27 March 2012: Award winners announced

Nearly 4,200 people attended the recently held 22nd Sussex Beer & Cider Festival. “We nearly ran out of beer and cider on the Saturday night” says Ingrid Sharp, Festival Organiser: “this only shows that the popularity of real ale and cider is increasing”.

• Beer of the Festival: Hop Back Entire Stout based at Downton, Wiltshire
• Bev Robbins Trophy for Best Sussex Beer: Kissingate Mary’s Ruby Mild
• Cider of the Festival: Gwatkins Norman Cider
• Perry of the Festival: Troggi Perai
• South East Regional Champion Beer of Britain: Dark Star Imperial Stout

Thanks to the generosity of the festival goers who donated unused tokens, the festival charity, Leo House Brighton, benefited by £1309. £531 was also collected in cash. Kissingate Brewery based at Lower Beeding kindly donated a barrel of ale which raised £127.

Next year's festival will be held on the 7th –9th March 2013, and more information will be available on this website as and when we have it.

Peter Mitchell
Publicity Officer for the Sussex Beer and Cider Festival
March 2012

12 March 2012: Another year down...

Many thanks to the hundreds of you who came to enjoy the festival over the past weekend, and very special thanks to the dozens of volunteers who gave up their time freely in order to make it happen!

A beer festival of this scale is a little like a swan - we all want it to appear calm and graceful on the surface; meanwhile, under the water, large leathery feet are paddling away like mad! Whilst we hoped we made it look like a swan for most of the time, there were two issues that we'd like to explain briefly (and may be able to expand upon in due course):

• Firstly, the beer list: running a festival hinging on promoting a temperamental, living product is always going to pose special challenges, which is why some beers invariably end up hitting condition late (or not all), and some don't even leave the brewery in a state that the brewer's happy with (usually ending up in the odd substitute beer here and there). What happened last week, despite the sterling efforts of our exasperated beer coordinator, was a supplier let us down badly and at the last minute with nearly 40 beers, meaning a whole raft of substitutions (nearly 20% of our entire provisional list!) had to be sourced, racked up on the stillage (ruining our carefully planned alphabetic order!) and then conditioned. Our hugely experienced cellar team will not let us sell a beer that they don't believe is in tip-top condition and good to go, hence a lot of beers were held back from Thursday night's session (and, in some cases, Friday lunch as well). Whilst we did our best to spread the word, both in person and via paper lists asnd blackboard updates at the Festival, and remotely via Twitter, Facebook and the Blogger feed at the foot of this page, we do again apologise if you had your heart set on a particular beer only to find it unavailable when you asked for it. Still, the whole point of these festivals is to give you the opportunity to try new beers...
• Secondly, the catering: unfortunately, and unbeknownst to both the festival organisers and to our caterers, the power supply arrangements to the Main Hall kitchen had changed since last year, leading to a number of challenges in trying to get enough food out to hungry punters at key times. Rather than walk away, our caterers valiantly soldiered on in the face of this, and we thank them for their professionalism and effort in doing so. We would, however, still like to apologise to any festival visitors and volunteers who were affected by these delays.

The organising team have a wash-up session in early April, so if there's anything you wish to bring to our attention, please drop a line to the email on our Contact Us page.