I've only ever been to St Austell twice and on both occasions I went with friend and former colleague Jason and on both occasions we got drunk. If you're sensing a link you're right, we both like beer and the two occasions, separated by about eight years, involved the Celtic Beer Festival which is held at St Austell Brewery. I'm not sure where the Celtic bit comes into all this. Obviously Cornwall is a Celtic nation and there were a number of beers from the Celtic zone (and some from way out of that zone). As one of my grandparents was a Scot I qualify to go and felt very much at home in a large room full of sweaty drunk people at this Saturday's festival.
The festival has grown in popularity since we last went and we had to queue to get in, but the wait was worth it. Beer festivals are slightly odd, to my mind, in that they often end up like trips to a pub with no seating. Where they score over pubs is that there is a sense of a meeting of minds (livers?) in that people have come along to have a good time and try out new beers. There is not really the potential for posing, although there were some splendidly attired Roman legionaries who cut quite a dash, especially when standing next to punters in ordinary attire in the queue for the toilets. The Celtic Beer Festival has live music, which was pretty loud, and I spotted a number of more mature (maturer than me, shall we say) festival-goers who looked a bit glum at the aural assault. I suspect they were there more for the beer side of things rather than the festival element. However, they stuck manfully to the task of drinking beer.
There were also a considerable number of women at the festival and they stuck womanfully to the task of getting lashed right up. One asked me what beers I would recommend having no doubt been fooled by my beard into thinking that I actually had some in-depth knowledge. I just vaguely pointed at a few behind the bar and said it was all a matter of pot luck. Among the beers I did know was Brewdog's Punk IPA, which I had a pint of only to find when I went for a refill that it had all gone, a good indication of the esteem in which this powerful brew should be held. Nowadays we are all told to drink sensibly (not whirling round like a mental case juggling hand grenades) and this applies particularly to Punk IPA, it's 6% ABV. Even so it was far from being the strongest beer on offer, which might explain why even as we were arriving I saw one woman cannoning off walls as she attempted to leave.
Because the room was packed and the music was loud, meaningful conversation was difficult, which was a shame because I met quite a few colleagues from the place where I used to work and was keen to catch up with them. I began to think it was a bit rude to continually grab hold of their shoulders so I could bellow into their ear and even though they did this to me I could not always tell exactly what they were saying. Consequently I hope when I took the easy option of just saying "Yes" and giving a bit of a Gallic shrug every now and again I wasn't just agreeing with them that someone else in the group had become a "dreadful bore" or was a bit of a prat. In the end, I suspect that none of it mattered as we all seemed to discover that in some way we were "related through the drink".
The only fly in the ointment was the tool - not part of our group - who insisted on carrying a tray of drinks high over his head as he made his way from the bar to the table where he was sitting, which was near where we were standing. I've seen Greek waiters (other nationalities' waiters, too, I'm sure) who carry vast trays with many orders on them in exactly this way. The significant difference is that the waiters have not been filling themselves up with beer for hour after hour and they are not attempting to manoeuvre their way through a hall packed with the aforementioned sweaty drunk people. The waiters are also proficient at what they do. For our friend the tool, who affected some sort of quiff, I think, the inevitable happened and the glasses (fortunately made of plastic) of beer on his tray slid and he dropped the lot, creating some sort of beer waterfall right next to where we stood. He looked about him rather grumpily, I thought, as if it were anyone else's fault rather than the result of his own pride and ineptitude. But I suppose if that's the worst I can find to say about the trip to the festival, I haven't got much to complain about, but then that's beer for you - it gives you perspective. Thank you St Austell, shall we do it again in another eight years?
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