The 32nd Ipswich Beer Festival

After taking a sabbatical last year (the history of which I might write a longer more detailed post on at some point) the Ipswich Beer Festival organised by the local CAMRA branch returned this year with a brand new location at Ipswich Town Football Club's stadium and a brand new date in June.

Add caption

Held on the practice pitch, which is essentially just a large expanse of astro turf. The festival had all the advantages of an outdoor beer festival, with the benefits of all the plumbing, electricity,lighting and security provided by an indoor venue, that should have made the logistic headache of organising a bit easier.

The beer list was an impressive 180+ beers for essentially a two and a half day festival with also a cider bar, Podges Belgian bar (familiar to many local East Anglian CAMRA beer festivals) and the welcome addition of a number of local brewery bars including Calvors, Nethergate and Earl Soham/Cliff Quay.

Musical entertainment was provided Friday and Saturday nights courtesy of the Grapevine live stage promoting local bands and singers, and BBC Suffolks Stephen "Foz" Foster hosted a music quiz on the Saturday afternoon.

The beer festivals charity this time was Krissy & Friends who were able to provide a family fun area for children, which seemed to cover face painting and five-a-side football mostly. And there were a decent selection of food options from pizza,bratwurst,steak sandwiches,thai,sausage rolls/pork pies and even the football clubs famous catering, though I forgot to check if the Portman Pie was available.

The sun did shine for a bit

The football club have been keen to hold an off season beer festival for a while but essentially needed a partner organisation willing to help run and manage it for them, and with the local CAMRA branch looking for a new beer festival location it was the perfect setup, the ground is a well known prominent local location has good bus links and is only a short walk from the train station.

Essentially though this years festival was designed to be,despite the amount of beer ordered, a lower key  affair to prove the event was feasible and manageable at the location, with the hope then a longer term arrangement could be made and give the beer festival some stability for future planning, something which has been lacking for a number of years.

For the record I volunteered at the beer festival and did two shifts of bar work serving, but also spent much of the rest of the time the festival was open as a consumer so pretty much saw both sides of things.

Sadly the weather wasnt in our favour, even when the sun was shining it was remarkably still chilly for the middle of June, and it rained heavily on Friday night (including a thunderstorm) and drizzled much of Saturday, which no doubt affected turnout. Though gauging the number of visitors was difficult by sight as the size of the venue, which comfortably accomodates at least 7,000-8,000 football fans on matchday meant  several thousand could have been in attendance but spread out across  the whole area, whilst for instance on Friday night they were still queueing to get in.

Overall the beer was reasonably priced in 1/3rds, 1/2s and pints, though a SNAFU on the pint glass printing had omitted the 1/3rd measure line, meant 1/3rds in the pint glass had to be measured in a different glass and then poured into the customers glass, fortunately the half pint glass did have the correct marks.

A view on Thursday that wasnt that different even by  Saturday night.

A further confusion arose in that only the CAMRA volunteer run bars, the brewery bars & Podges belgian bar provided their own staff, marked beer token cards. The other bars either took cash (but often forgot to state that upfront) or cut beer tokens out of the card for redemption from CAMRA later. Though this is a format familiar to most beer festival veterans, it surprised enough people for it to become a major topic of conversation and complaints at the bar. It probably wasnt helped by the fact it wasnt that obvious where the bars were demarcated or that not everyone was a CAMRA volunteer. I was even asked at one stage if I was working for the brewery which Id simply happened to be standing in front of a beer rack with their brewery advert on.

These minor quibbles aside the festival appeared to run smoothly enough across the 3 days, although it was notable that considerable amount of the beer was still left by the Saturday night and was becoming a source of frustation as though again beer festival veterans may be familiar with the concept that the beer list is merely a guide not a guarantee, the amount of beer that "wasnt on" or didnt even "come on" the whole time is certainly something I think needs to be looked at in the future. Hopefully of course the club invite CAMRA back next year and the festival becomes another permanent fixture for the future.