Diesel Smoke and Real Ale

It appears to have been a case of third time lucky with the recent Swanage Railway beer festival. Held over the weekend 9-11 May, it finally sold enough beer to break even. The selection of 56 ales, chosen by Tim of the award winning Red Lion in Swanage, came from a variety of breweries - many of them local. A reasonable mix of styles and

strengths were represented - Hampshire’s Penny Black porter and Moles Mild on the

darker side, Hop Back Crop Circle and DBC Jurassic more on the lighter. Hampshire Pink Elephant proved popular as did the White Horse Village Idiot, yet unusually for a beer festival, the first things to sell out were the burgers and white wine! However, Hop Back Summer Lightning proved to be the usual favourite, being the first beer to sell out by Saturday night. Sherborne brewery was represented by 257 and Cheap Street ales, but this reporter chose instead to sample a Pale Ale from Small Paul’s of Gillingham.

This was certainly worth finding and it was a pleasant surprise for the few “tickers” present. Publicity was, as usual for this event, patchy - and although a mixture of diesel train enthusiasts and beer is good, numbers attending the tent on Friday and Saturday nights were still easily managed by 4 bar staff.

The weather was exceptional (in a good way) meaning that most of the drinkers could be outside in the large field – a considerable boon to having everyone huddling inside a dripping tent! A selection of mostly Westons ciders were also on tap, with one Perry and two barrels from Jack Ratt of Lyme Regis.

Too many beers to list individually, this reporter found the Palmers Dorset Gold in top form, the celebration beer from Abbey Ales, Maximus and Stargazer from Yeovil Ales were also quite refreshing. One of the big challenges at this festival was the unfortunate decision to simply put the barrels onto the scaffold in the order they came through the tent flap. Combining this with hastily written beer titles taped onto the barrel ends meant that locating a beer of your choice was almost impossible – whichever side of the bar you were on! A couple of changes to the beers had also not made it onto the bar top lists, so even if your poor server did look at all 56 barrels, there was still a chance that the beer you wanted wasn’t there! This is something that will be addressed next year, and certainly indications suggest that the event as a whole was profitable enough to do it all again next year. Catering was run by the Red Lion team and was the basic barbeque fare of burgers and sausages in buns, with a selection of soft drinks available from the cool box. The mixture of searing meat smoke combined with diesel smoke on the platform was indeed unique!

Graham Cope