Category Archives: beer festivals

St Austell Celtic beer festival

image

The now annual Celtic beer festival at St Austell brewery is clearly a major event in the local social calendar. Despite the pouring rain, people were waiting outside in the road river for two or more hours to get in.

Inside were labyrinthine cellars, a music stage and young folk on the pull – a party atmosphere more like a nightclub than a traditional beer festival. We know St Austell can brew, but they can also, most definitely, organise the proverbial P-up in a B.

With 35+ St Austell brews plus around a hundred from other breweries, we could only start to scratch the surface, particularly as we had to traverse the meat market to get to the more interesting ones. We started with our new favourite, 1913 stout. This has already dropped in strength from when we had it last, which is a little disappointing, but was still tasty, and if this change is a precursor to rolling it out to more local pubs as a Guinness-challenger, then we’re in favour.

At the more experimental end, Smoking Barrel was a refreshing Rauchbier; Bad Habit was a superb 8.5% triple; and Hell Up was a very convincing Alt Bier. There were also beers for the sweet-toothed West Country palate – High Maltage was a turbo-charged HSD, whereas 1851 was a sugary, honeyish pale ale.

As you might expect, everything was in perfect condition – probably the best we’ve ever encountered at a beer festival. Korev lager came across really well, even against more exotic competition, which we put down to freshness.

The only way this festival could be improved (for us) would be to have either a quiet room or even better, a quiet day beforehand for beer geeks to taste all the experimental brews. But maybe that would be contrary to the very essence of this celebratory event.

Full disclosure; we received “VIP” access (cringe) to the festival, which got us in for free, and included a few free pints and grub.

European Beer, 1634

Oscar A. Mendelsohn’s Drinking With Pepys (1963) is a compendium of everything Pepys wrote about alcoholic drinks, including beer and ale. As a bonus feature, Mendelsohn also includes a long letter by a contemporary of Pepys, James Howell, to Lord Cliff. Here are our favourite bits.

In this Island the old drink was Ale, noble Ale, than which, as I heard a great Forreign Doctor affirm, that there is no Liquor that more encreaseth the radical Moysture, and preserves the natural Heat, which are the two Pillars that support the Life of Man, but since Beer hath hop’d in amongst us, Ale is thought to be much adulterated, and nothing so good as Sir John Old-Castle, and Smugg the Smith was us’d to drink…

In the Seventeen Provinces hard by, and all by low Germany, Beer is the common natural Drink, and nothing else, so it is in Westfalia, and all the lower Circuit of Saxony, in Denmark, Swethland and Norway; The Prusse has a Beer as yellow as Gold made of wheat, and it inebriates as soon as Sack. In some parts of Germany they use to spice their Beer, which will keep many years; so that at some Weddings there will be a But of Beer drunk out, as old as the Bride.

His source is a 1624 edition of The Familar Letters of James Howells, e-texts of which are available online, though we’re struggling to find this particular letter.

The sound of our own voices

A couple of weeks ago, we got an email out of the blue inviting us to speak at the Eden Project’s food and drink festival. Yesterday, we gave the first of two talks on how beer is made and how to spot the influence of malt, hops and yeast on the taste of beer.

There are few nicer places to spend a grey day than the Mediterranean biome at Eden and it was there, surrounded by fragrant citrus trees, that we did our turn. We used St Austell HSD to demonstrate ‘maltiness’; a German wheat beer to demonstrate the impact of yeast; and Oakham Green Devil IPA to illustrate the power of hops. We also passed around dried hops for rubbing and sniffing and pale malt for nibbling.

It was great fun for us, not least because it gave us the chance to talk about beer with people who aren’t as obsessed with it as we are. (Not yet, anyway.) We had fretted over whether our talk was too basic or even patronising but it seems not. Members of the audience:

  • gasped in amazement at the aroma of the wheat beer, as if we’d performed a magic trick
  • gasped a bit more, and laughed in joy, as they smelled and tasted Green Devil
  • asked us whether dark beers were stronger than light ones, as they’d always believed
  • were entranced by dried hops, coming up for seconds — “they smell like Jamaica, if you know what I mean, nudge, wink, say no more”.

We’re doing the talk again next Saturday and can’t wait. There is a bit more work to do, though, as we need to come up with a good answer to the question which left us scratching our heads: “How come there are hundreds of new breweries but fewer and fewer pubs?”

