Another Beer Festival

This is my third beer festival this year!
This time, it's within easy walking distance, at Kilvert's, where they have 35 or so real ales from Wales on offer this weekend, plus various music.
I went down this afternoon (so I'm still under the influence), because I wanted to listen to Pete Brown's talk on matching beer with books. I would have stayed for the later talk by Adrian Tierney-Jones of Called to the Bar, but the tasters were quite generous and I'd had more than enough by then.
The talk started a bit late, with a bit of a 'rounded up' audience - 'intimate' is how Eddie described it in his introduction, but we were enthusiastic.
Pete Brown started with Martin Amis' London Fields and a lager - Jever pilsner. He said that Martin Amis quite obviously didn't like people who went to pubs in London, but he described them brilliantly, so we got Keith the darts player in different readings, drinking lager and extolling the virtues of keg!
Next was the classic Moon Under Water by George Orwell - an ideal pub that never really existed (despite Wetherspoons using the name!) With that went the Otley version of Burton Ale, which George Orwell would have been familiar with - and what a fragrant beer that is! Though he preferred his beer from a china mug.
The third reading is a bit of a taster for Pete Brown's next book, which will be about the history of the George Inn in Southwark. It's called 'Neath the Mask, by John M East, and is a theatrical memoir of his grandfather and a relative who was the landlady of the inn in the 1920s and 30s. Dickens is very much associated with the inn (and many others in the area), with mentions in Little Dorrit and Pickwick Papers (though that was probably the White Hart next door!). I went to the George with my young man, and it truly is a wonderful building (though it's now a Greene King pub). For this reading there was a porter, which would have been Dickens's favourite tipple.
Pete Brown was musing on the nature of nostalgia at this point, a word that only came into common use in the 1920s, when stories of Dickens were doing the rounds, and how that impacted on the history of the pub, which is now claimed to be haunted by Sam Weller, who is a fictional character!
Finally, it was Hops and Glory, Pete Brown's own book, and the story of his transporting a cask of IPA to India by sea for the first time in 140+ years. He read out one of my favourite bits, where he actually broaches the cask, and a little man accosts him to say "This isn't beer! This is wine!" For this reading the beer was Yspridd y Ddraig from Breconshire Brewery. When Buster Grant recently moved from Breconshire Brewery to set up his own Brecon Brewery, Eddie bought the last casks of this beer, which was aged in whisky barrels for four months (possibly Penderyn - nobody seemed to be sure).
As well as these rather nice beers (including the Jever pilsner - and I'm not normally a lager drinker), I also tried Dark Side of the Moose from Purple Moose, which was full of flavour and rather lighter in colour than I'd expected, Celt Experience Golden Ale, an organic ale, and Monty's Midnight stout from Montgomery.
One nice touch was the inclusion of how many miles the beer had travelled to get to Hay - beer miles!
Oh, and cutest thing of the day? It had to be Freddie the Kilvert dog grabbing the lead of a visiting little dog and pulling it down to the lawn to play with him.
(For full disclosure, I have to say that Eddie kindly didn't charge me for the beer tasters, though I did offer).