Egham Summer Beer Festival 2011 - Roundup

Well, that’s Egham Beer Festival over until the next time. As usual, it was thoroughly enjoyable festival despite inclement weather on the two days I visited. I managed to get most of the beers that I wanted to try and only missed out on a few, mainly because they had not come on by the time I left on Saturday night. I’m pleased to say that, although there were a few that were not entirely to my personal taste, the beers were nearly all of a extremely high standard with no real duffers, covered a wide range of styles and in were generally in very good shape – something that can be difficult to achieve at a beer festival. So many thanks, once again, to Bob Inman and the team for their sterling work. The next festival commences on Thursday 3^rd November and runs until Sunday 6^th. Unfortunately, I will only be able to visit on the first day because I will be heading for Lewes, and it’s bonfire celebrations, for the weekend. Before I move on from Egham, I’ve not been able to resist picking out some particular favourites so a list of my “awards” (no they aren’t worth anything) follows: -

	DARK BEERS
	Winner	Ascot Last of the Blue Devils Imperial Stout (Cherry)
	Runner Up	Canterbury Street Light Porter
	Runner Up	Sherfield Village Pioneer Stout
	Highly commended	Betjeman Sebastopol
	Highly commended	Rectory Mild Pilgrimage
	Honourable mention	Old Forge Old Ted
	PALE BEERS
	Winner	Wayland's Sixpenny Rushmore Gold
	Runner up	Westerham Hop Rocket American Pale Ale
	Runner up	Ascot Single Hop Apollo
	Highly commended	Black Cat Hopsmack
	Highly commended	Complete Pig Hallacre Gold
	Highly commended	Byatts Phoenix Gold
	Highly commended	Kent Club Cascade
	Honourable mention	Ascot Single Hop Sorachi Ace
	Honourable mention	Bingham Outer Space Hoppy IPA
	Honourable mention	Canterbury Haka
	Honourable mention	Devilfish That Gold Devil
	Honourable mention	Brewshed Pale Ale
	BITTERS
	Winner	Rectory Rector's Celebration
	Runner Up	Halfpenny Anniversary Ale
	Honourable mention	Black Cat Original
	Honourable mention	Brewshed Best Bitter
	Honourable mention	Devilfish Devil Best
	Honourable mention	Longdog Brindle Bitter
	SPECIALITY / OTHER
	Winner	Surrey Hills Greensand IPA
	Runner Up	Byatt's Urban Red
	Highly commended	Sherfield Village Solo Quintessential
	Highly commended	Old Dairy Heiferweizen
	Highly commended	Westerham Bohemian Rhapsody
	Honourable mention	Ascot Red IPA
	Honourable mention	Havant The 7 Pointer
	Honourable mention	Loddon In Yer Face American IPA
	Honourable mention	Canterbury Summer Wheat

You can find my full reviews for all these beers at RateBeer. Or, if you want to see a compendium of my (briefer) reviews of all the beers I tried at the festival, not just my top picks, head to Egham Beer Festival Summer 2011 – Tasting notes & Reviews

Going down to Liverpool - A big pub guide

A while back, in A tale of two cities - and farewell to the Everyman, I was singing the praises of Liverpool as a beer-drinking city. Tandleman and Eating Isn’t Cheating have also been talking about Liverpool pubs recently. There’s plenty of top notch beer to be had and many of the pubs are quite simply fantastic. And, to assist anyone planning a beer-oriented trip to Liverpool, I have put together a rather hefty pub guide, including maps and routes. It’s really too big to post in its entirety here but you can find it at Chrisobeer’s Liverpool Pub Guide - don't worry about the safety of the link, it just takes you to a pdf on my Google Docs page. One thing. As I found out, it is impossible to do the city's pubs justice in a single day. You'll need a couple of days to make the most of it, which sounds to me like an ideal weekend break, although you might need another break to recover. So, a return trip is beckoning me strongly. Just for research purposes to fill a few gaps in the guide you understand. But I expect I’ll have a rather fine time as well.

And now for something completely different – Egham Beer Festival

Egham played a prominent part in British history as the location of Runnymede where (probably), in 1215, a reluctant King John sealed the Magna Carta. In more recent times AliG, the most famous son of Egham’s near neighbour Staines, declared the Wimpy bar on Egham High Street to be part of his turf. I may be doing Egham a disservice but, if much has happened in Egham in the intervening eight hundred years or so, it has passed me by. But three times a year, for the last few years, I’ve made the journey out to the quiet suburban town, and through it’s quiet suburban streets (if the Wimpy bar exists I’ve never noticed it) to a rather nondescript blocky building that goes by the name of Egham United Services Club. It’s a journey that has been made by large numbers of other discerning beer enthusiasts too. For, within that community Egham and it’s United Services Club have acquired a burgeoning reputation. That reputation is, as you might have guessed, based on the superlative beer festival hosted there.