Those who are in the Cornwall on their hols and like Sharp’s beers might be interested to know that, for the duration of the festival, Eden are also offering what looked like the full cask range, available in tasting ‘flights’. They also have the full bottled range, and we can personally vouch for the excellence of Sharp’s Belgian-style Honey Triple and Quadruple Ale.

This was a paying gig. The beers were bought by the Eden Project from our shortlist. We haven’t been given free samples of any of the beers we used; but we didn’t pay for the Oakham Green Devil that knocked our socks off the other week, which was donated by the landlord of the Star Inn from his personal stash.

New Variant Spingo

The sign of the Blue Anchor pub and brewery, Helston, Cornwall.

The Blue Anchor in Helston has been brewing for several hundred years. Its Spingo ales are a Cornish tradition, available in only a handful of select pubs, and something of an acquired taste.

Generally, they play to a West Country palate — sweet, brown and not too ‘light’ (hoppy). One of their range, in fact, is ‘Bragget’, with no hops at all and a good slug of honey.

Their brewer, though, has begun to feel the urge to experiment, hence Flora Daze. At 4%, it’s the weakest beer on offer; it’s also the lightest in colour, by far the hoppiest, and being launched ahead of the summer arrival of ‘foreigners’.

By the standards of many other UK breweries, it is not a remarkable beer, being similar to Harvey’s session-strength IPA or Fuller’s Chiswick, but it was certainly generating conversation amongst the chaps spoofing at the bar in the Blue Anchor: “It tastes… like a pint with a slice of lemon in it.”; “I’ll be sticking to Middle.”

As far as we could tell, they were only drinking at all because the first few pints were free. Not everyone is drawn towards the new, and the point at which a beer seems ‘extreme’ is culturally defined.

We really liked Flora Daze and hope it does well this summer, though we know that brewers have to make cask ales that will sell. The Blue Anchor Beer Festival runs until Sunday 1 April.

Beasts of Bodmin and the Price of a Pint

The heritage railway ran beer festival visitors from Bodmin Parkway into town.

The heritage railway ran beer festival visitors from Bodmin Parkway into town.

Unlike at most beer festivals, we found room to breathe at Bodmin. There were no queues for anything and we had little trouble getting a seat. This, of course, probably means that it was fatally undersubscribed, but we won’t worry about that for now.

Working our way through the beastly strong Burton Ale candidates on the menu, pondering the “West Country Ale” as a separate useful descriptor for certain types of sweet, strong brown beer, we became aware that the chaps at the other end of the table wanted our attention.

“Do you know where the local Wetherspoon’s is?”

We didn’t, but we ended up chatting to them for a while, and very nice they were too — veterans of Exeter CAMRA with the bulging, twenty year old tickers’ notebooks to prove it. Once we’d compared notes (literal in their case) on the beers at the festival, the conversation turned to Exeter. As we’d struggled to find a good pint there, we decided to pump them for information.

We were interested to note, however, that their comments went something like this: “The Old Red Lion — now, that’s a nice pub, £2.90 a pint, about four handpumps.” For them, the average price of a pint was a key piece of information, and they had an estimate for every pub in Exeter.

When they asked us about Penzance, we had no specific idea of the price of a pint in any pub. Are we odd?

We enjoyed St Austell Big Job ‘double IPA’, Driftwood Spars Alfie’s Revenge, Spingo Special, as well as beers from Coastal and the Penzance Brewing Company.

CAMRA Kernow Festival, Falmouth

Detail from the logo of CAMRA Kernow

Having moved to Penzance proper from a village a few weeks ago, we suddenly find ourselves much better connected by public transport, and so getting up to Falmouth for the CAMRA Kernow beer festival on Saturday was a doddle.

Even as we approached the venue from the station, we could tell it was going to be good: the streets were crowded much like the approach to a football ground on match day. The venue itself was busy — almost chaotic — but the startled looking volunteers were nonetheless fast and efficient and had us inside, pints in hand, within five minute of hitting the door. Impressive.

Now, there was plenty of Cornish and other West Country beer on offer but, frankly, we can get that any day of the week so we made a beeline for what we’ve been missing the most since the move: proper northern beer.

