46th Cambridge Beer Festival: Progress in History
I paid a visit to the 46th Cambridge Beer Festival on Wednesday. Although I am very old I wasn’t at the first, although I certainly attended several at the Corn Exchange.
These days its held in tents on Jesus Green which is perhaps just as well since it is an extremely well attended event. CAMRA of course have huge experience of organising beer festivals so everything works smoothly none the less.
There are some things which are traditional about the festival that continue still and I don’t mean the beards. The cheese counter is still going and in fact I think has improved with some interesting and local and regional cheeses featuring this year.
Cambridge has embraced keykeg sometime since and there was a keykeg bar as well as beers using that method of dispense on the Adnams, Grain, Three Blind Mice and Bexar Country brewery stands.
While all the bars were busy the queue at the keykeg bar which stretched back a bit (service even so remained good) underlined where the zeitgeist is going.
Experience of the festival was being served a HillFarmstead saison on the world beers bar by former Parliamentary Beard of the Year winner Julian Huppert.
There was certainly an effort to embrace progress here not just in a series of talks including a launch of the Queer Beer project but also a free tasting of a Bexar County mixed fermentation beer on cask and keg.
The festival is open all day Saturday and is well worth a visit.
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