Essex Days Out

It was the 25th Colchester Real Ale and Cider Festival last week, and we’ve been to the majority of them.  The first one or two were held at the Colchester Institute, but since then they have been mostly held, very successfully, at the Colchester Arts Centre. (It could actually have been the 26th festival, but one year there was a problem with the booking, and there wasn’t one that year!)

We had a nice couple of hours late Friday afternoon/early evening. It was hot outside, and many of the drinkers took advantage and sat outside in the old graveyard drinking. I suppose some might think this somewhat of a sacrilege, but I could think of no better way for my tombstone to be used in the centuries to come than to be a place of comfort to someone drinking real ale.  After all, as a people we have been drinking real ale rather longer than Christianity has been around!

The growth in real ale in the last 25 years has been huge, thanks in no small part to CAMRA. I well remember by teenage years in the 70s, the Watney’s Red Barrel era, when choice in beer was limited – in Hartlepool in those days you were pretty much limited to Cameron’s Strongarm or Crown Ale, or the national fizzy lager brands. Mind you, you could have a Friday night out and have four pints and fish and chips on the way home, and still have change out of two pounds.

And more recently, one of the changes has been that you are now spoilt for choice in terms of porters, milds and stouts, beers which I would always choose ahead of bitter, on account of finding bitter somewhat … bitter .. to my palate. There was plenty of the darker beers on tap last week, and those we sampled which I can remember (!) from the beer list from the programme were:

• B&T (Shefford, Bedfordshire) – Edwin Taylor’s Extra Strout @ 4.5% abv
• Goose Eye (Keighley, West Yorkshire) – Over & Stout @ 5.2% abv
• Ilkley (Ilkley, West Yorkshire) – Ilkley Black – a mild @3.7% abv
• Sticklegs (Elmstead Market, Essex) – Malt Shovel Mild @ 3.7% abv
• Harwich Town (Harwich, Essex) – Parkeston Porter @ 4.5%

I’m going to have to work out a way of recording what I drink during these beer festivals. If only there was some kind of hand-held, portable scribing kind of device that you could make a mark with on the programme…

I do recall though that the Ilkley Black Mild with which I started the evening off was of such a high standard that many which followed suffered in comparison. But also that the Malt Shovel Mild from a brewery new to me, Sticklegs from Elmstead Market,  just a couple of miles away, was also outstanding.

The hog roast was excellent as ever, although the curry was tempting! Good service from the volunteers, everyone well behaved, and the only disappointment was that we had been so busy during the week that we only had time for one visit! On that note, I’ll remind myself that the forthcoming are the:

• 24th Chappel Beer Festival at the East Anglian Railway Museum (note that the Friday evening is tickets in advance) on 7th-11th September 2010
• 4th Colchester Winter Ale Festival is to be held on 20-22nd January 2011,

More articles like this: | beer festivals, real ale