A short note on a quick visit to the 4th Colchester Winter Ale Festival. The Festival Beer List is testament to the huge growth in real ale in the past decade. By my reckoning there were no less than 14 Essex breweries represented, 10 from Suffolk, 5 from Norfolk, 3 from Hertfordshire, 1 from Camrbridgeshire [...]
It’s been a busy year and I thought I’d take a moment to look back on 2010 in terms of real ale and pubs. .. The year started, as it finished(!), with a lot of snow. In January we blogged about a walk in the snow around Colchester Castle Park (link), whose route back home [...]
The 9th Harwich & Dovercourt Winter Ale Festival 2010 has been in my diary for some time, and I’d been looking forward to my first experience of serving behind a bar. The heavy snow this week, and the struggle National Express East Anglia had to cope with it, looked to jeopardise this trip. But in [...]
We visited The Five Bells at Colne Engaine one Saturday lunchtime last month and blogged about it here. We dropped in yesterday afternoon for a couple of pints at their beer festival, which they’ve been running for the past five or so years. They had the beer tent attached to the side of the pub, [...]
The Thatcher’s Arms at Mount Bures ran a beer festival over the weekend, and we found the time to pop in to sample a couple of pints. There was a good range of beers for a pub beer festival, a couple of dozen or so, and I was trying to work out if it could [...]
We’ve put up a calendar of the major beer festivals in Essex – partly to make sure we don’t forget any! You’ll find the page from the menu at the top of the site. If you know of any we’ve missed do let us know. And if you’re a pub running a beer festival, get [...]
The 24th Chappel Beer Festival has been running all week at the East Anglian Railway Museum, and we popped in this afternoon – pondering how the year since the last one had flown by. The festival is continuing to grow, and this year featured a larger food area – sadly taking the place of the old fruit [...]
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 [...]
It wasn’t the greatest Easter weekend, weather-wise, and we spent a lot of it on the allotment, getting it ready for the year. We’ve now got some strawberry plants in, some sprout seedlings, sown some carrots and parsnips, and have the beds ready for a lot of stuff currently in the greenhouse. We did brave [...]
It was a busy week, and Friday night was the only opportunity to get to this year’s Winter Ale Festival in Colchester. I was at Google HQ the following day, and I’ve been busy today writing that visit up on another blog.. A winter ale festival is nirvana for me, featuring virtually wall to wall [...]
