Model of the End of the Road festival site - not to scale! |
List of beers outside the Bear Tavern |
There have been previous experiments with returnable plastic glasses for a refund and heavy duty souvenir plastic glasses but recently flimsy plastic disposable glasses have become the norm. See Chris Corry's explanation of why these are best for outdoor festivals at the end of this post.
Simon outside the Black Crow - the bar for the Woods stage |
On Saturday 3 September there was a brewing demonstration by the Brew Shack, Wimborne, at the side of the Bear Tavern tent.
Adam Bascombe with 'Ullage' |
Brewing ingredients, including several varieties of malt and hops, were on display. Adam and his colleague answered questions about brewing from interested festival goers.
The Brew Shack - 9 Grain Porter |
Anderson East - Woods stage |
A different Adam, who I had chatted with on a visit to Wakefield Beer Exchange in March, was busy tapping and spiling some casks on the scaffolding stillage behind the bar. It was fortunate that he was wearing glasses as beer spurted out at his face with a couple of the livelier casks. All the time, the bar staff were serving customers in a friendly and helpful way.
Watching them stoop or crouch to pour beer from the lowest casks made me wonder if their job could be eased by having these casks raised higher in future. Once the casks had been tapped, Chris Corry appeared to observe and taste the newly tapped beers to see if they were ready for serving.
In 2015, some keg Beavertown beers were also available at the Bear Tavern. In 2016, a new dedicated Beavertown bar, near the Singing Theatre and Garden Stage catered for craft beer enthusiasts.
Whitney - Garden stage |
On Sunday, more draught beers were available including Lupuloid IPA (6.7% ABV) which had been launched officially at the festival on Saturday.
Thee Oh Sees - Garden stage |
For more details of music at End of the Road festival 2016 - see my Tumblr blog eotr2016
For details of cider at the featival - see blog post End of the Road festival 2016 ciders
Addendum
Chris from Really Good Bar Co advises:
EOTR is the only music festival I've been to this year where they encourage us to go and find good quality, interesting, local produce for the bars. Hence why all the ale is local as well.
We went with the current plastic glasses as previous versions caused us
problems. The current ones work directly with the mechanical recycling
kit at the depo and so gets packaged up and reused. The glasses also
split once, when trodden on, so they flatten. This is very important as
it stops the cups breaking into multiple bits. When they do this and it
is wet the small bits disappear in to the mud and then reappear when
livestock is on the land resulting in lots of problems and big vet
bills. So although they are a bit flimsy for us beer drinkers they
actual are the best all round solution for outdoor events.
We tried washing hard plastic ones, but these caused lots of grey water issues and a potential problem for bar service when the washing machines broke down onsite. The also split into multiple shards of hard plastic when trodden on so very dangerous all round.
Paper cups - you can't see if its a full pint or settled and finally corn starch cups although in theory are great as they reduce to compost, have a tendency to contaminate batches of plastic cups destined to be reused & recycled.
I agree on the Lupuloid Tim ! The first day was a problem for them, but the Beavertown folk were very chatty once the equipment started to work.
ReplyDeleteShame it was so pricy but they weren't that much different to a London or Manchester craft bar. Hope it returns.
The real ale selection is good, and I enjoyed the Gyle 59 and the Milk St, but the plastic glasses don't really work for me, so keg won.
Glad you enjoyed the festival, despite the weather.