The second visit to the Letchworth fest for me, and the third for Dan. Taking place Thurs-Sat 22-24th September and boasting over 45 ales, we made it along to the Friday afternoon sesion. It's quite a nice little fest, with good beer notes again, and this year non-smoking (which I was happy about - but others much less so). Also managed to get seating (possibly for the first time ever at a festival!)

After last years disappointing "hard man" curry (link here), we were hoping for more traditional fest grub - sausages, pasties and the like. Unfortunately for some bizarre reason, the organisers chose to offer chinese instead, which I couldn't fathom at all. If you're drinking beer, you want hand-hald, stodgy, meaty goodness - not chicken chow mein on a paper plate with a fork and spoon. Not that we could even have that, as they didn't start serving til the early evening. Fortunately nuts and scratchings came to the rescue to stave off the hunger.

As last year, the beers were good on the whole, although serving a couple of degrees cooler would have bumped up a couple of marks I think. Also sampled a couple of the foreign beers, which were great - will have to give this bar more attention in future.

Brewer	Region	Name	ABV	Tasting Notes	Rating
Bartrams	Suffolk	Coal Porter	4.5%	Burnt, malty dark ale with a dry, lingering aftertaste	6/10
Red Squirrel	Herts	Californian Ale	4.1%	Gold, slightly sweet, but cloying	5/10
Surrey Hills	Surrey	Ranmore Ale	3.8%	Light, very flavoursome session ale. Peppery, quite dry flavour	7/10
Green Jack	Suffolk	Orange Wheat	4.2%	Light, quite citrusy. Refreshing - could drink this a while	7/10
B&T	Beds	Fruit Bat	4.5%	Light, raspberry flavour. Bit too synthetic, but does improve with drinking. Quite sweet.	5/10
Du Bocq	Belgium	Blanches de Namur	4.5%	Very pleasant, wheat-style beer. Nicely spiced	7/10
Adnams	Suffolk	Flagship	4.3%	Quite OK pale ale	6/10
Donnington	Gloucs	XXX	3.6%	Dark, but with a delicate flavour. Light chocolate with malty aftertaste. Quite drinkable	7/10
Verhaeghe	Belgium	Echte Kriek	6.8%	A fantastic Kriek - not overwhelming, but very well balanced cherry beer. Good amount of sharp to counteract the sweet	8/10