I’m not a fan of beer festivals. I’ve only ever been to one of them, and it didn’t end well. After three random beers at a university festival I lost my grasp of reality. I have no idea about how I got home, but I do remember sitting on the floor of a kebab shop in Manchester, with my head in my hands, surrounded by people who were pointing and laughing.
I needed to get to Orpington. For me, the M25 motorway sets the boundary of where London ends and ‘everywhere else’ starts. I guess you can also define the geographical extent of London as ‘where the red London buses travel to’. The red Buses don’t go much further than Orpington.
It was pretty easy to get there. I caught a train from a nearby train station, got off five stops later, and walked for ten minutes until I found a large house that was also home to the Orpington Liberal Party. I knew the dangers: after two pints there was a strong possibility I would end up ranting about government policy, in particular, the Liberal Democrats’ rejection of an election pledge to protect higher education funding. A small yellow sign that had the hand-written words ‘beer festival’ had been stuck on a green door. I decided to accept the ‘ranting risk’, and went inside.
‘You need to pay three pounds for a deposit on a glass. You can either return it at the end of the night, or take it home with you.’ I gave the doorman, who was called Sean, some money. ‘Here’s the voucher. This allows you to get two pints. And here are the notes.’ Sean handed me a sheet of paper. ‘At the bar, you’ve got those’ Sean gestured to a section of the paper that signified ‘ales on the pump, at the bar’. ‘And through there you’ve got the barrels’. Sean pointed to an entrance, which was at the end of the bar. ‘You can see what they are on the sheet’
I found my way to the entrance to the ‘barrel area’. It was noisy, humid and seemed to be filled completely with middle aged men, all of whom were sporting beards. A folk music trio were playing, and were being thoroughly ignored. I joined the beer queue, and ordered a pint of strong oat-coffee-stout. It was delicious.
Feeling suitably equipped with beer, I decided I needed to try to find the ‘Meetup crew’. I went back to talk to Sean (since I thought he might know people), and asked him in a deliberately loud voice, ‘do you know anyone here called Debbie?’ Before Sean had a chance to say, ‘sorry, mate, Debbie who?’ I heard a voice emerge from the depths of a nearby leather sofa. I had found Debbie and her entourage.
Debbie was a retired social worker in her late fifties. She had set up her group, as a book club, a year earlier, but its spectrum of activities had widened. Her group, which had just over one hundred and fifty members, advertises trips to the city, a bridge club, pub quiz nights, music evenings, and beer festivals in Orpington Liberal Club.
After the introductions to five other people, which included Debbie’s husband Andrew, and a young Irish couple called Siobhan and Michael, I told Debbie about my quest.
‘Have you been to Fill my Weekend?’ asked Debbie, enthusiastically. I told her about my sketching at the National Portrait Gallery. We had both met the chap who ran the group. ‘How about Ken? He runs Ken’s events.’ I said that I had also met Ken. This was further evidence to support my hypothesis that everyone seemed to know Ken.
Debbie and Siobhan exchanged tasting notes about cider and then swapped glasses. After some chatter about the challenges of running a book group, Debbie said that she had to go ‘to play the washboard in the folk band’. Apparently she didn’t know how to play the washboard, but that didn’t matter, since nobody was listening and everyone was, by then, pretty drunk.
Three quarters of an hour later, I had finished my first pint. I struggled out of the leather sofa and staggered over to the ‘barrel area’. It was at that point that the strength of the beer hit me. I felt woozy, but very happy. It was almost as if I had reached the point of optimal blood-alcohol level after a single drink. Aware of the rule of ‘diminishing returns’ (and wondering whether I had ‘peaked too soon’) I ordered half a pint of American stout, which turned out to be distinctly hoppy.
For the next half hour I chatted to Andrew. Andrew used to be a software developer, who retired a couple of years ago. We chatted about programming, real-time control, assembly language, different programming languages, and we collectively solved the challenges of the software industry. ‘I’ve used loads of different languages’ he told me. ‘I’ve coded things all the way down from microcontrollers up to web front end systems. When I left, they were moving onto languages like Python’.
The door man, Sean, had gone. In his place was another chap who was sipping an interesting looking cloudy beer. I asked him what it was and he told me the name. ‘It’s Belgian’, he added.
Having finished my bitter American stout, I staggered over to the bar and gesticulated wildly towards the pump that was the source of the cloudy Belgium beer, asking for a half pint of the stuff. The tasting notes described a beer with a rich taste of honey, accompanied by complex overtones of lavender. My space on the leather sofa was still there when I returned. Michael had, however, taken Andrew’s place. Andrew and Debbie had decided to call it a night, perhaps since Debbie, by then, had downed three pints of strong cider.
For the remainder of the night, we chatted about politics. By the time I was three quarters into my Belgian beer, the inevitable happened: I had started to rant about university tuition fees and Liberal Democrat policy. Nobody minded. Either no one could hear me, or no one really cared.
The bell for last orders was rung; time had flown by. I looked around the room. Numbers were beginning to wane. Siobhan and Michael decided that it was time to go, so we said our goodbyes. I checked my phone for train times: I had a bit of time to wait until my next train.
New drinkers colonised nearby seats. I chatted to the new people for a bit, but I have no recollection of what we talked about.
I left the club ten minutes later, feeling warm and happy, and walked to Orpington train station. I loved the oat coffee stout, but wasn’t a great fan of the American equivalent. The Belgian beer, on the other hand, with its rich floral overtones had been a complicated revelation. Another good point was that I wasn’t in Manchester, and I wasn’t ending the night sitting on the floor in a kebab shop.
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