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Leicester Beer Festival 2011 Report
The annual four day Leicester Beer Festival started off on Wednesday 9th March 2011 at 5pm at The Charotar Patidar Samaj, our eleventh festival at this venue. The festival this year featured over 220 different beers and over 35 Perrys and ciders. Beers were sourced from all of the Leicestershire & Rutland breweries and as many breweries as possible that are within 25 miles of Leicester on our LocAle bar. Our Cider Bar also featured local cider with Farmer Fear’s and Charnwood appearing. Our Guest Ales bar featured 130 beers at any one time from some of the newest and smallest micro-breweries along with some very popular breweries. Wednesday evening saw the launch of Full Mash Brewery's "Chopper Fuel". The beer was launched at opening time with two Air Ambulance Paramedics opening the proceedings. The Brewery are donating 10p per pint sold to the Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland Air Ambulance. Over the festival, 350 pints of Chopper Fuel were sold. We also reintroduced our "Beer of the Festival" and judged 45 LocAle beers with representatives from the trade, media and CAMRA branches blind tasting the beers. The winners were:-
We had a good selection of “festival specials” based on our light hearted “Decimalisation” theme. The most popular were fruit beers “Black Monday” and “Penny Sweet” from Church End Brewery, “Ha'p'ny Ginger Dip" from Nobbys and “Bob a Job” from Oldershaw Brewery. Another record attendance saw 5104 people attend during the event and consume over 18000 pints of beer along with over 1780 pints of cider and perry. Friday was again the busiest day with hall capacity reached at 5.15pm. Some people had to wait a while outside in the evening due to our hall capacity being reached. We apologise once again for this and appreciate your patience, most people tell us they want to stay at the Charotar because they like it so much. We opened on Saturday with a big choice of 145 beers so that we would not run out, indeed we closed with 33 beers left on to maintain choice right to the end. The first beers to run out were from the Angel Brewery – Virsio VI with their Kismet soon after, both early on Thursday. Our CAMRA membership stand recruited 52 new members to Leicester CAMRA and we welcome all of you to our branch. The authentic Indian curries were a real success and our traditional English food counter manned by CAMRA volunteers was busy as always. Indeed we got through 700 Pork Pies and 700 Sausage Rolls along with 4 full Stiltons! People were also very complimentary about the cobs which were sourced from Ethels Bakery. Once again we collected for LOROS by means of collection buckets and the sale of pumpclips - Thank You. We would like to thank everyone who attended for making the event so successful. We would also like to thank Everards Brewery and all of our LocAle sponsors and beer agency suppliers: Boggart, Beer My Guest, Shardlow, Avalon and Kinver for supplying some fantastic beers. Andy Sales Beer Festival - Awards On Wednesday 18th May, a small group of Leicester CAMRA members went to the Everards “Project William” Five Lamps pub in Derby to present the winning Derbyshire Brewers with their awards won at our Beer Festival in March. We were joined by a small group of Derby CAMRA members along with the Brewers and friends and family in what was an enjoyable evening.The very pleasant Five Lamps is on Duffield Road and has a range of 9 real ales along with Cider etc. Many thanks to Graham the Landlord for allowing us to host the event.
L- R Rachel Matthews, Dancing Duck, Andy Spencer, Mr Grundys, Steve Twells, Rowditch and Richard Muir, Muirhouse Brewery.45 Beers were judged from the 85 LocAle beers at the festival, all brewed within 25 miles of our beer festival as the crow flies. The list of all the winners was published in Drinker 75.Chairman Keith Williams presented awards to Dancing Duck Brewery who won Gold with their “Gold” in the Golden Ales category, Mr Grundys Brewery who won Gold with “1914” in the Speciality category and also Joint Runner Up in Beer of the Festival and Rowditch Brewery who won Silver with “St Stephens” in the Bitter Category.Andy Sales who ordered all the beers and is Muirhouse Brewery BLO then presented Muirhouse Brewery with Gold for their “Magnum Mild” in the Mild category and Overall Beer of the Festival.
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