The Cambridge Beer Festival is in its 40th year this year, which makes it nearly as old as Andrew. That’s old. Speaking of Andrew, and reasons why I shouldn’t mock him for being only slightly older than me, the hard drive he ordered for my laptop arrived the next day and he and Luke installed it and now I have the internet again and I don’t have to log Luke out of everything to use it. We’re both pretty happy about that.

Back to the beer festival. We’ve been twice so far – Monday and Tuesday. Luke and I had gone into town Monday to do some shopping then figured we’d go by the festival to see if they needed any extra help. We signed in, grabbed our complimentary t-shirts and our name tags and then wandered around the bar area but there were so many volunteers everywhere that there was nothing we could do. There were so many volunteers that most of them were drinking rather than serving, in fact.

So we grabbed a table outside and some drinks and waited for Andrew. The festival is entirely run by volunteers and CAMRA, the campaign for real ale. I don’t like beer but I do like cider. There are over 200 beers and 50 ciders as well as perry, mead and a few wines. One thing I particularly like about the festival is that you pay a small amount to get in and then buy a glass or bring your own. The glass is a great souvenir or you can take it back at the end and get a refund. As volunteers we get to use glasses from previous festivals for free. This means there’s a really small amount of waste.

Food wise there’s vans selling fish and chips and doughnuts etc but the beer tent also sells plates of cheese and giant hunks of bread that you have to rip apart with your hands. Exactly what you want to go with drinks like that.

The first day of the festival I tried a few ciders and ended up meeting two guys who were selling their cider at the festival for the first time. Yesterday I tried mead for the first time and wow! I thought that it would be like cider – a drink produced from a product to which the end result bears a slight resemblance. Not so! Mead tastes and smells a whole lot like honey. I loved it, being the sweet tooth that I am. I tried two, a light then a dark and definitely liked the less burned/medicinal taste of the light better.

I’m in the middle of transferring all my photos from my camera to my computer (all 1808 of them) so no photos today.