The very best of Yorkshire produce is to be celebrated at the Yorkshire Post Taste Yorkshire Awards next week as part of the York Food and Drink Festival. The festival director Michael Hjort chaired the judging panel which has come up with three finalists in the six award categories. Here we profile these Yorkshire food and drink heroes.

Local Brew category

Great Heck Brewery. Denzil Vallence. Harwinn House, Main Street, Great Heck, North Yorks. 07723 381002.

Product: YPA.

They only began brewing in May and started selling in June – but already they are a year ahead of where they expected to be. Denzil Vallence is now working here full-time and he and his partner Jason Hall, the head brewer, are also assisted by their partners Lisa and Julie. Another of their products Great Heck Dave (Dark and Very Enjoyable) speaks for itself and they have also developed an exclusive best bitter for the Judges Lodging in Lendal in York. This was originally the place where the judges stayed when presiding at the York Assizes, and their duties included donning the black cap to pass a sentence of execution. The new beer is called Final Judgment.

Old Bear Brewery. Atlas Works, Pitt Street, Keighley.

Product: Real ales.

The Old Bear Brewery started out at the Old White Bear pub in Cross Hills in 1993. It to larger premises near the centre of Keighley – a tough place to make a living since the town has three other breweries. Ian Cowling bought it in 2004 and they now brew seven standard beers, all with a bear theme. They start taking orders for their Yorkshire Day Ale in July and sell until it runs out, usually by the end of the August. It's a traditional beer which sold 250 gallons in the first year. They approached the Yorkshire Society and were part of their main celebration event at Guisborough. Result – 800 gallons sold and they hope to repeat that next year when the venue is Pickering. They only use Yorkshire malt and whole hops to give that true northern real ale flavour, plus of course the unique Keighley water filtered through the Pennines.

Wold Top Brewery. Gill Mellor, Hunmanby Grange, Wold Newton, Driffield, East Yorks.

Product: Real ales

The family of Tom and Gill Mellor has farmed 600 acres high on the Yorkshire Wolds since the 1940s. They were famed for growing high-class malting barley and since they also have their own supply of the purest chalk filtered water that is drawn from the borehole on the farm, putting the two together and drinking the result seemed a good idea in the light of a decline elsewhere in agriculture. It is thought that they are one of only a handful of breweries (if not the only one) that grows and sources its main ingredients on site. Their year got off to a good start when their light beer, Wold Gold, won a gold medal at the Society of Independent Brewers North awards. The company has enjoyed double digit growth – helped along by the fact that customers holidaying in Yorkshire have sampled their beers and have continued buying bought from the brewery's website once they got back home.

Pies category

E&EG Bullivant & Daughters. Vicarage Farm, Claxton.

Product: Pork Pie.

The hands that make the pies (no machinery involved) belong to Jennie Whiteley who in addition to the baking is also the farmer. The farm is now 34 acres, down from the 155 acres when her late mother and father, Gwendolen and Ernest ran it. But since Jennie and her sister Vivien are well beyond pensionable age, it suits them very well. They rear their own rare breed stock, feed it on what is grown on the farm and market it themselves through their own farm shop or farmers' markets. Jennie Describes it as good, proper, old-fashioned food. She started making the handmade pies ten years ago and they soon took off. No preservative or cured meat is used. Along with the sausages and game pies, this is a one-woman band and Jennie's sister does all the packing. Jennie describes a typical Christmastime as 'demented' when they don't bother to sleep. Last year the last of her pies came out of the oven at 4.30 in the morning. The pigs that go into the pies are Berkshires, Gloucester Old Spot and Large White crosses. "I'm a great believer in hybrid vigour," says Jennie.

JA Mounfield, White House, Bubwith, Selby. David Mounfield, 01757 288339

Product: Pork Pie.

David Mounfield delved into the past to unearth an old family recipe and came out with a winner, a pork pie that won a national food title among several others. His sister Anne had taken charge of the baking operation at the business, which has been in the family for five generations since it was launched in 1890. They have always prided themselves on making locally-produced products and only sell their pork pies in the shop in Bubwith, in the surrounding villages and farm shops. Locally-reared pigs from East Yorkshire are used for the pork, with young gilts slaughtered at an abattoir on site in Bubwith. There's full traceability of everything they sell – and a minimum of food miles are involved.

Tony Neary, Clifton, York.

Product: Steak pie.

Tony Neary, who has been in his attractive, traditional corner butcher's shop overlooking Clifton Green for over 20 years, is now semi-retired and his brother John is in day-to-day charge. The regime however remains unchanged. They buy solely Aberdeen Angus beef (from Turnbulls of Coxwold once a week) and look to use the whole animal. It's not uncommon to see queues outside the shop on
Saturday mornings but John describes the corner butcher as a dying breed. Their counter tactic to supermarket discounting is to sell only top-quality meat and be in a position to assure their customers exactly where it's from.

The steak pie recipe was arrived at by trial-and-error with their long-standing customers. All the pie varieties are baked on the premises by the girls who start at six on Friday and Saturday mornings. That's an hour later than the butchers.

The awards dinner, to be held in York Guildhall on September 25 is now sold out. For further details of the York Festival of Food and Drink, please visit www.yorkfoodfestival.co.uk