This is Will Longmate and David Martin, festival organizer and branch chairman of the Campaign for Real Ale's Milton Keynes branch. A lot has been said about the UK’s craft beer movement, to the point that we often forget where we came from. And I’m as guilty as the next guy for overlooking the myriad events the UK’s various CAMRA branches put together.
I made the 30-minute journey from London to Milton Keynes to a former bus shelter where the festival was being held. I worked my way through several beers, all poured straight from the cask. The standout was Elusive Brewing’s Shadow of the Beast Black IPA.
There was even a keg bar, which is still a pretty radical thing for CAMRA. The consumer organization has long championed beer that undergoes secondary fermentation within the cask, so to see some excellent beers being dispensed from keg at this festival felt like, wait for it, real progress.
—Matthew Curtis