HAPPY RETURN FOR YORKSHIRE'S BIGGEST REAL ALE FESTIVAL
The Great British Northern Beer Festival
Despite possible doubts about the future of Yorkshire's best loved realale and music festival, it has been announced that it will be held once again at Oakwood Technical College. With the retirement of the founders, Jan and Jim Charters, the new head teacher, David Naisbitt, has given the charity his full encouragement.
The event will be held on Thursday 18th, Friday, 19th and Saturday 20th February 2010.There will be many real ales, fine wines, real cider and foreign bottled beers as well as fine music on four stages with 28 different band appearances, featuring Rock, Blues, Big Band, Folk, Tribute and Soul acts.
There will be 220 real ales, all served through handpulls making this Festival the biggest hand pulled Festival in the world. The British ales will vary from summer style, easy drinking beers through to heavy, beautiful, dark, winter warmers. This allows the Festival to offer a huge range of beers that summer Festivals find difficult. Brewers make easy drinking beers all year round, but the heavier brews tend to be only available in the winter months.
The Festival is the biggest one of its kind North of Peterborough in the UK. Nearly 12,000 visitors came in 2009 and 2010 is set to beat that record. As a result the organisers have reluctantly decided to restrict Friday entrances to tickets sales only, therefore no readmissions from the sponsor evenings will be allowed.
As well as real ales there are fine rare wines sourced by professional sommeliers, real British ciders and Perrys from counties as diverse as Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Somerset and Herefordshire. There's also a large number of foreign bottled beers all of which have unique flavours. One is of pure chocolate, another of apricots. They are from no less than 9 countries from Australia to Argentina and all very different to English ales. To help maintain the palate there are 2 café bars serving excellent food.
Tickets will be available from Rotherham and Sheffield pubs and large stores as well as the council visitor centre in the centre of Rotherham from 1st January 2010 . It is strongly advised to purchase advance tickets as the 2009 Festival closed entry to those without tickets on Friday. The organisers are sure that Friday will be a sell out, so it is possible that no tickets will be available on the Friday night in 2010.
