CAMRA Wigan Beer Festival 2009 - A Preview

Everyone always has a date pencilled in their mental diaries, I’m not too dissimilar. However, it’s not a birthday or even an anniversary of something memorable (in many ways it is though!) – It’s the Wigan Beer Festival!

Ran since 1987, I jumped on the bandwagon (to be fair I was only 19!) at the final festival to be held at The Mill (at The Pier) in 2005. With Wigan Council leaving the town with no decent concert/conference hall, Newtown’s very own Robin Park has stood in since then. It’s handy for me, as I live just 5 minutes away from the state-of-art sports centre. It’s also only a mile from Wigan Town Centre, so a pub/club crawl afterwards is always top of the agenda!

But what are beer festivals, I hear you ask. Well basically, it’s all about sampling different home-made ales, ciders and even those heathen lagers, from around the country and abroad. There’s not a ‘Fosters Ice’ or ‘WKD’ in sight as people sample all sorts of beers from pale ales to stout, from West Country cider to dodgy German lager. Best of all the prices are very good and with you being able to purchase/borrow your very own commemorative festival glass in either half pint or full pint, there’s plenty of beer to sample!

The best of all, CAMRA festivals use the ‘beer tokens’ system, which I think is a very good idea. Basically, you trade your money at the front desk for a sheet of paper with different amounts of money indicated on them. When you get a drink, the volunteers behind the bar, cross the amount off. It saves people messing about with change and drunken people losing their money! It’s a system which I think should be employed in nightclubs.

The festival also has ‘entertainment’, if that’s what you can call it! Usually it’s a folk band and vintage pub games (not darts or pool!) but the most fun is had seeing some of the daft folk trying to dance after a couple of pints of ‘Otters Arse’, or something!

There’s also plenty of food to be sampled. Although the German sausages (well worth a bite, trust me!) and the Crapes aren’t included on the tokens system. But they are always well worth a sniff – they even have pies and chips, which is unheard of in Wigan, honest!

The festival normally has a ‘theme’, this year its ‘The Dark Side vs. The Light Side’, which I presume is a Star-Wars homage, as people can chose which ales, from each side, they like best! Whatever happens, I can guarantee I’ll be on the cider at the end of the night! But hopefully plenty of fun can be had!

The 22nd Wigan Beer Festival takes place at The Robin Park Sports Centre from Thursday 19th March to Saturday 21st. For dates, times and more info, visit the Wigan CAMRA Beer Festival website.

Happy supping!

For those who don’t know, CAMRA (CAMpaign for Real Ale) is an organisation that is trying to keep the British beer going. What with many of our pubs closing every week and the ones that are left, selling mostly sub-standard drinks, the organisation formed and has being been going strong ever since, trying to keep our culture alive. The beer festivals are just one way of promoting this – there’s no ‘binge drinking’ or violence, just clued-in folk having a few beers and having a good time. That is how it should be – people getting drunk but causing no bother and having a laugh. But yet the government home in on the minority and punish drinkers and their pubs with high prices.

CAMRA run beer festivals across the country, for more info visit their site.