Peterborough Beer Festival 2008

I can get to Peterborough by bus from where I live. That's to say I need to leave my house before 8am to get to the festival before it opens at noon. It's a long journey obviously but armed with a good book and making occassional glances up from the pages to people watch, it goes by quicker than you'd think.

Of course the timings aren't so perfect that you arrive at the festival just before it opens, thus I found myself fifteenth in the queue at 11:20 grateful that the weather was clement enough for the forty minute wait.

The gates opened timeously and a table was grabbed and beer drinking commenced. I've always enjoyed my trips to the festival, and this year was no different, but somehow the beer quality seemed less good this year. It could, of course, have been my fault; I do have a tendency to buy beers from new breweries, and sometimes quality is sadly an issue.

That said, I did have a couple of impressive beers. Son Of Sid Muckcart Mild is a full bodied mild with great smoky and roasty overtones. There is a slight lactic quality to it as well. Better than that though was Ascot Anastasia's Exile Stout. My second beer from this relatively new brewery. This is a superb dry, roasty stout with some excellent bitterness. It's a beer I'd heard good things from, and it didn't disappoint.

I normally drink fairly sensibly at festivals, but something must have gone adrift in my head as two of the three last drinks I had were a brandy cask cider and a mead. I don't like brandy and I don't like honey, so I don't know what was going on here. The mead has one of the nastiest sweet aromas I've ever smelled. Please, please if anyone drinks with me in the future, don't allow me to make stupid mistakes like these again.

In spite of feeling a little let down by the drinks, I shall doubtless return to what is the second largest beer festival in the country. It's a good chance for me to meet up with some drinking buddies; some of whom are recent friends, some I've known for years. If it were further from home though, I would certainly think twice.

Oakham Brewery Tap - Go While You Can

Oakham is one of England's finest breweries producing predominantly pale hoppy beers but no slouch with dark beers as anybody who has tasted Hawse Buckler should testify to. It started life in 1993 in the town of that name. The largest town in the smallest county: Rutland, but six years later outgrew those premises and moved to Peterborough where it already owned an awarding winning pub named Charters; a Dutch barge on the River Nene.

The brewery set up shop in an old jobcentre, naming the venue The Brewery Tap, which was reckoned to be the biggest brewpub in Europe, although there are many doubters to that claim. The brewery's reputation grew and grew, culminating in a Champion Beer Of Britain overall title for Jeffrey Hudson Bitter (JHB) in 2001, two years after it won overall silver. The pub is sprawling and modernistic with huge glass panels allowing a perfect view into the brewing area. Lovely Thai food is served also.

It seems to have been the case since day one though that the pub was living on borrowed time. Redevelopment has been threatened in that area, and with some foresight Oakham opened a new brewery in another part of the city two years ago, although brewing is still done at The Brewery Tap. Now, however the redevelopment plans are running at full kilter and the pub's days really do seem numbered. As would be expected locals are up in arms, and the brewery has started a campaign to stop the pub's impending demolishment. The purpose of this blog entry is twofold: first join in the campaign - personally I feel it may turn out fruitless but you never know - and second if you've not been, make it there before you lose the chance. There are enough decent pubs in Peterborough to do a damn good crawl, so make a day of it. It really is a must do before you die issue.