August 2025. Birmingham.
Our Gang of Four left the NEC at 5pm, just as the crowds were arriving at the Great British Beer Festival‘s Friday night session.
Except they weren’t. It was eerily quiet, in contrast to central Brum, packed with Hen parties,
cricket fans, and Blues heading to St. Andrews for the start of the minor leagues that night.
At least one of our (female-dominated) group had bemoaned the lack of sours at GBBF*, and Blackpool Jane knew just the place to head to rectify that. Back to the Colmore, then.
Jane went for the cans with proper beer names like Pastel de Nata and Mrs Tweedy’s Chicken Pie;
some of the more adventurous stock to Jaipur and the Union.
Mrs RM and I had forgotten to eat at GBBF (apart from a thousand calories of duck crisps) so it was artisanal pizza and Peach and Apricot sour matching,
with the Vault City Custard Tart Smoothie the winner over the Sureshot.
We somehow steered Mrs RM away from the “Kelham” barley wine,
resisted the siren call of The Victoria,
and crashed in the B & B hotel, mysteriously still out of caffeinated coffee.
*I’m sure there were sour and saison’s at GBBF, but we barely moved from our spot for 4 hours to search them out
retiredmartin 