National Winter Ales Festival 2010, Manchester

Would you buy a CAMRA membership from this man? National Winter Ales Festival, Manchester 2010. Photo: Tim Hampson

The National Winter Ales Festival is very much the little brother of CAMRA’s two national festivals: with an attendance of 8,350 this year, it’s about an eighth the size of the Great British Beer Festival — though still manages to offer some 200 different beers, ciders and perries compared with GBBF’s 500. And it’s a much more relaxed and enjoyable occasion, leaving a warm glow despite the inhospitability of Manchester weather in January.

This year the festival moved about 1km from its long established venue at New Century Hall to the Sheridan Suite on Oldham Road in Ancoats, a bit of a bleak area a stretch of the legs or a bus ride from the city centre. The place is a bit corporate but comfortable and civilised, and much better able to handle the numbers — there was very little queueing. When I visited on the Wednesday there was also plenty of seating, usually a bugbear at festivals, and moving around the single big bar space on the first floor was no problem. The posse of northern-based beer writers and bloggers I stumbled upon proved most congenial company.

If you’re a lover of strong and/or dark beers like me, then this is the fest for you, with lots on offer, and well-chosen too, though there’s still a good range of lighter and lower gravity stuff for those that prefer. A fine array of casks covers the country, but with a detectable bias to the north of England, and a range of breweries that gives plenty of space to micros but also honours worthy independents. The Real Ale in a Bottle bar had rarities from the likes of Dunham Massey and Three B’s, while imports continued the winter theme, with plenty of German Bock and Eisbier and strong Belgian and Dutch winter beers (a trio from Alvinne named after the Three Kings), though on the lighter side there was the unfiltered Kvasniove Pivo from Duvel-Moortgat’s Czech subsidiary Bernard. An unusual range of Danish craft brews added to the interest, with their importer on hand to provide further information.

The Winter Ales section of the Champion Beer of Britain competition is also judged at the festival — there’s a regional round, and a national round with the winning beers going forward to the main CBoB competition at GBBF. Some very worthy brews went off with gongs, with overall winner the highly deserving Elland 1872 Porter, last year’s runner up. Also in the Top 3 of the national round were Breconshire Ramblers Ruin and Acorn Gorlovka Imperial Stout.

My one gripe was the food, a mainly Indian-themed buffet. At any other event I would have welcomed what was indeed tasty food at a very reasonable price and with plenty of vege options, but it was just too spicy for serious tasting — it took a good half hour and quite a bit of water for my tastebuds to reboot. And there was plenty on offer that richly rewarded the capacity to taste.

Overall well worth making a regular event in your beer calendar, and there are some great pubs in Manchester that also put on a show at festival time. The Smithfield Hotel in Swan Street runs its own fringe festival with around 60 beers, mainly on stillage in the cellar and brought up to order, though quite a few seemed to be ticker-friendly specials…much to the delight of an elderly gentleman at my table who’d brought his own jug along, the better to pour his beers into recycled 250ml plastic mineral water bottles for reasons best known to himself.

Top 3 Festival Tastings:

• [intlink id=”511″ type=”post”]Elland 1872 Porter[/intlink] 6.5%, Elland, West Yorkshire, England
• [intlink id=”517″ type=”post” /]Leeds Midnight Bell[/intlink] 4.8%, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England
• [intlink id=”514″ type=”post” /]Marble Chocolate Marble[/intlink] 5.5%, Manchester, England