Despite England making the World Cup semi-final, I'll be setting off tomorrow on my annual trip to Ealing Beer Festival in Walpole Park, Ealing.
As usual the festival runs Wednesday to Saturday, and this year it starts tomorrow on the 11th of July.
In preparation, I've looked at the beer list and tried to find a range of top picks, spanning different types and flavours of beer, some well known to me, some completely new, and I've collated them in a (now traditional) Euler diagram.
Why would you do this?
I have previously written about how I come up with my choices and why I ended up using Euler diagrams in a few blog posts, and you can see the most recent here:
- Ealing Beer Festival 2014
- Ealing Beer Festival 2015
- Ealing Beer Festival 2016
- Ealing Beer Festival 2017
The TL;DR version is:
- Beer festivals are about enjoying the beer, the company and (hopefully) the weather.
- Spending time reading the beer list is time you could spend doing any of those other things.
- Using a diagram lets you quickly pick out a beer and know (roughly) what to expect.
- It helps me make recommendations to others without having to think too much after a few pints.
Although it's not perfectly accurate, I've had good feedback from others that have used it as a rough guideline over the last few years.
My beer picks for 2018
Here is my Ealing Beer Festival 2018 diagram (click for full-size):
Although it's (deliberately) subtle, the beers in dark blue text are those that made it into the diagram from last year. Those in black text are new picks for this year.
Top picks
From those beers in the diagram, my top three picks are:
- Robinsons - Hoppy-Wan-Kenobi - I'm a sucker for a silly name, but Robinsons are consistently excellent and I'm keen to try some more of their beers (their Trooper, developed with Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden, is very nice).
- Bushy's - Ruby 1874 Mild - I've previous had a few great beers from Bushy's and one of my former colleagues went to the Isle of Man just to drink their beers excessively for a weekend, you know, as you do. So, this'll be high up on my list.
- Downtown - Slovenian Dream - It's always great tasting Slovenian hops in our beers, and I'm sure this will be no exception.
Enjoy!
If you're planning on going to Ealing Beer Festival this year, I hope you enjoy it! If you take a print-out of this diagram, please let me know how you get on.
If you're going tomorrow, despite the football, maybe I'll see you there!