Caterham Beer Festival

A new beer festival just around the corner from our mates home so it would have been rude not to go along to this. Organised by the local Round Table and extremely well organised at that, with ticket presales which allowed them to work out beer needed for each day and very helpful friendly staff! It was held at what used to be the local council house, saved for the community by a group of businesses when the council were looking to sell it off. Lovely venue for the festival. They focused on a lot of local breweries and beers, a nice touch as many aren't seen in the local pubs so this is a good showcase for the travelling beer drinker.

As the glass sponsors were local accountancy firm I thought it amusing to have Audit Ale as my first beer, one of the strongest beers at the festival at 6.2%, according to the festival tasting notes it was brewed to the 1938 strength and using the same ingredients as the original best selling bottled beer of the Black Eagle Brewery. It is a sweet beer, reminding me of a barley wine, gorgeously morish which is a tad dangerous at that strength. After this one I went for a weaker beer in the shape of Pilgrim Brewery's Porter at 4.1%, fantastic porter with more flavour than some stronger beers and their Moild mild (3.8%) was also very very good. I'm hoping to try some more of their beers soo.

Old Dairy Brewery's Gold (4.3%)  and Blue (4.8%) tops didn't disappoint either, hoping one day to see their imperial at a festival but these two were lovely, Blue Top disappearing before the bell at 5pm. In fact Kent was very well represented at the festival with beers from Westerham and Tonbridge.

Cronx, a new brewery in Croydon had two beers at the festivals, one was their bitter called Standard (3.8%) which would be a fantastic session bitter but Nektar (4.5%) was the second beer we had to throw, some may enjoy it but personally it just didn't work at all although it did smell of blackcurrants as per the tasting notes but just tasted plain weird. Looking forward to trying some others of theirs, hoping for more like Standard than the other.

All in all the festival had some crackers, a couple of pourers but that's the way of it. Hoping the Round Table put this on again.