Beer Fests Running Dry
Hello all you nice people who keep visiting this site despite my lack of posts. I suppose I kind of left you in the lurch, wondering how the beer festival turned out.

First, the bad news. When beer festivals get too popular, they run out of beer. I learned this by the second night of the Peterborough beer festival last month and my brother assured me he discovered the same thing at a Bakersfield beer fest last weekend. But even worse, his festival ran out of food. Bad beer + no food = hangover.

So back to the England festival. My husband has the lucky fortune of having grown up in a little town that is now home to one of the biggest beer festivals in his beer-drinking land. The local press – which was one of the pretend news outlets I was forced to rely on during my visit – said the festival was on mark to surpass the attendance of the Great British Beer Festival, which would make the Peterborough fest the largest such party in the country.

My other favorite fun Peterborough fact is that the city’s cathedral (once sacked by Vikings) had an undertaker named Old Scarlet who lived to be about 100. He was apparently quite a character, and had the duty of burying Mary Queen of Scots and Katherine of Aaragon at Peterborough. Local legend has it Shakespeare modeled his drunken gravedigger on Old Scarlet.

The cathedral, which lights up at night, is just a couple blocks from the beer tents.

So back to the festival. This year was the 25th festival and supposedly the biggest yet. They claimed to have more than 350 beers, mostly real ales. These guys (yes, mostly guys) are serious about their beers. The first night I went to the festival with my father-in-law, who sheepishly asked if Bass had a booth there. I thought the guy at the information booth was going to slug him. Instead, he took a deep breath and almost politely explained that Bass is bad. What the Peterborough festival celebrates isn’t merely the small, local and independent brewer, but those guys who only make “real ales” which kinda goes over my head except that it has a short shelf life and must be drawn some special way from casks. Fortunately, the people who run the festival - CAMRA, or Campaign for Real Ale - run a web site that explains real ale. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you much about the festival or which beers won.

They judge their beers, wines and ciders in 10 categories, plus an overall champion beer category. The overall winner this year was Rooster’s Yankee beer. We tried it the first night and I liked it a lot. The silver and bronze overall winners were from a place called Newby Wyke with beers called White Sea and Summer Session. I was unable to try either of those.

Oops. I stand corrected. The CAMRA site now has this year’s winner’s list posted.

Last year’s winner, St. Bibiana’s from Oakham Ales, disappeared quickly last year, but I finally got a pint of it this year and liked it a lot. I also had a glass of a beer called “Sinful” but I never did find out from where it came. The bad thing about the popularity of this event is that they were out of just about everything you really wanted to try by Saturday night. I was there Thursday, Friday and Saturday. All for research purposes of course.

The whole festival is put on by volunteers and the money goes to support the English version of the Coast Guard, which for some reason isn’t operated by the government and it’s all done by volunteers who sometimes die trying to save lives. So while the festival organizers are serious about their philanthropy, they’re mostly serious about all things beer – saving historic pubs, fostering new ales and lobbying the government to force bartenders to fill your mug completely when you order a pint. They even have a "rip-off calculator" you can take to your local to encourage a full glass. I told you these guys were serious.
- posted by Amy @ 9/09/2002 06:43:00 PM