Beer in the Cathedral

As previously mentioned, the 29th East Anglian Beer and Cider Festival is on at the moment. I volunteered to help out on both Thursday and Friday (and tomorrow too), but yesterday I was the other side of the bar with friends drinking the beer.

It seemed a bit weird having a lot of the bars in the nave of the cathedral. I overheard one lady say "I've never seen so much booze in a cathedral". Me neither!

Here are a few of my photos...

Until yesterday night, all the non-East Anglian beers were in the nave of the cathedral.

But I was in the marquee behind the main bar here... here we are all ready to go for 12pm Thursday when the gates were opened.

While serving, I was allowed to taste a few of the beers... but not too much as I still had to serve the beer and cross out the right amounts on the beer cards. The first one I tried, of course, was from my namesake brewery (which I hadn't come across before), Moody's Goose, who are based in Braintree. The Arbor Gold was rather good.

While I was serving, a nice man from the Pie Fest! stand (supplied by Thurston Butchers Cookhouse) brought me half of one of their delicious Suffolk pasties.

With a lot of people in the cathedral there was plenty of room outside.

...and in the marquee.

Here is what it was like inside on Thursday. It really wasn't very busy compared to the weekend.

Yesterday, when I went into the cathedral there was an organ recital "Music from the Movies" going on. It was odd, but great fun, to hear the Dambusters March and The Blue Danube played on the cathedral organ. And we got a live video stream of the organist in action.

After our session yesterday, as is traditional, we went for a curry. Walking home we passed the outside of the cathedral and saw a few empties....

Lol. I wonder how much beer will be left for the last day tomorrow?

[Monday Update: When I arrived this morning there were still about 50 barrels with beer left in them and several new ones on tap. I was told there were about 800 pints left... and there still seemed to be plenty to be finished after I ended my shift at 2:30pm]

You can see more of my photos here on Flickr.