The wooden pin of Beer Nouveau's Lees 1903 XXX on the bar ran out before I got to it, but I drank the other three, two of them from the brewing records of J.W. Lees in Middleton and one from the long gone Heginbothams in Stalybridge.
I was especially keen to try Blackjack's Lees 1951 "C" Ale, a type of strong ale brewed in the Manchester area in the twentieth century, mostly it seems as a bottled beer, whose name no one appears to know the origin of. A dryish, malt-accented beer which is amber in colour, as Ron said in his talk, it's in the same family as the Burton ales brewed elsewhere in Britain. I also had the two stouts, Squawk's Lees 1952 Stout and Tickety Brew's Heginbothams Invalid Stout, which some people reckoned had a lactose taste, although I couldn't particularly pick one up myself.
Hearteningly, the Smithfield was packed for the event, and hopefully other brewers, including the bigger ones in the Manchester area, will be inspired to delve into the archives and produce historic beers of their own.
Reviving old beers is interesting but if we had a TARDIS and could go back and taste the originals, I wonder how they would compare. My only experience of a revived beer where I knew the original involved Higsons Bitter. This beer has had been two separate revivals, and there may soon be a third, but it seemed to me that neither of them really matched the taste of the old Higsons. But to be fair, I don't think memory works very well with taste, and the efforts weren't bad at all, especially the one by Liverpool Organic Brewery.
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