The Chappel Beer Festival

As you may know we are designing a new beer and so yesterday I went off on a 'research' mission to a Beer Festival in Chappel, Essex, which has apparently been running for 22 years. Run by CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) and the East Anglian Railway Museum, I found it quite difficult to see who was benefiting out of the whole process.

We were given on arrival 1 pint glass and a long list of all the beers available at the Festival. However, for what we wanted it was useless. It told us the name of the Brewer, the actual beer name and alcohol content. However, there was absolutely no telling whether it was a golden beer, a stout, a brown ale etc. There wasn't any signage or indication on the barrels. Not even all the beers cited on the list were present at the Festival so even if you knew which one you wanted there was a chance you wouldn't be able to have it. To make matters worse, the staffing of the bars was run by the Railway Museum not CAMRA and so the volunteers knew a heck of a lot about railways but next to nothing about beer. We managed to speak with the President of the Norfolk branch of CAMRA and he explained to us how much a shambles the whole business was.

Did we actually drink anything in the end? Well, yes, of course. However, nothing was really that wonderful. We started with two Belgian brews, a honey one and a ginger. Being continental, they were very different and MUCH stronger, being 10.5% and 8% respectively. Ginger was quite nice actually with a good lot of rounded flavour. The honey was too sweet, probably due to the fact that it contained added sugar as well as the honey. Honey is meant to be used as a natural sweetener anyway so you can imagine what it was like. Other beers included an organic ale (4.5%) from Hepworth breweries, Horsham, Sussex, a full throated, foul smelling hoppy beer (5.8%) from Coastal Breweries, Redruth, Cornwall, a less than pleasant 4% from Harwich, a quite repulsive 4.7% coriander ale and then possibly one of the better ales we had - a 4.8% 'Suffolk Pride' Real ale from Mauldons Brewery, Sudbury, Suffolk.

So, what have we got out of the whole process? Well, to be frank, we know what
we don't like in terms of some of the ingredients. We are thinking that we will probably now go down the herbal route as opposed to the hops route, simply because it would be different to anything else out there and you have a lot more freedom in terms of creating your flavour. However, we shall see as the work progresses. The next job is to go and see the Maltster in Warminster, Wiltshire.