Another Wigan Beer Festival over with!

I got back from the Wigan Beer Festival yesterday evening just in time to see Lizzie Nunnery's excellent set at the Bothy Folk Club. Wigan went well. As usual there was a good atmosphere, most of the beer disappeared, and there was a variety of bands on from folk bands playing the kind of well-known folk songs that seem to go down well at festivals (Wild Rover and the like), a rock covers band and a young grungy band with a vocalist clearly into Liam Gallagher.

As I've commented here before, Wigan is quite unusual in that it gets in a lot of young people on the Saturday night sessions, including groups of young women who have not come as partners of beer drinking males, but on their own. You'll therefore be faced with the sight of young women glammed up to the nines, tottering around on high heels clutching a pint glass with real ale or cider. I was on the door for a while, and quite a few of them turned their nose up at the half pint option. "We want pints!" they'd say mock-indignantly. You don't argue with Wigan women.

Several people came up to me and asked, "Are you RedNev?" It was nice that people are reading the blog, but I wondered how they knew it was me. Eventually I twigged: there's a picture of me on this blog - idiot! It was also good to bump into friends whom I don't meet very often nowadays. The beers I had were well-kept, and I heard no complaints from anybody about the others. And for the first year ever since the move to this sports hall, no one said to me that they preferred it in the old venue in Wigan Pier. That's good, because it means that this is now seen as the proper venue for the festival.

I'll check the beers of the festival and publish them below when I find out. While at the festival, I picked details of some beer festivals that, in the next day or so, I'll put on my beer festivals page, which needs updating, as does the events page.

P.S. Beers of the Festival

Light Beer Winners were :
Gold: Castle Rock Sweet Woodruff
Silver: Blakemere Cosmic
Bronze: Abbeydale Dr Mortons 'latest'

Dark Beer Winners :
Gold: Binghams Ginger Doodle Stout
Silver: Blackedge Black Port
Bronze: City of Cambridge Atom Splitter