Curds & Ale II: A Celebration of Beer & Cheese (July 27)

The Chicago Beer Society is hosting a cheese & beer tasting event on Sunday, July 27, from 2:00-5:30pm at Rock Bottom-Chicago.

This event will feature a CBS-procured selection of American craft beer and American artisan cheeses. A number of the cheeses will come directly from the American Cheese Society Conference and Competition which will take place in Chicago July 23-27. A small number of cheesemakers will be invited to attend our event and sample cheese.

Tickets are still available but may sell out quickly. More details including an order form are available here.

The beer list is in the works but there will be offerings from:
Goose Island
Rock Bottom
Mickey Finn's
Flossmoor Station
Three Floyds
Gordon Biersch
Sprecher
Two Brothers
Jolly Pumpkin
Dogfish Head
plus a few surprises

I don't have a cheese list at the moment but will post one when I do. I do know there will be folks representing several cheese makers or distributors, including Roth Kase, Prairie Fruits, and 3D Cheese, present to share their products and answer questions. Others may attend and I'll post when I get more information.

This was an email sent out by Dave Phillips, who selected the cheese for a beer and cheese event done at Sheffields in conjunction with Dogfish Head founder/brewer Sam Calagione's visit to Chicago several months back, about this event:
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As a reminder, Curds and Ale II will take place three weeks from Sunday (July 27) at Rock Bottom, and it is shaping up to be a fantastic event for anyone with even a casual interest in the juxtaposition of cheese and beer. Among approximately 20 beers and 20 cheeses (!) will be two focus areas: American-made clothbound Cheddars in the UK tradition, paired with British-inspired bitters and ales (including at least a couple cask conditioned ales from local breweries) and ...... stinky cheeses confronted with sour and wild-fermented Belgian-inspired beers.
There will also be a great cross-section of cheese and beer styles arranged to accommodate some of the amazing flavor marriages we discovered at the 2006 Curds and Ale. Some of the cheeses will be presented in person by the cheesemakers or their representatives, we will have a number of award winning cheeses and beers, and we hope to have at least one of each from each of the states that surround Lake Michigan.

Tickets are still available through Chicago Beer Society, but this event will likely sell out soon, so download the form and send in your payment soon, if you don't want to miss it. Curds and Ale II is being organized by CBS and the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild to coincide with the July 23-27 American Cheese Society conference and competition which is in Chicago this year. For more information on the cheese society and the conference (some events are open to the public) visit http://www.cheesesociety.org.
For more info on Curds and Ale: http://chibeer.org/2008/06/04/curds-ale ... er-cheese/.
The direct link to download a TICKET ORDER FORM is http://chibeer.org/CurdsAle08web.pdf.

Curds & Ale II was another excellent event. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it even more had I not sampled hundreds of cheeses the evening before at the Festival of Cheese. I particularly enjoyed the "Stink and Pucker" table, washed rind cheeses paired with sour Belgian-style beers. Juliet, Goose Island's rye malt and marionberry beer, is worth looking for (I'm not sure it's released yet). Flossmoor Station's De Zuidentrein wasn't bad either. The clear highlight, though, was Isabelle Proximus, a much-hyped American gueuze, a collaborative effort of Port Brewing, Russian River, Dogfish Head, Allagash and Avery. Yikes, was that good! Only 400 cases were made and there are no plans to distribute in the Midwest. By chance, has anyone noticed it in Chicago?