After the gargantuan Great British Beer Festival in the cavernous Earls Court, Egham beer festival is indeed something completely different – intimate, modest and low-key. But the list of British beers that Bob Inman, Ian Davey and the rest of the EUSC team put together is anything but low-key. The number of beers is not huge compared to the hundreds on offer at GBBF – 70 or so is the norm – but what it lacks in quantity, it more than makes up for in quality. Where the British selection at GBBF is regarded by many as somewhat pedestrian, Egham’s is adventurous in the extreme. And some of the beers are rather extreme too. Not to mention the new, the novel and the obscure. For this reason, Egham has become a magnet for scoopers from far and wide. Even the most hardened of tickers will find plenty of new stuff. Of course it’s not that tough to disregard the quality and simply order beers that nobody, even the most seasoned ticker, has ever heard of, but the Egham guys have a happy knack getting in the good stuff and it’s certainly not just a ticker-fest. It was at Egham for instance that I first had the opportunity to try two British brewed Belgian-style tripels alongside each other – something that I would have considered quite unbelievable just a few years ago. 

So, yesterday, I found myself joining a procession of familiar faces from Egham station to the EUSC for the Summer 2011 festival. At GBBF, out of the 500 or so UK cask beers there were just about 100 that were new to me and less than half that number that I was really looking forward to trying. At Egham yesterday the list of 70 beers contained nearly 60 that I had not encountered before and I wanted to try them all. I managed to get through 26 of them yesterday before my grip on sobriety began to loosen and I decided it was time for home. They included beers from 9 breweries I had never come across before and, whilst there were a fair number of “brown bitters”, I also sampled milds, porters, stouts, imperial stouts, German & Belgian style wheat beers, strong IPAs, zesty golden ales making generous use of US hop varieties and more. It would be unfair to single out particular beers (although my reviews will be appearing on Ratebeer in due course), a high proportion of which were excellent and nearly all of them were interesting – something I would be hard pressed, in all honesty, to say about the UK beer selection at GBBF.

Whilst I’m feeling a little fragile today, I will be back for more tomorrow. If you have not been to Egham beer festival before, I would urge you to give it a try. The festival is open until chucking out time on Sunday. If you can’t make it this time, the Autumn festival, to be held from the 3^rd to the 6^th of November should be a date for the diary.  

Ridleys return to the Compasses, Littley Green

Most of my posts up to now have had something of a valedictory tone. By way of balance, this one is more of a “welcome back”. A few weeks ago, at Chelmsford beer festival I noticed some beers from the Compasses brewery, which I had never encountered before. A little bit of research revealed it is based at the Compasses Inn at Littley Green in rural Essex.

Now, I am familiar with the Compasses, although have not visited in many a long year. It was the brewery tap for Ridleys, which had operated a classic Victorian tower brewery under family control since 1841 in an equally rural setting at Hartford End, just a couple of miles away from the pub.

That is until 2005, when the brewery and Ridleys’ 70 odd pubs were acquired by Greene King. At this point in any Greene King acquisition story it is customary for the term “rapacious predator” to be applied but, in this case, things are not quite so straightforward as it seems that Ridleys had put themselves up for sale. Whether Ridleys was unviable in the longer term or it was a case of the family cashing in is beyond the scope of this piece but it seems to me inevitable that, at some point, most of the established family brewers will either go bust or the owners will decide to sell out. After the takeover things proceeded in the usual fashion. The brewery was promptly closed and stripped out, some of the Ridleys beers were dumped and a few were retained, brewed by Greene King in Bury St Edmunds.

Six years on the brewery still stands empty, redevelopment having, as usual been bogged down by planning wrangles, although it seems that a proposal for a housing development retaining part of the original structure is now in the offing. 

As for the Compasses, it operated for a few (presumably unsuccessful) years as part of the Greene King estate, followed by the customary attempt to sell it as a private house. Until, finally, it was sold to Joss Ridley, a direct relative of the original Ridley brewing family, who has reinvigorated the pub and decided to get back into the brewing business. I’m not sure whether he intends to install a brewery at the Compasses but, for the time being, the beers are brewed at Felstar brewery, just a few miles down the road. Their first beers appeared in May of this year. Fittingly, they are brewed by Joss’ brother Nelion. I wish them all the best in their endeavours.

There were three Compasses beers on the list at the Chelmsford festival – Gold, Special and Bitter. Unfortunately, the Gold was nowhere to be seen on either of my visits. The Special was a sweetish, fruity best bitter with caramel and nutty notes, perfectly well executed but not entirely to my personal taste – I’m just not that keen on that type of beer. The Bitter was a traditionally styled bitter, pleasantly drinkable although the malts seemed a little raw and toffeeish – probably still something of a work in progress. But it is invariably preferable to try the beers on their own turf than in, often less than perfect, beer festival conditions so it’s perfect excuse for an excursion into the Essex countryside to sup some fresh beers and sample the famous huffers (look it up).

A good opportunity would be this weekend, August 19-21, when there is a beer festival (with lots of other attractions too) at the Compasses. Unfortunately I am otherwise engaged so my return to the Compasses will have to wait a little bit longer.  

Earls Court - A goodbye to all that

Phew, that was a heavy couple of weeks. A week of pub touring with my friend Pat from Finland to start and the RateBeer European Summer Gathering to finish. With four days at the Great British Beer Festival sandwiched in between. The last GBBF at Earls Court. Next year Earls Court is being used for the Olympic volleyball and GBBF moves to Olympia. After the Olympics, Earls Court will be flattened to make way for a new housing development. Which raises the question of a longer-term home for GBBF.

Olympia is without doubt a more aesthetically pleasing venue but it’s smaller than Earls Court. And anyone who has been at the GBBF during the busy Thursday and Friday evening sessions will know how crowded even Earls Court can get. But Earls Court is probably the best London venue that’s available, at least in terms of what CAMRA wants GBBF to be. Sure it’s a horrible, soulless concrete bunker with no natural light. And it has a nasty echoing boom when there’s a band playing. But it can pack the punters in and has an easily accessible London location, which I think are key priorities as far as CAMRA is concerned.

The fact is that GBBF can’t be all things to all people. Those who already appreciate beers that are not mainstream mega-commercial products (see how I avoided using the terms “craft beer” or “real ale” there) generally find it flawed for one reason or another. The geeks find the UK beer range too conservative to tickle their taste buds and tend to gravitate towards the foreign beers. The scoopers find insufficient new stuff on the UK list and many steer clear of foreign muck. Some of the more mainstream CAMRA types regard it as overcrowded and overpriced. But GBBF is not squarely aimed at existing beer enthusiasts. It is a shop window hoping to attract the gaze of those who are normally more at home supping Stella, or Guinness, or Magners, or even a chilled Pinot Grigio. Take a look around at the composition of the crowd and you will see a lot of tourists, and office parties, and groups of lads on the piss, and groups of girls on the piss, and those who are simply curious and have a free evening so pop in to see what it’s all about. It’s all very jolly, and all very good natured and CAMRA hopes that those people will be inspired to change their drinking preferences. Sure it sometimes leaves us diehards wanting something rather more adventurous in beer terms but, hey, I have a cracking time anyway.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that, despite its shortcomings, Earls Court is a very suitable venue for GBBF in its current format and with its current priorities. So when I walked out of an Earls Court GBBF for the last time last Friday it was without doubt something of a bittersweet leave-taking. Will Olympia be up to the task of reclaiming the permanent home spot when attendance is well up on what is used to be? I guess we’ll have a better idea this time next year. Some people have been suggesting that other changes should be considered. Such as moving GBBF out of London to somewhere like the NEC near Birmingham. Or accepting that it will have to be housed in a smaller venue and limit attendance. Those are certainly possibilities that are worth considering but GBBF would surely become a significantly different beast to what it is today. The demographic of those attending would certainly change. My experience of a number of CAMRA festivals, and festivals in the United States, where numbers are limited suggests that the more casual visitors would be replaced by those who are prepared to go through a few hoops to secure tickets. And moving GBBF outside London would certainly attract fewer “casuals”. So there are lot of issues to consider. Hopefully those in the CAMRA hierarchy will be giving serious thought to what they want GBBF to be and how best to achieve that.

In the meantime, Earls Court – so long and thanks for all the good times and good people I’ve rubbed shoulders with there. And hopefully I’ll see plenty more of them in the future wherever GBBF ends up and however it evolves..