National Winter Beer Festival 2010
Last month, in my home town of Manchester, saw the National Winter Ales Festival. Having missed it last year I really couldn’t pass on the invitation this time around. So I hopped on a train out of Glasgow, met up with pals and, “Put my drinking trousers on,” as one friend put it.
The four-day event is organised annually by CAMRA, the ‘Campaign for Real Ale.’ Think of them as the Abu Hamza of the 
beer world, except without the hooks and the wonky eye. I jest of course, CAMRA laid on another top-notch event in the same format as previous years but in a new location, The Sheridan Suite at ‘The Venue’ on Oldham Road. The new site seemed to draw mixed reactions from the punters but the vital components were there, namely wall-to-wall casks of beers, ciders and perrys.
The festival also awards important accolades to the brewers. A panel of judges blind-taste all of the competition ales and present a regional award, medals by beer category and overall prizes for the ‘Champion Beer of Britain.’ The 2010 overall winners were…
- Gold medal: 1872 Porter, The Elland Brewery, W.Yorkshire
- Silver medal: Ramblers Ruin, The Breconshire Brewery, Powys
- Bronze medal: Gorlovka Imperial Stout, Acorn Brewery, S.Yorkshire
My personal stand-out ales this year came from Wapping Beers in Liverpool. Their Wapping Smoked Porter (one of my favourite beer styles) has an excellent roasted malt and smoke aroma which is maintained in the taste, with a wonderful tang as it hits the palate. Their Tabley Mild is equally as tasty. Again, a roasty brew and with more body than you might expect from a mild, even a winter one. I do envy those Baltic Fleet drinkers, even if their cars are up on bricks in the car park! (Hey, I’m a Mancunian, Scouse bashing is in the contract!)
Other stars of the show for me were Staffordshire’s Beowulf and their Dragon Smoke Stout, the Arran Brewery’s Arran Ale and, of course, habitual festival attendees Bank Top of Bolton and their Port O Call, which simply must remain one of my desert island beers and I couldn’t resist having myself a swift third for the road at the end of the night.
Beer festivals are, without doubt, 100% guaranteed fun and aren’t just the haunt of old beardy beer types. All ages and genders were present and suitably revelling! Many thanks to CAMRA for laying on the event and being such a cheery bunch of very helpful folk. See you again next year!
Don’t know who those clowns are. They’re no friends of mine!
GDave
‘Mashing’ is the term that brewers give to the process of steeping malted grains in water at a specific temperature, activating enzymes that convert the starch in the grain into fermentable sugars. The ‘mash tun’ is the vessel in which this steeping takes place for a duration of 90 minutes, so to hold a body of liquid at such a defined temperature for this length of time would obviously require something with significant insulation. What better vessel than a picnic cool box? Just as suitable for keeping a mash at a stable 64°C as it is for keeping sandwiches and salads chilled. My cool box is a Thermos 32 litre ‘Weekender’ - the Rolls Royce of cool boxes 
- easily capable of mashing 5 kilos of grain, enough for a 25 litre batch of the good stuff.
A couple of modifications are needed before she’s ready to go. A keg tap is core-drilled into the wall of the cool box, behind which a run-off manifold is fitted. The manifold’s job is to allow the wort (brewspeak for unfermented beer) to pass freely through the 5 kilos of grain to the tap without getting bunged up along the way, an unfortunate event known as a ’stuck mash.’ It’s made from standard copper plumbing pipe and the elbows and T-joint are solder fittings so a quick blast with a blow torch was all it took to fix it together. The crossbeam is there to increase the surface area of the manifold and the outward-turned T-joint attaches to the back of the keg tap via a hosepipe fitting and a short length of syphon tube. Finally, slots are sawed into the bottom of the manifold at 10mm intervals, at a depth of just less than half the pipe’s width. My Dad and I worked up a hell of a sweat with our junior hacksaws that day, I can tell you. Good thing we each had a bottle of Deuchars IPA to hand.
temperature, accounting for the loss of heat when the grain is added) and the grains are stirred in well to avoid clumping. If the mash temperature hasn’t been hit then either more hot or more cold water can be added to adjust. With the room already filling with a malty aroma like a cow biscuit dunked in a mug of Horlicks, the mash tun lid goes on and the whole thing is wrapped up in a thick sleeping bag for extra insulation. An hour-and-a-half later and the mash tun will be full of sweet liquid maltose (and other sugars) that the brewer’s yeast can go to town on. Mashing is only the first step along the way, of course, but one made so easy by this little DIY gem.
Pimm’s is regarded to be epitome of English refinery, the drink of choice for the Wimbledon hat-wearers and every polo tournament frequenter in the Royal Shires. Order a pint of Carling at a polo match and you’re in for some stern looks. Shellfish monger-turned restaurateur James Pimm came about the idea for this gin-based cocktail in 1823 whilst searching for the ideal digestif for his oysters. Thirty years later and demand for the ‘No.1 Cup’ was such that the company moved to large scale production in order to keep gentlemen’s bars and officer’s messes well stocked up. Pimm expanded his range in the years to come, using his herbal recipe with other base liquors; vodka, scotch, rum and the like, although few of these survive to this day. Marketing variations on an original brand is a difficult proposition, one which only the KitKat Chunky has met with success in recent years.