I went down to London with my school friend Martin Young. Also, a CAMRA member. We had to queue for a while to get in, which surprised me. As I think it did the organisers.
How many beers did they have? Fifty or sixty? I doubt that it was any more. It still seemed enormous to me. More beers than I could possibly hope to get around. I went for Mild and hard to get. Embodied in the only beer I can remember drinking: Yorkshire Clubs Dark Mild.
Why do I remember that? Because soon after the brewery was bought up and closed. A shame. The Mild was pretty much black and from what I can recall, fairly nice.
It was like a wonderland of beer for someone living in a town where only three cask beers were available. Not having travelled much, pretty well all the beers on offer were new to me. Most of all, it was a demonstration of the richness of the UK’s brewing culture, despite the best efforts of some in the Big Six to destroy it.
Covent Garden was the template for future CAMRA festivals. It morphed into the Great British Beer Festival and inspired scores of local events.
Do you have memories of early beer festivals? Then get in touch.
Not exactly a Festival, but full story here
ReplyDeletehttps://www.joulesbrewery.co.uk/our-story
In 1973 I had the honour, along with my local branch of CAMRA, to join in with a massive demonstration around the streets of Stone in Staffordshire when Bass were closing, and then demolished, the Joules (pronounced Jowls) brewery. We drank the town out of Joules which sadly wa now a shadow of its former according to locals.
https://boakandbailey.com/2013/11/today-in-beer-history-marching-in-stone/
I was fairly active in SW London CAMRA in the mid-70s, and did a stint serving beer at the Covent Garden event. I was on the Greene King stand - which might not sound very exciting now, but as well as IPA and Abbot (the IPA in particular was superlative – the best I have ever had), we had Rayment’s Bitter and Rayment’s AK light mild. I can’t now remember whether we had GK light and dark mild as well. Of the other breweries, the highlight for me, like Ron, was the Yorkshire Clubs Brewery, though I think it was the bitter (possibly 4X) that I tried. That may have been my only taste of Yorkshire Clubs’ beer, though I have a hazy memory – which may be quite wrong – of sampling it in a pub somewhere in Yorkshire.
ReplyDeleteSW London branch also organised a beer festival at Wimbledon baths – I think that was in 1975 as well. I drove a van to Manchester with a couple of other chaps: we collected some beer from Hyde’s brewery (possibly Robinson’s as well), and visited the White Gates (the CAMRA pub in Hyde) that evening, where we tried Pollard’s Bitter. My impression was that it was not dissimilar to Wilson’s Bitter – pale and slipping down easily, though without any particularly distinctive flavour. On the way back to London the next day, we called at the Litchborough Brewery to collect some Litchborough Northamptonshire Bitter from Bill Urquhart. Although it was filtered and was normally served under pressure in its local area, we served it (unsurprisingly) straight from the cask at the festival – quite palatable as far as I can recall, though not especially exciting.
GK from what I have read was much better back then.
DeleteOscar
Boak and Bailey wrote more than a decade ago now about the 1873 exhibition of English and continental beer at North Woolwich: https://boakandbailey.com/2012/11/the-original-great-british-beer-festival-1873/
ReplyDeleteAs well as the list of breweries, what's fascinating is the number of similarities with modern beer festivals, including payment by token and voting for the best beer.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI've written about it before, too:
https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-first-beer-festival.html
What I remember about the early beer festivals was that just about all the beers available were on gravity dispense, with the barrels racked up being the bar and they just turned a tap and the beer came out. There was no head at all, or what head there was was just big bubbles. Also the beer was warmer than if served from a pub cellar. So it was a bit of a shock to the system at first.
ReplyDeleteThe first beer festival I went to was at Cleckheaton Town Hall. Must have been '78 or thereabouts. Someone had been on a tour of the south west and brought back quite a big selection of beers from down there. The only ones I definitely remember were Butcombe and Devenish but there were definitely several others. Best beer by far for me was Devenish Wessex BB. Unfortunately, before I got the chance to try it again, the Weymouth brewery had closed.
I used to live in Muswell Hill, and Ally Pally, with its Panorama Bar, and a bar in the grounds (pulled or burnt down, I think) were places to go. I went to the CAMRA Beer Festivals there at the end of the 70's, and an abiding memory is of being almost glued to the floor by the spilt beer. I watched the place go up in smoke in 1980.
ReplyDeleteIn 1978, I went to the Maidstone Beer festival, held at Allington Castle (still have the engraved 1/2 pint glass tankard). I have no idea how it came to be held there, as at the time it was home to the Carmelite religious order, and another clear memory is of a friar walking through the place, an expression of disgust on his face, as he navigated through the variously prone and sitting drunks.
Great days, when I could go out to lunch from my office in central London and have a couple of pints of Bass with colleagues. Verboten now, of course.
My dad went to the Covent Garden beer festival but sadly he's long gone.
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