Alastair Hooley sees green at the Ealing Beer Festival 2007.
Ealing Beer Festival 2007 report
Submitted
by Alastair
Hooley
The
Ealing Beer Festival is one of the UK's
Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA)
beer festivals – there’s probably one every week
somewhere in the UK. Ealing is my local festival, in that it's the one
organised by my local West Middlesex CAMRA group, and it was the third
consecutive year I attended.
This year's event differed in that rather than being held in Ealing Town Hall, it was held in marquees with outdoor seating on a nearby sports ground, thereby becoming an outdoor festival, which the organisers hope to repeat next year.
Now most of the CAMRA festivals are held in town halls, or similar venues, so it made a great change to have my local festival outdoors. The sports field on which it was sited effectively made the festival much bigger than previous years and of course less stuffy, so it didn't become uncomfortable late into the evening as some of the indoor festivals can become. Although the weather held up (just), it did get quite cool early evening.
Ealing Beer Festival 2007
And so to the beer. I always follow a set drinking plan at beer festivals. I tend to start with the weaker beers and then move up to the stronger, richer-tasting beers.
This does make sense as if one started with a strong porter (say), followed by a 3.2% abv mild, the latter drink would be like water!
So I started my tasting at Ealing Beer Festival 2007 with Potbelly Beijing Black. This is a lovely creamy mild and at 4.4% abv is quite strong for this particular style.
I then moved on to one of my favourite beers, Dark Star Hophead – a 3.8% abv massively hopped beer, huge taste for such a weak beer and not too dissimilar to Oakham Ales Jeffrey Hudson Bitter which I've reviewed previously on this site.
In no particular order, at the Ealing Beer Festival 2007 I sampled Crouch Vale Brewers Gold (4.0% abv) – two-times Champion Beer of Britain and still the current champion; Hesket Market Great Cockup Porter (3.0% abv) – unsurprisingly quite bland as one would expect from a porter this weak and so its name seemed quite appropriate; Elland Bargee Bitter (3.8% abv); Jarrow Rivet Catcher (4.0% abv); Twickenham Ales Gothic Dark (4.0% abv); Wylam Haugh Porter (4.6% abv).
One or two
further beers were also drunk,
although by this stage of the day I've no idea what they were, except I
remember one of them was green!
One of my friends who went to Ealing Beer Festival 2007 with me suggested we sample something from the mead stand.
Mead is a fermented alcoholic drink made of honey, water, yeast and whatever spices or other ingredients are to hand.
This didn’t go down too well – the drink had a strange Tupperware taste that I wouldn’t like to experience again!
For a podcast of the Ealing Beer Festival 2007 and previous festivals this year, featuring interviews with festival-goers, head on over to my site or type realalecast in the iTunes Music Store search.
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