Beer Festival 2018

As you may remember, every February we volunteer at the Fleetwood Beer Festival, where we serve beers to customers and meet some lovely people in the process. This year’s festival was so relaxed and we tasted so many amazing beers that it was difficult to choose which ones to include on my art journal page (grin!).

I started this page with an image of glasses filled with beer which I recycled from a magazine; it is stuck to the page like all of the other papers using a UHU Stic. Then I cut some strips of dark grey wood effect paper from a Docrafts paper pack, tearing the edge on one side and colouring all the edges with a Cold Grey Faber-Castell Big Brush marker. Next I took our tasting notes that we used at the festival and cut out the beers we most enjoyed, arranging them on the page so the colour of the actual beer matched that of the beers in the glasses. I also cut the beer festival wording from an old magazine too and I edged them and the tasting notes with the Cold Grey Big Brush marker before sticking them in place. I added a star brad to each of the tasting notes, which I pushed through the page and fastened into place. I also covered the back of all the brads with masking tape to protect my next journal page. As our beer festival supports the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) I added one of their badges to my page, removing the pin from the back and sticking it in place using double-sided tape. To match the orange on the badge and sea theme, I also added three little orange fishes to the page which reminded me of the Dutch Fishman Fish & Chip catering truck at the festival too; they often came round with free tasters for us to enjoy (grin!).

There were over 100 beers at the festival this year and we enjoyed trying around 50 of them over the 3 days of the festival, as you can see from our photo we only had a small taster of each – well that’s my story and I’m sticking to it (grin!).

We liked quite a few a few beers this year and the ones I included on my page were:

• Chocolate Orange Stout by Amber Ales in Derbyshire (ABV/Alcohol By Volume 4%) – it is a dark and creamy beer and tasted just like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange in a glass and was my favourite beer, yum!
• Harveys Sussex Bitter (ABV 4%) – this is a well-balanced easy drinking amber bitter and it’s from Sussex; this is one of the beers we use to drink all the time when we lived in the South of England.
• Moonshine is from Abbeydale Brewery in Sheffield (ABV 3%) – this is a pale ale with a hop aroma and grapefruit to finish. My hubby wrote “nice” on his notes and I found he often had this one in his glass (grin!).
• Lemon Dream (ABV 5%) from Salopian Brewery in Shropshire – this is a golden ale that is brewed using organic lemons which adds beautiful subtle zesty aromas and has a citrus filled fruity finish.
• Rhubarb and Ginger Pale Ale from Settle Brewery in North Yorkshire (ABV 9%) – this is a zingy pale ale and is made using Yorkshire rhubarb balanced with fiery root ginger and tasted very smooth.
• Mutiny on the Bounty (ABV 2%) from Campervan Brewery in Edinburgh – this is a yummy dark milk stout and gets its unique aroma from the use of roasted coconut, it tastes of rich chocolate and a touch of coffee and vanilla. Again it’s a dark beer so one of my choices (grin!).
• Yorkshire Pride (ABV 7%) from Acorn Brewery in Wombwell – this is a well-balanced light golden ale, it tasted like a regular bitter and was very easy drinking and smooth.
• Schiehallion (ABV 8%) from Haviestoun Brewery in Cumbria – this is a crisp and refreshing Scottish craft lager with a lingering, fresh grapefruity finish. It takes its name from the famous mountain Schiehallion (pronounced “She-hal-i-on”) in Scotland.

As T Stands for T Day I’m joining Bluebeard and Elizabeth and the rest of the T Gang with my Beer Festival art journal page and photos – cheers! If you are not keen on beer then there is a bar where you can get tea, coffee, soft drinks, water etc as well as a Cider Bar which sells (hard) cider and also a Gin and Prosecco Bar – wishing you all a very Happy T day!

I’m also pleased to join the lovely Rike from rike’s art, who is hosting the Animals A-Z challenge over at Art Journal Journey as F is for Fish on my page today!

We  like to support the RNLI so we were pleased that our local lifeboat station took delivery of a brand new lifeboat this weekend. The boat sailed from Poole, Dorset where it was built, even carrying out a sea rescue along the way and was carried to the lifeboat station from the sea on it’s trailer as the tide can be up to 3 miles away. It was a lovely sunny day, but so cold with the Siberian winds we have been experiencing for a week or so. There was a good turn out of people to see it and it arrived at 13.24 hours which was no accident as 13-24 is its identification number (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:

• Old Beer Magazines
• Fleetwood Beer Festival 2018 Programme
• Docrafts A4 Ultimate Die-Cuts and Paper Pack (Festive Fauna PMA160949)
• Faber-Castell Big Brush artist pen (Cold Grey IV 233)
• RNLI badge
• Metal Brads (Stars – Brown, Fish – Orange)
• UHU Stic
• The Range double-sided foam tape