Norwich gears up for beer bonanza
Added: Thursday, May 1st 2014
The organisers of a groundbreaking festival of beer and pubs have been invited to Westminster this month to explain to MPs from the All-Parliamentary Beer Club how they have achieved such astonishing success. The visit will come at the end of the fourth successive event – Norwich City of Ale – which runs this year from 22 May to 1 June.
City of Ale is a long way removed from the beer festivals pioneered by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. For a start, it’s not in one place – it’s a moveable feast. It takes place over 10 days, with a range of events in pubs throughout Norwich that will include Meet the Brewer evenings, beer-and-food matching, talks and beer tastings, pub quizzes and a special FEM-ALE gathering designed to attract women drinkers.
The people of Norwich will be kept well aware of the festival. It’s sponsored by the local paper, the Evening News, and the sides of local buses carry banners promoting the event. If you arrive in Norwich by train, the first pub you see over the road, the Compleat Angler, is the springboard that points you to all the other pubs in the city supporting the festival.
City of Ale is the brainchild of two people who share a great passion for beer and pubs. Dawn Leeder is a lecturer in information technology at Cambridge University while Phil Cutter runs one of the city’s best-known pubs, the Gardeners Arms near the castle. It’s better known by its nickname of the Murderers – a grisly killing took place there in the 19th century.
Dawn Leeder, with her husband Howard, a chemical engineer, have a great passion for cask beer. They have built a data base called Pint Picker (www.pintpicker.co.uk) that lists more than 13,000 beers with ABVs, flavour profiles and tasting notes. In October 2010, Dawn fell into conversation with Phil Cutter at the annual CAMRA Norwich beer festival, one of the longest-running festivals in the country. They agreed that while the event was a marvellous showcase for beer, Norwich didn’t do enough to promote its rich diversity of pubs, many of historic importance. The Adam & Eve, for example, dates from 1249 and was built at the same time as Norwich Cathedral.
When they discussed the embryonic idea for a festival based on pubs they met an enthusiastic response from publicans. Phil Cutter, who hails from Ipswich – but he keeps very quiet about that in Norwich – has been in the pub business since the age of 15. While he thinks CAMRA-style beer festivals are fine, he says the best place to drink beer is in pubs and he has held regular festivals in the Murderers for several years.
City of Ale developed out of his experience – and it grew at a fast pace. The first City of Ale was held the following May, with 40 pubs and 30 breweries backing the event. The third City of Ale last year featured 229 beers, backed by 133 events in pubs. This year 43 pubs and 40 breweries are on board. The Norfolk Brewery in Hindringham, run by Rachel and David Holliday, has brewed a special beer for the event that will help raise money for the victims of the winter’s devastating floods in Norfolk. The 5% IPA will be named in a competition run by the Eastern Daily Press, Britain’s biggest-selling regional daily newspaper.
Dawn Leeder, who has taken a keen interest in ale since 2005, stresses the important role of pubs and brewing in Norfolk’s history. She points out that barley has been grown in the county for some 2,000 years and is far and away the most important grain-growing region for brewing in the country.
There are now some 34 breweries in Norfolk and the county has recovered from the dog days of the 1960s and 70s when two giant London brewers, Watney and Whitbread, bought and closed three breweries in Norwich and one in Great Yarmouth and laid waste to scores of pubs at the same time.
Today Norwich has half a dozen breweries while Lacons, closed by Whitbread, re-opened in Yarmouth last year and will be a major sponsor of this year’s City of Ale.
City of Ale is run solely by enthusiastic volunteers and is a non-profit event. It relies on sponsors, who include Norwich Business Improvement that has paid for full-page ads in 20 regional newsletters published by CAMRA. There’s no animosity between City of Ale and the campaign; on the contrary, the local CAMRA branch welcomes the initiative and says the two festivals inspire one another.
And Norwich could soon be the launch-pad for similar events in other cities. Andrew Griffiths MP, who chairs the All-Parliamentary Beer Group, will discuss with Dawn Leeder, Phil Cutter and their colleagues how to spread the message. Dawn and Phil have simple Biblical advice to other British cities that are also rich in brewing and pub history: “Go thou and do likewise.”
Two key supporters of City of Ale are women publicans running distinctively different pubs – the Rose Tavern with Dawn Hopkins, a well-known figure in the national campaign to stop pub closures, and Aey Allen at the Vine, which blends Thai cooking with cask beer.
Dawn Hopkins was born in Norwich, worked in London for 10 years, travelled the world and returned to her birthplace to work for herself.
“I like pubs, beer and people,” she says. “I’d never done any bar work before but getting on with people is essential.”
For 14 and 11 years respectively, she ran two pubs, Ketts Tavern and the Rose, with her husband Kevin. The pubs are just a mile and a half apart and the Hopkins installed their own small brewing plant, the Norwich Bear, at the Rose.
When the marriage ended, Dawn moved to the Rose in Queens Street and lives above the pub with her two children. The brewing kit is being transferred to Ketts where Kevin Hopkins will run it: the space at the Rose has been turned into the Bottle Store, which specialises in British, Belgian and international beers.
Dawn became a key player in the Fair Deal for Landlords movement as a result of her concern about the behaviour of giant national pub companies. She got involved by contacting Greg Mulholland MP and as a result spoke at a rally in London he organised last year.
“It was pretty terrifying but it helps if you’re passionate,” she says. She wants statutory legislation that will adjudicate fair rents, with a market rent option for publicans who want to be free of tie.
Aey Allen is from Bangkok in Thailand and came to Britain in 1993 as a student. She worked in a Thai restaurant in Norwich and fell in love with cask beer.
“I’m the only Thai girl in Norwich who drinks real ale!” she laughs. She wanted her own restaurant that would also serve cask beer and in 2008 took over the city’s smallest pub, the Vine in Dove Street, close to the famous open-air market. It had just two hand pumps when she moved in and she managed to squeeze two more on the bar. She specialises in beers from local breweries, including Brandon and Winter’s, but her best-seller is Oakham JHB from Peterborough.
As well supporting City of Ale, she holds her own “small but perfectly formed” beer festivals with a bigger range of beers. The upstairs restaurant has room for just 16 people who eat specially prepared Thai dishes with ingredients sourced from the adjacent market.
Her marriage has ended and Aey closes the Vine on Sundays so she can spend time with her two young sons, Max and William.
*Print version: Publican’s Morning Advertiser, 1 May 2014.
