Campaign for Real Ale

Know your rights, especially as a drinker, when you go next to your local. You could be drinking crap for all you know.

I had the amazing, once-in-a-year opportunity to go to the Durham Beer Festival held at the Durham University Student Union.


Yeah. I'm in Alice's world where you can drink pretty much what you want on a university campus. Ring, ringring, ring. Um, hello OU? Yeah, I'd like to open you up for this cool thing called adult discretionary activities where you could allow the adult students and adult faculty and staff to partake of the wonderfulness that is Delirium Tremens....

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It's such a wonderful Belgian beer, I didn't even mind the pink elephants I saw...

I mean really, OU... If a #3 university in a CIVILIZED COUNTRY can have a family room for the underaged at a beer festival, surely too, you could as well. What better way to keep tabs on our youth than right under our noses as we imbibe?

You could even have security! They have such smooth butts to polish the handrails with! There's bathrooms for the washing of the hands afterwards! WE CAN DO IT! We can be the change we want to see!

And the clientele that would attend are the good ol' boys with money types. With a festival like this, people are there to spend money to drink beer. To drink beer. And to drink the beer. It's classy. See? The bartenders have official festival uniform polo shirts. There's a manly smell that you just can't get from the 50 yard line at Owen Field. Toby Keith knows this.

*****

I went this last weekend to the Durham Beer Festival, obviously. I really enjoyed myself...sensibly. I thought I caught a glimpse of a "minor" celebrity and was thrilled that I might get a chance at a reddit post, "Guess Who I Ran Into?" Alas, the fat man was just a fat man.

The fat man sitting under the PROMOTES DRINKERS RIGHTS sign, to me, looked like Nick the Greek from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. 

CAMRA, or Campaign for Real Ale, is an organization that was started in the 70s here in England as a way to keep drinking from being commercialized, a la Budweiser and to promote small pubs. I had several Englishmen (okay, two) tell me about their perception of Americans and the American beer (they think it's shit). 

According to these two Geordies, and if I'm honest others from the area here as well, think that all Americans drink is Budweiser varieties and the odd Coors and Miller Lites. I didn't totally disabuse them of that notion because well, those beers have their place. But I told them about how when I did go out to Louie's after a hard day of teaching 6th graders, I'd usually get a Sam Adams or a Corona. With lime. No salt. Or a Negro Modelo. With shredded lime on the goblet rim. The bigger the better. No salt. See? I can be a beer snob too.

First beer of the night.

So, the Durham Beer Festival. Really cool in many ways. First, it was on a university campus. Paradigm shift for me. Second, £10 for four half pints and I get to keep the glass? Bargain. Third, I got to go to a part of the University that I hadn't been motivated to explore prior. Really. Fourth, I got to go with my buddy, Ruth.

And I learned a lot about myself that night too. I learned that I LOVE Belgian beer. Best beer of the night? Delirium Tremens, hands down. It won "Best Beer in the World" in 1998 at the World Beer Championships. 

Also, I like the Dumbo reference.