable both to make and to drink, my latest brew is all transferred safely into its keg. We're getting very good at siphoning (although it's still a two person job!) and moved the beer from the fermentation bucket (see the thick layer of yeasty sludge left at the bottom in the first pic) in no time at all. Seeing all that yeast (I used Wyeast 1099, Whitbread Ale) at the bottom made me think that I really need to look into recycling yeast in the future. Well, 4-5 weeks to mature in the keg now and it'll be ready. There's the nice full keg in the last pic, next to our slowly chitting potatoes. Sadly, as the current mild is all but finished, we'll have a month without homebrew. Might be an idea to visit the ever excellent Beer Emporium in Burslem again...