We knew Steel City Brewing’s Escafeld would be hoppy and weren’t disappointed: it smelled of mown grass, and tasted something like a good, sharp gooseberry jam. Kelham Island’s Now That’s What I Call Bitter was exactly the kind of flinty, crisp, pale and hoppy beer we’d been dreaming of. It took us right back to Sheffield in an instant. And we couldn’t resist an old favourite — Thornbridge Kipling. Can you believe we’ve gone more than six months without a pint of anything from Thornbridge? Weird.

We didn’t just drink beers from up north, though, and also dug into the very decent selection from Oakham, reminding ourselves that this brewery (whose products we don’t see enough of) are up there with Dark Star, Crouch Vale and other favourites of ours. Black Hole Porter was the standout.

Not for the first time, we’ve been very impressed by a regional festival in a way that we aren’t generally by the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF). Why? Perhaps because there’s less overwhelming choice; a different crowd — locals, students, passing hippies; and a cosier venue? We’ll keep pondering this.

Of course, the real  buzz was about the toilets: many of the women in attendance were gleeful at a turning of the tables which saw them walking straight in while the gents queued for a urinal. “I wouldn’t use the sink in the disabled toilet if I were you.” Eeew.

A plug and a rant

London’s Rake Bar has stolen all the good Cornish beer for the August bank holiday weekend. Amongst others, their Cornish beer festival features rare up-country outings for two of our favourite local breweries, the Penzance brewing company and the Driftwood Spars.

But… why can’t St Austell make some of their fancy beers more readily available in bloody Cornwall? By drinking endless pints of Tribute (or Proper Job if we’re really lucky) we subsidise the production of amazing-sounding beers like Smuggler’s Grand, Proper Black and Big Smoke, so that the urban beer bloggerati can get shitfaced on double IPAs. Not fair.

And another little festival

The Betjeman Arms at King’s Cross St Pancras is having a little ale and cider festival right now. I’m drinking a very passable pint of Dark Star Hophead (our beer of the year last year) right now.

It’s a very variable but extremely convenient pub.

Beer festivals are growing on us

At a loose end, we decided to pop to Manchester for the weekend, taking in the National Winter Ales Festival, of which Tandleman was one of the organisers.

After startling him with our unannounced arrival (he made a very effective bouncer) we made our way upstairs to the main hall. Our first impressions were of a relatively young crowd with the kind of male-female mix you’d expect in the real world. The atmosphere was like that of a large, busy, if rather brightly lit pub. Or, with people sat on the floor in groups, was it reminiscent of a music festival? We felt very comfortable and soon completely forgot we were in a wedding banquet hall on an industrial estate in a city we hardly knew.

We headed straight for the German rarities. Uerige Sticke Alt, which we’d been wanting to try for a long time, had the trademark Uerige bitterness, although after such anticipation, it was a little disappointing. Schlenkerla Urbock (or did the label say Eichbock?) (6.5%) was clear and syrupy and, frankly, balanced too much towards sweetness for our taste.

A brief detour to Bohemia next with Bernard Kvasnicove took the idea of unfiltered beer to the extreme:  there was a bit of wood in it. It was mellow and, again, sweetish. It wasn’t warm, but it could have got away with being two degrees colder.

Lowenbrau Buttenheim Bock didn’t taste as strong as 6.5%. It was very nicely balanced, clearly a well crafted beer, and far from bland, but we wanted a bit more zing.

We went closer to home for the next round. Broughton 80 Shilling was bland; Acorn Gorlovka Stout astounding. What a contrast. We were sceptical as to how a 5% beer could lay claim to the ‘imperial’ moniker but this beauty did it, through hop bitterness, chocolate intensity and a very heavy, chewy body. It was the stand out beer of the evening.

JW Lees Darkside was really interesting — so fruity and sour that if someone said it had plums or maybe even cherries in, we’d believe them.

Red shield, White Shield’s weaker, blonder, cask-conditioned cousin, could have borne a lote more hop aroma and came off as a bit boring in comparison to, say, Dark Star Hophead or Marble Pint.

Pirates, pale ale and pork sandwiches

Wedmore Real Ale Festival 2009

We’ve got a standing commitment to go to the annual Wedmore Real Ale Festival in Somerset as often as possible.

We’ve described the unusually young, party-like, community atmosphere before, so we’ll just update a couple of topical details: the fancy dress theme this year was pirates, and the live band, Loose Change, were led by the absurdly charismatic local hero Pete Hicks.

These were the highlights on the beer front: