The SIBA Beer Festival was a lovely way to spend Friday evening. With over a hundred different beers and ciders to choose from though, all lined up along one side of a large marquee, I felt spoilt for choice. What a great problem to have though. I think I only spent about £7.50 on beer with each £1.50 token buying me half a pint of any beer there but I must have drank about twice that amount. That or they were so strong that I only needed half as much to feel more than a little merry. (Probably a bit of both!) Even trying a finger of quite a few beers before committing to my half pints it would have been impossible, even for a hardened darts player, to get through every beer there. Rather ridulously there were a couple of beers on sale which were over 10% alcohol by volume (abv) which I did sample but to me they taste a little like treacle. Now I actually quite like treacle but I wouldn't want to drink half a pint of it! The Ten Per Cent Club is definitely not for me! I decided that I seem to be drawn to the mid strength, around 4.2 to 4.8% abv, best bitters. Not sure why but I do seem to like some of them such as Old Dairy's Red Top and Hepworth's Sussex Bitter. I was fortunate to be able to sample quite a few lovely examples but the beers that stick out as being particularly notable were The Flower Pots' Bate's Best Bitter, TEA by Hogs Back, Sovereign by Tunbridge Wells Brewery, Larkins Best Bitter, Filo's Ginger Tom, Langham's Hip Hop, Westerham's 1965 Special Summer Ale and Summer Pearle and Whitstable's Native. All excellent beers in my humble opinion. I love alot of the names as well. Names with attitude. By far my favourite though, of those beers that I managed to sample, was Hog's Back Brewery's Summer Ale which the brewery's bumpf describes as: Ideal for those warm summer days/light straw coloured ale/refreshingly cool taste/thirst quenching. It may not have a name with any attitude but I would describe it as, quite simply, nectar in a glass....
1 comment:
Bloody amateur!
Post a Comment