CAMRA Winter Ales Festival

Manchester, January 2000

With many thanks to Peter Alexander and Father Mack

The city
Our beer experiences in Manchester were not just restricted to the festival - we started the day in the Rembrandt, a pub tied to local brewer J.W. Lees, with a refreshing pint of the brewery's Bitter, served northern style through a tight sparkler. Later we had the opportunity to take a look at the local beer scene in the form of a short crawl of several startlingly good pubs to the north of the city centre. First off was a quick diversion to a large Sam Smith's pub housed in a beautiful old half-timbered building, for some low-priced but top-notch pints of Old Brewery Bitter. The twist in the tale was that the entire edifice had been moved and lovingly rebuilt some hundred or so yards from its original location after Manchester's Arndale Centre was bombed a couple of years ago.

From there we went on to The Smithfield Hotel, a free house boasting about six real ales including Greene King Mild, where we sampled a couple of extremely good guest beers - one in particular (John Brewsher's Bitter from Tirril Brewery) was beautifully hoppy in an American way, with a bitter, grapefruity, resiny tang. Our next stop was a little more unusual - a Belgian-style beer bar called Bar Fringe, boasting draught English, Belgian and German beers, plus a huge selection of bottles. We enjoyed some pleasingly aromatic, spicy and refreshing draught Vlaamsche Wit, despite the presence of a motorbike dangling alarmingly from an overhead balcony.

The next leg of our crawl took in the aptly named Beer House, a bar on two floors boasting a huge number of UK cask ales, many from local micros, plus draught and bottled Belgian and German offerings. In fact, they had chosen to hold a rare beers festival to coincide with CAMRA's Winter Ales one, so we had the chance to sample a couple of unusual treats (Magg's Magnificent Mild and Mr Chubb's Lunchtime Bitter, both from West Berkshire Brewery) before somewhat unsteadily heading back towards the main event for a bite to eat and, of course, some more beer.

The festival
The festival itself was held in a huge Victorian market hall. A wide variety of styles were on offer - lots of seasonals, as expected, but also a large number of porters, stouts, old ales and other high-gravity and dark beers good for keeping real ale drinkers warm and happy. There was also a foreign beer bar, with something like 70 bottled and draught German and Belgian winter beers and three American beers - draught Commonwealth Barley Wine, and bottled Sierra Nevada Bigfoot and Sam Adams Triple Bock.

Despite the winter ale theme, lots of lower-gravity beers such as ordinary bitters and milds were available - a good thing if you want to stay the course in an extended session. Notably, one of the first beers I sampled was a light mild from Manchester brewery Hyde's - a refreshingly light, fruity but all too rare style. Other ales tried in this session included Bridgewater Navigator, Cain's Traditional Bitter, Commonwealth Barley Wine, Flannery's Oatmeal Stout (dry attack, with dark powdery chocolate notes following - I found it enjoyable but palate-destroying), Holt's Bitter, Hambleton Flubru, RCH Old Slug Porter and, er, some others. We also bought two bottles of Blair's New Labour (but only because of the appalling picture on the label - see our review in the database) from a limited run of 600 - a BCA from the Museum Brewing Co. in Burton-upon-Trent.

Incidentally, here are the results of the official beer judging at the festival: the supreme champion beer at the festival was Robinson's Old Tom; second and third were Theakston Old Peculier and Wye Valley Dorothy Goodbody's Wholesome Stout.

For the evening session we started with a quick visit to the foreign beer bar, sampling some draught Kasteel Tripel. A few heavier beers rapidly followed, kicking off with the obligatory Robinson's Old Tom, the festival winner - a robust but smooth beer with complex dark fruit flavours and a remarkably subtle bite for its 8.5% ABV (subtle to our rather 'tired' palates, anyway). Other delights included Gale's Festival Mild - its strength making it more of an old ale than a mild - and an interesting Oyster Stout from Ventnor (brewed with real oysters), which was smoother, lighter, less roasty and more fruity than expected. A final foray to the foreign beer bar at the call for last orders produced some bottled Palm 2000 and La Guillotine (plus some more bottles to take home - Schlenkerla Rauchbier, Augustiner Maximator and the now sadly discontinued Rodenbach Alexander), following which we were just about ready (and barely able) to leave. Suffice to say that a long coach journey home is not the best way to recover from a day like that...

Pink elephants?

No, but I could have sworn I saw a man staring into a huge pint...

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