Northern Monk hosts two beer festivals a year - Hop City in May, and Dark & Wild in November.
As you can probably gather from the names, Hop City is more focused on hoppy beers, while Dark & Wild is more about stouts, porters, wild ales and sours.
We attended Dark & Wild back in 2023 (and have just booked for 2025), but we’ve never made it to Hop City because previous dates always clashed with other commitments.
Fortunately, we were able to make it to this year’s event and booked our tickets back in November.
Hop City is hosted at the Northern Monk Refectory. We’re lucky enough to live within walking distance, but if you are coming from further afield, the venue is only a 16-minute walk from Leeds station (10 if you use the south exit).
There are three sessions - Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and Saturday evening. We prefer a day session, so we attended the Saturday, 12pm-4.30pm session.
The event attracts breweries from across Europe, the USA and Canada, and each brewer has at least two beers pouring per session. There are also food vendors and live bands at each session.
The way the event is priced varies from year to year. Some years the ticket price is slightly higher, but it includes unlimited 100ml pours. Other years, the price is slightly cheaper, and you get given five tokens to exchange for 100ml pours of your choice (you can buy more tokens on the day).
What we drank
This year’s ticket included unlimited pours, but with over 35 breweries pouring, it’s impossible to get around them all.
Fortunately, Northern Monk share a list of breweries and beers in advance, so we were able to make a shortlist of beers we definitely wanted to try if we could (not all beers are available at all sessions).
We managed to try a good selection and ticked off most of the beers that we’d pre-picked. Some of the pours were very generous in size, and some of the beers were pretty strong, so we made sure we split the day up with a food break in the middle.
Kicking off with a westie, a pils and a DDH TIPA
We started with Lanzarote, a 6.4% West Coast IPA from Spanish brewers, Basqueland.
It had notes of peach, apricot or nectarine (not quite sure which) and a slight bitterness on the finish. A good start to the day.
Next up, we went for Ritual Pils, a 4.9% Italian Pils from Italian brewer, Ritual Lab. This was lovely and refreshing with a nice maltiness and a bitterness that built with each sip.
Our next pick was Raining Blood, a 10% DDH TIPA, from Swiss brewer, Hoppy People. This was an excellent beer and one of our favourites of the day. Hoppy, powdery and thick, with lovely apricot notes. Delicious.
A New England IPA from New England, a smoothie sour, and a TIPA.
We wanted to try a New England IPA from New England, so we headed over to Vitamin Sea, a Massachusetts-based brewery. We opted for the Double Spring - an 8% double NEIPA. It wasn’t quite as thick and powdery as the previous beer, but it was much juicier with a grapefruit-like bitterness.
We had a quick break from the hoppiness with our next brew, Panna, a 6% smoothie sour from Sussex-based brewer, Beak. This was a very interesting beer, with different layers of flavour. First came the berry flavours, then a pasty-like flavour, and finally the maple syrup. Not too sweet. Not too tart. Complex, but well-balanced
Back to the hoppy beers next with TDH Bedlam, a 10% NE TIPA from Finnish brewer, Revenant. We were told this beer had “lots and lots” of Nelson hops. Not sure I could have guessed what hops were in it if I didn’t know, but it was a very good beer with a nice dry finish.
Honey, berries, and peaches
Our next pick was Blossom, an 8% honey DIPA from Scottish brewery, Overtone. This was a juicy, hazy IPA with delicate floral and honey flavours. I’d have liked the honey flavours to come through more, but it was a good beer.
Time for another sour, and this one was from Lancashire-based brewer, Rivington. Named Cosmos, this 5% smoothie sour was thick and easy drinking with a nice tartness and a slight saltiness.
I don’t think we’ve ever had a beer from a Romanian brewery before, so we were keen to see what Berata had on offer. We decided to try Fruit Harvest: Peach, a DIPA made with freeze-dried peaches. It was peachy and creamy, with yoghurt-like flavours.
A double dose of Deya
When we saw that Cheltenham-based Deya were going to be doing a bottle share of a mixed ferm ale, we wanted to make sure we were in the queue. While we waited, we decided to sample one of their other beers.
We opted for Break Me Into Bigger Pieces, a 6.5% Lemon and Lime IPA. It was juicy and zesty, with a lime green bitterness (think green fruit pastilles).
The 5.8% Picnic Bear Quince, was worth hanging around for too. It was funky and tart as you’d expect from a mixed ferm ale.
Lime lager, a 12% QIPA and an IPA
It was about time for some lunch, so we got ourselves a Lime Snaps (a 4.5% lime rice lager) from New York’s Other Half Brewing and headed outside to order food. This was a lovely, light, refreshing beer with a nice amount of lime flavour. Perfect for sipping in the sun while waiting for our parmo.
We were going to wait until after lunch to hit the QIPAs, but our lime lagers went down a bit too easily, so we refreshed our glasses with Hopium, a 12% QIPA from Spanish brewery, Soma. We’ve never had a QIPA before, and this was a great one to start with. It was thick, powdery and dry with loads of hop flavour and a little bit of fruitiness. Definitely one to savour.
After filling up on super tasty parmo and fries, and finishing off our QIPA, we headed to find Manchester-based Sureshot for a pour of their Now That's What I Call Sureshot! Vol.300, an 8% double dry-hopped double IPA. We loved all the Sureshot beers we tried when we visited their taproom back in January, and this juicy hoppy brew didn’t disappoint.
Another QIPA, another wild ale and a hoppy pilsner
Some of the beers we were hoping to try weren’t available at the start of the session, but made an appearance before we left.
One such beer was Turning Fragile, a 13% QIPA from Welsh brewery, Polly’s, (our strongest beer of the day). It was definitely worth the wait, and was thick, powdery and juicy. A standout beer.
Another beer we had on our list that appeared late on was the 6% Blend No.1 spontaneous wild ale with honeyberries from Schilling, a brewery based in New Hampshire (USA). It was an excellent wild ale - funky, tart, dry and one of our top beers of the day.
Time was ticking on, so I went and refreshed my glass with Cross Drift, a 4.8% hoppy pilsner from Colorado-based brewer Outer Range. Unfortunately, all the brewers stopped serving before Alex got a chance to refill his glass, so I kindly split it with him. And although I managed to snap a picture of the menu card, I forgot to get a picture of the beer itself. Luckily, I did remember to note down that it was clean and malty with some tropical notes.
A great event
We might not have managed to try beers from every brewery, but we were pretty happy with our choices. There was not a single bad beer, and we had a tough time choosing a favourite (so we didn’t).
Our standouts for the day were the Raining Blood from Hoppy People (DDH TIPA), both the QIPAs (Hopium from Soma and Turning Fragile from Polly’s) and the Blend No.1 wild ale from Schilling.
If you like beer (and if you’ve read this far, you probably do), then I’d highly recommend grabbing yourself some tickets for next year when they go on sale in November.
If you can’t wait that long, tickets for Dark and Wild 2025 are already on sale here. We’ll see you there.
