What an exciting festival it was this year! Undoubtedly our most successful ever. We're quite sad to see it finish. We've so enjoyed meeting all the people who travelled from all over the UK to join us in a fantastic week of socialising and savouring the wide variety of real ales available in the UK.
A glorious 10,500 pints sold in total! Over 130 casks of Scottish and English ales and Scottish Ciders were enjoyed over a week of great craic, wonderful music, food and friendship.
We had great feedback about the range of ales this year which included ales from new local micro breweries. Here is the list we published with tasting notes click here. (some additional ales were added during the week).
We had brand new ales from - Cromarty Brewery Atlantic Drift (which was well received and the fastest selling ale of the festival), Cairngorm Honey and a special hoppy blond (4%abv) ale brewed just for our festival by Windswept Brewery.
The most popular ale was Cromarty's Happy Chappy. We also had very good feedback on the Windswept Wolf.
Speyside Brewery Bottlenose Bitter was also very popular. Highland Brewery Island Hopping sold out by day two of the festival. The most popular English ale was Gundog Shotgun IPA.
For the first time we had Mor Brewery and Mor Please! 4.5% abv - excellent feedback. Another first for us was Williams Bros. Seven Giraffes - we will definitely be taking this in again in the near future.
Strathbraan Brewery is one to watch. We collected direct from brewery and got a brewery tour. This is a fantastic brand new ten barrel brewery.(On A9 turn at Dunkeld junction heading to Crieff for approx. 5 miles). The brewer has not had any beers north of Pitlochry, so our beer festival was first to showcase Strathbraan's "Head East" 4.2% abv and Due South 3.8% abv.
We had a brilliant line up of Live Music ranging from up and coming local artists to well kent favourites! This really added to the event and we plan to have more great music next year. Thank you to all who played and helped create such a great atmosphere.
Friday 29 March Richie Henderson, Stuart Nisbet, Andy May and friends brought the house down.
Saturday 30 March Andy Murray eased the afternoon away followed by foot-stomping Celtic music in the evening from The Scone Fairies
Sunday 31 March Jemma Tweedie, a young local artist with a growing reputation and following gave us a wonderful performance in the afternoon - so well received that she was persuaded back for a few encores.
Friday 5 April Mak-A-Din brilliant foot stomping fun and gentle celtic music was enthusiastically received.
Sat 6 April 70's Disco went down a storm.
Sun 7th April We closed the festival with a barbecue and a relaxing afternoon's music from The Scone Fairies.
We all enjoyed a fascinating Brewer Talk by Ken Duncan, Head Brewer from Inveralmond Brewery and Ali and Nigel from Windswept Brewery. So thank you to for this.
Charity Events in aid of MFR Cash for Kids - £1572.05 Raised!
We are thrilled to announce that during the festival we raised £1572.05 for MFR Cash for Kids. A fantastic result that exceeded all our expectations. We had a Raffle and a fun Quiz Night and had ale related products and memorabilia on sale at our Charity Stall, plus our home-made speciality pies and snacks. A big thank youto everyone who contributed and especially to the brewereries for generously donating items to be sold or raffled for charity:- Cairngorm Brewery, Cromarty Brewery, Fyne Ales, Highland Brewery, Houston Brewery, Inveralmond Brewery, Orkney Brewery, Speyside Brewery, Windswept Brewery.
Festival Food
Food was a big feature of the event this year. We had a Speciality Snack Menu available all day with Wild Boar Sausage, Venison Burgers, Game Pie and a Special Menu of dishes created using some of our favourite local ales (Happy Chappy Chicken, Black Gold Steak and Ale Pie etc). .
A year comes around really quickly so if you are planning on joining us at next year's festival why not book accommodation with us and enjoy the ales without any concerns about travelling home? We offer a 10% discount on accommodation for CAMRA members.
We'd like to say a special thank you to all our wonderful staff who worked so hard and so cheerfully throughout the whole event. Also, to those of our regular customers who gave a helping hand thoughout the week. We couldn't do it without them.
Cheers and see you all next year!
Gordon and Morag Holding |
Beer Festival 2012
Beer Festival 2012
Beer Festival 2012
Beer Festival 2012
Beer Festival 2012
Beer Festival 2010
Beer Festival 2010
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