Fleetwood Beer Festival 2017

Every February we volunteer at the Fleetwood Beer Festival, we really enjoyed our three days serving beers from the bars and we met some lovely people too. This journal page is all about the amazing beers that we tasted. It was very difficult to choose our favourites this year, because there were so many that we really enjoyed.

I started by painting broken stripes of Liquitex acrylic paint vertically down the page. Next I added small splatters of diluted Spectrum Aqua markers by scribbling the ink on an acrylic block, spritzing it with water and then flicking the ink onto the page with a paintbrush.  I chose Gold, Amber and Black coloured markers to represent the different shades of beer we tried. I stamped a faint grid design around the edges of the page, to add some texture, using a homemade stamp and black Archival Ink. I stencilled embossing ink using a distressed dot mask by Creative Expressions and then I covered the ink with a white embossing powder and used my heat gun to fix it to the page. This depicts the froth or “head” that forms on the top of the beer when you pour it. I collaged beer related images and words from magazines and our tasting notes using a UHU Stic to stick them to the page and outlined them using a black Uni Pin marker so they stood out more from the background.

I really like this information about glasses; we tend to drink from tankards/mugs when we are working behind the bar at the festival, as they help keep the beer cooler.

The snippets from our own tasting notes show our five favourite beers of the festival.

At the festival there were over 125 real ales, ciders, perries and world beers. We worked on the bar serving the cask real ale, some of which were on hand pumps. We tasted many beers and added our comments to the tasting notes so we could recommend beers to others; there was something for everybody whether your taste preference is fruity, coffee, chocolate, hoppy, citrus, floral, ginger, honey, treacle and we even had some that were a little like lager.

I just managed to get a photo of the beer and Subway Club sandwich we had in one of our breaks. My beer preference tends to be the darker coloured beer and I have to say the Spilt Milk (spelt wrong in the tasting notes) really did taste like chocolate milk. My hubby tends to like the paler beers and amber bitters and was not disappointed as they had one of our old favourites by Harvey’s brewey in Sussex. As T Stands for Tuesday I’m saying a big hello to the T Gang and wishing you all a Happy T Day!

By the end of the festival many of our favourite beers had sold out, I’m not sure if it was because we were recommending them or because we were drinking them – we didn’t drink all the Harvey’s Old Ale,  honest (grin!)

Thanks for joining me today! If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you.

Here is a list of all the materials used to create this art journal page:

• Liquitex Artist Color Acrylic (Parchment)
• Spectrum Aqua Artist Marker (Gold, Amber, Black)
• Ranger Archival Ink (Jet Black)
• Uni Pin Fine Line marker (Black 0.1mm)
• Dovecraft Premium Embossing Stamp Pad (Clear)
• Stampendous Embossing Powder (Detail White Opaque DP100 50727)
• Creative Expressions That Special Touch of Mica Masks (Distressed Dots)
• Homemade wooden stamp block with Plasterboard/Drywall Tape
• Beer magazines and booklets
• Fleetwood Beer Festival 2017 Programme
• UHU Stic