The Middle Earth Beer & Music Festival 2016 is taking place this weekend at Hurst Green Village Hall on the road between Longridge and Clitheroe in Lancashire. Friday the 17th June is a ticketed evening event with live music. Saturday June the 18th lasts all day from 12 noon until midnight and beyond and it's £3 to get in but you do gain a nice commemorative beer glass - and there's live music all day and night.
But I'm not going to do that!
Instead I'm just going to tell you how good it's going to be and have done with it. Put simply, this weekend at the Middle Earth Beer & Music Festival there will be a selection of ale choices like I could've never imagined when I first started drinking back in the 1980s. As a 15-year-old, having my first proper pint of bitter in my local pub in Deane, Bolton, all I knew was that you didn't drink trendy lager because it wasn't "proper" and mild was going down hill.
I knew it was a social triumph having your brothers put a jacket on you, to make you look older, and take you down the pub. It meant entering a world of laughter, story telling, inebriation, girlfriends, mates and sometimes the full on action of an adventure somewhere new in weird, exotic, even dangerous surroundings.
Since then though the drink itself - the ales - has gone further into a new culture, way beyond cartoon characters like Andy Capp supping a pint with a fag stuck to his bottom lip. The choice of ales, the difference in taste and style, has exploded into a world of consumerist fantasy -with complex imagery association involving elves, dwarves, the void, famous writers, exotic locations, serial killers, acid trips - you name it, being marketed and brewed right now as beer-association love juice! A pint down the pub has blown up into another world of craft beers, real ales and even a new cider industry boom.
This weekend is no exception. Our festival is themed around the fantasy novel Lord of the Rings - now a bunch of massive budget films and an international merchandise set in the imaginary world of Middle Earth. So expect some themed beers and maybe even the odd hobbit lingering among the crowds.
Expect to be impressed.
If you appreciate the subtleties of flavour, alcoholic blurry eyed merriment and you've got a chirpy and amused imagination then you're laughing all the way to the Gents. The world of ales now; it is beer drinkers heaven. The magical variation on flavour match the joyful write ups and clip imagery too. It's not just talk. Our festival has plenty to offer as well as continuous live music, as you can see from the lists with this article.
So I have to state clearly and loudly that The Middle Earth Beer & Music Festival involves drinking the most glorious and finest ales I have ever tasted in 30 years of supping. I mean it. Even better than last year. 2015.
Trust me I have tested this out.
No kidding. No exaggeration.
I returned to the town of Clitheroe in Lancashire to live with a relative back in February.
I happily discovered that my mates were in the best, friendliest bar, I've ever spent time in - The Ale House in Clitheroe - which also happens to be the base for the Middle Earth Beer & Music Festival 2016. (even if it goes pear shaped socially from this point on, it will have been the "friendliest bar with the best beers I've ever been in") with a rotating selection of real ales and craft beers. It was two streets from where I lived and I suddenly wasn't on the brink of homelessness and the general poverty which is prevalent in the UK today. Time to celebrate life, friendship and laughter with beer!
I spent a few months testing my new theory that these craft ales and real ales at the Ale House ( a micro pub in the centre of town) also gave me hardly any hangover. That may be just me. I also drink more slowly than I used to though I promise, scout's honour, that I did try hard to get a hangover and hardly got touched.
Personally my favourites are the citrussy pale ales. I love them.
By the way there will be a shuttle bus to take people from the Ale House to the Beer Festival in Hurst Green this Saturday. Check at the Ale House for times or on the website.
It just seems funny now that as an 18 year old backpacking on an Inter rail across Europe (a chance to travel all the trains of Europe on one month's ticket taken up by generations of travellers) with friends when I discovered hefe weiss bier in Munich. I was shocked. What gunk had they been serving me In Bolton. I'd been cheated. The beer in the 80s in the north of England was hard to drink. You took pride in your manliness in getting used to it for the effect it had on you. German beer, on the other hand, was sweet and gorgeous, easy to drink, all frothy and fizzy in golden glory served in enormous jolly tankards. Our beers were miserable and vomity bland in comparison. They smelt like the morning after and tasted like you'd washed your shoes in the barrels.
Like the dire nightmare of being brought up with instant coffee (Mellow Birds was like factory floor scraping, weedy dust that made insipid dishmuck) - over the years I can now say that we have good coffee in this country, finally. I no longer have to bazz off to Amsterdam or Bruges, or Copenhagen or Paris to get a good coffee. Equally we now have beers to rule the world ( in good taste obviously I'm not talking about rebooting our old Empire of atrocities and exploitation).
What I'm saying is...when it comes to beer and coffee we've made it ! The UK is up there with the best. The dark days of murky slops, for those who don't know any better, are over for many pubs.
Your local festival in the Ribble Valley is here to prove it.
(as an aside it's somehow comforting to know we still have rank food in restaurants compared to say the French or the Spanish no matter how many cooking shows there are on terrestrial TV. We wouldn't want to start getting good at food as well now would we. )
Mike Kneafsey My Official website
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