Beer on the Wye

 I went into Hereford yesterday afternoon with a friend and her two adult children for the nineteenth Beer on the Wye.  It's also running today and tomorrow, at the Rowing Club in Hereford.

 

Because of works that the Rowing Club were doing on the field, the beer festival wasn't held last year.  This year, because of the improvements to the site, the marquee has been erected at 90 degrees to it's position in all the previous festivals - which was a bit disorienting.  Inside, it looks exactly the same, but when you look outside, suddenly you have no idea where the river is!

We got used to it over the afternoon, and even sat at a table by the river (under an umbrella) with a lovely couple from Cardiff who were doing a crossword puzzle.  My friend is a crossword fanatic - she'd even brought some crosswords to do at the festival herself - so we had a lot of fun helping them to solve it and chatting.

Usually at a beer festival I like to try as many different beer styles as possible (subject to my cut off point of a maximum of three pints - any more than that and I feel awful the next day).  So this means six halves, or nine thirds.  However, this time there were two breweries there with beers I wanted to taste, and they were both Gold beers (somewhere around the bitter/IPA area, but now a distinct style of its own).  Uley's Hog's Wallop and Woodfordes Bure Gold were both delicious, but the Uley packed a slightly harder punch at 5.2%.  Then my friend wanted to try the Solstice from Three Tuns brewery at Bishops Castle - we'd both visited the pub at different times some years ago, so it was a bit of a trip down memory lane.  Solstice is a bitter, and very pleasant on a hot day.

I wanted to try a mild, so I went for Old Magic from Magic Dragon in Wrexham - again for nostalgic reasons, because I used to live near Wrexham.  I hadn't come across the brewery before, but it was a very good mild.

I finished off with the Jaipur Union IPA from Thornbridge.  I first tasted Jaipur at a Beer on the Wye (I think it might have won supreme champion of the festival that year) and since then they have installed a traditional Burton Union fermentation system in the brewery (which is something that beer nerds get quite excited about).  It was delicious, and a good beer to round off the session before we went for the last bus home. 

The champion beers of the festival (and also ciders and perries) were announced while we were there, but I didn't write them down.  I think Makerfield from Weird Dad brewery in Newport was the supreme champion this year - it's a pale ale, and Jarl, a blond ale from Fyne Ales in Argyll, all the way from Scotland, was also mentioned, as well as Titan from Left Handed Giant brewery in Bristol, a pale ale. 

And there was a treat when we got back to Hay - a traction engine came down the road just as we got off the bus!