Dredge and Mogg‘s latest beer-related wheeze is Open It! – a weekend-long celebration of all those rare and interesting bottled beers that beer geeks like me have a bad habit of stashing away at the back of a cupboard for a ‘special occasion’.

Simple idea: pick out a choice bottle or three, Open It! and blog about it.

Here’s my Friday evening selection:

That’s a bottle each of:

• Harvey’s Elizabethan Ale
• Hardknott Infra Red 2009
• De Dolle Special Extra Export Stout

Maybe not the rarest beers you’ve ever seen, but I’ve been saving them all for a while and I’m looking forward to trying all three of them immensely.

Btw, does anyone else think “Dredge and Mogg” sounds like a firm of Dickensian solicitors..? :)

Lurking next to the Orcs Black Ale, I found this bottle of CAMRA 25th Anniversary Ale.

Brewed back in 1996 by George Gale & Co (who were acquired by Fuller’s back in 2005), this 7.1% ale was brewed with Maris Otter barley and Fuggles, Goldings and Challenger hops.

I’m guessing it’s an IPA-style golden ale? Hard to tell through the brown glass, of course. I can’t find any information on the CAMRA website and Google isn’t turning up anything either.

I’m pretty sure this came into my possession by accident a few years back. I think it was courtesy of Jo’s Nan, who had decided to clear out her own drinks cabinet and had found this bottle lurking behind the sweet sherry, Bells whisky and Canada Dry. I said “thank you very much” and brought it home, at which point it disappeared into our drinks cabinet and was forgotten about until a few weeks ago.

The best-before date is given as April 2000, but with its 7.1% ABV and – from the sounds of the label – plenty in the way of hop-content, I suppose there’s a chance it might still be drinkable..?

What do the beer congnoscenti among you reckon? Best keep the cap firmly on? Possibly rank, but worth risking? Entirely safe to drink and most likely delicious? Or even, worth saving for CAMRA’s 50th anniversary in 2021? I’d love to know what the experts out there think.

Here’s a close-up of the label. Click for a larger version if you’d like to see it in a bit more detail:

I found this bottle lurking in the back of the overflow Beer Cupboard (formerly known as the Wine Cupboard and still housing the Single Malt Annexe) when I had a clear out a few weeks back.

I picked this up back in 1998 at the first of the British Fantasy Society’s annual Fantasycon events that Jo and I had both gone along to. One of the Fantasycon traditions is to hold a banquet (or, as it’s come to be known by attendees in recent years, the “rip-off chicken dinner”) before the announcing of the British Fantasy Awards.

The banquet that year was sponsored by Millennium Books (who are no longer around as they later merged with Gollancz). Millennium had just published the first book in Stan Nicholls‘ Orcs series – a fantasy saga about a squad of Orc warriors – so everything at the table was Orc-themed. Instead of going for the more obvious “elf-blood wine” they put complimentary bottles of “Orcs Black Ale” out on the tables and, being a compulsive souvenir-collector, I grabbed one to take home with me. I stuck it away at the back of the drinks cabinet (at the time all we had was a much smaller, much less beer-oriented storage compartment) and it’s been there ever since.

I think it’s pretty obvious from the bottle-neck which factory-produced, widely exported Irish “black ale” they re-labelled for the occasion. That, plus the lack of best-by date means that there’s a racing certainty that this one will remain unopened and unsampled for a great many years to come…

According to Mark Dredge (@markdredge), who knows a thing or two about his beer, two major tell-tale signs of Beer Geekism are:

1. When you have a cool, dark cupboard (far from a radiator or the cold of the garage) to keep your beer at optimum storage temperature.
2. When you take photos of your beer.

So, combining those two symptoms must surely elevate the Beer Geek to new levels of shamelessness, no? Andy Mogg (@chilliupnorth) showed me his via Twitter this morning, and now, I’m showing everyone mine (and not for the first time, I know…):

That’s just the main beer cupboard though, including the massed ranks of BrewDog (left and centre), the bulk of a Rare Belgians case that I bought a few months ago from BeerMerchants.com in the middle-right, and a few recent Tesco purchases on the far-right there, including a pack of Flying Dogs. Oh, and a Theakston’s gift pack I picked up in Masham a while back.

But that’s not all, folks. Thanks to the current Sainsbury’s Real Ale Promo, plus my Dad’s beer-bearing visit on Monday, there’s currently an overflow section that’s loitering at the far end of the dining table, making the place look untidy:

And then there’s the special beer cupboard, where I’ve put a few particularly choice items away to mature for a while (I suspect a few of those Belgians will find their way into the special cupboard before too long). No photos of that one, though. They’re all a bit camera-shy…

What about our fellow Beer Geeks? Got any good pics of your bottle stash? Post them on Flickr or TwitPic, send a link to @blogobeer (or email them to me via darren [at] blogobeer [dot] com) and I’ll post the links at the end of this post.

Because yes, I really am that Beer Geeky. And deep down inside, you know you are too…

Update

A couple of those beer cupboard shots:

• Andy Mogg has a very fine beer cupboard indeed.
• Mark Dredge has posted his ‘specials‘ selection.

Right then, here’s the state-of-play vis-a-vis beer stocks, as at yesterday evening:

Up at the front there you can see the Crazy Dog Stout that I went back to Sainsbury’s for, as well as a bottle of Cairngorm Trade Winds that I picked up in lieu of the Copper Dragon 1816, which my local branch still doesn’t have in stock just yet.

And I grabbed what turned out to be an extra bottle of Highgate Old Ale, because the sneaky so-and-so’s have changed the label since I bought one on the way down to Bridgnorth last weekend and I couldn’t quite remember if it was the same brewery… at least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Let’s hope I like that one.

There’s a prize for the first person to correctly identify more than 90% of the bottles in the pic. I’ll send you that vaguely juke-box shaped tin lurking waaaay at the back, which if memory serves is one of those Xmas novelties containing a miniature of Smirnoff and a couple of shot glasses. Yes, I know. I really need to tidy the crap out of the back of my beer cupboard…