A beer festival in Ilfracombe

By the time we got to the Ilfracombe beer festival at the twin-chimney Landmark theatre, a high, cool, breeze and spitting rain had sent the stragglers inside, where the bar had already sold 3,600 pints in a weekend.

Charmain Lovett, the festival organiser, poured us each a half of Golden Pig, a tasty product of North Devon’s superb Country Life Brewery. She was jovial — and wearing a crown of leaves from the earlier pagan parade.

The festival had started on Friday last week and when we arrived, late on Monday afternoon, the bar had already sold 50 barrels of beer and the 33 remaining barrels gradually emptied as the day went on. There was a Sunday-ish end-of-the-road feeling to proceedings when we arrived, which continued when we took a stroll around the town to get food; up the hill past the boarded-up social club and the almost-deserted streets.

Because real ale is a "live" product, it does not keep for long, and one of the features of the beer festivals I have been to is that the prices tend to go down towards the end of the event. So, when we arrived all pints were £3. Then, a couple of hours later that were £2. And when we leaving, they were £1. The morning after, I’m not sure my brain was entirely grateful for the ramifications of this price deflation.

Each of the beers we had was singular. An ale called Devonshire, also made by Bideford’s Country Life, had been the most popular beer, Charmaine said. Luckily for me, the Devonshire had all been drunk. Lucky because Devonshire has a challenging alcohol content of 10%.

Instead we had a try of Anniversary Ale, from the Branscombe Vale brewery in Seaton. The notes say it is a "well balanced amber-coloured bitter", which is, I have to say, quite true. I see I have scrawled "a splendid ale" in my notes.

Outside, a handful of people were bravely making the best of the dank weather, including some children on a bouncy castle, which was deflated and taken away while we were inside the Landmark theatre, in a slightly muggy room, listening to a musical folk duo called Fiddlebix.

We each enjoyed a glorious half of Golden Seahawk from the Cotleigh brewery in Wivilescombe while Fiddlebix — man with guitar and woman with fiddle — performed a version of the Dire Straits epic Romeo and Juliet. Then the guitarist said: "I’m going to play another Mongolian tune" and my friend appeared with two halves of Cavalier Ale, made by the Clearwater Brewery. He tasted it and said: "You can tell it’s from Torrington".

Unfortunately it was dark and "the burger man" had gone home when we buffooned out towards the bus stop. My friend fell asleep on the journey home while I was thinking of ways to describe beer that didn’t involve the word "splendid". The next morning, I was again faced with the strange fact that I had drank "only" "about" four pints ("about" eight halves) but felt like a million pain devils were stabbing miniature wands of misery in to the back of my eyeballs. William Blake said the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Well if the palace of wisdom is a nausea-rocked place of mindless horror at 7am on a weekday, he was, in a way, spot on.

In a fug of bleach, I am accosted by a man displaying symptoms of lunacy

A shiny beetle-black glass of glorious Guinness is often a failsafe option for the real beer fanatic who has been obliged by circumstance to visit a pub where the landlord or landlady thinks ale is a type of hard rain.

If the gods are smiling, and how could we prove they were or were not?, you will see a bottle of Ireland's finest stout on a dusty wooden shelf behind the bar, possibly next to some neon-coloured drinks in a fridge and some pork scratchings in a cardboard box. But these days the bottle option is less common, so there is draft Guinness.

At its best, draft Guinness is a welcome old pal of a drink but it is not as easy or cheap to keep and serve as keg lager, which might, or might not, account for the average-tasting pint I had in Sherry's Tavern in Barnstaple. But maybe I'm being unfair; maybe my senses were out-of-whack.

People who did not want smoking banned in our pubs sometimes complain about the smell of alehouses, now the scent-cloak of burning, and burned, tobacco is forbidden. 

I am in favour of the smoking ban, on health grounds, but as soon as we walked in and my ears adjusted to the karaoke, my nose and lungs and belly had to cope with a tang which I imagine a perfumier might describe as having a top note of bleach, with an undertone of lager, and a wisp of, er, something sold in a bottle labelled "perfume". Huddled beneath the din, like a man lost in a bunker somewhere in nomansland, my friend provided a less kind assessment of the vibes. For the first time in my life, apart perhaps from the times I visited those  plastic toilets at the Glastonbury music festival where the previous visitors had left too much evidence of their visit (and how little would have been too much, I hear you say), I longed for a huddle of incessant cigar smokers to appear and start blowing Cuban fumes up my nose.

No real ale was on offer that night, so to the Guinness we went by default. I have drank draft Guinness in many pubs around England and Ireland, and even further afield. Indeed, for some time in my early 20s I acquired a taste for stout and I regularly drank nothing else and, over-doing it, became slightly fat. You know good Guinness when you get it: it's bitter, creamy, long-lasting on the tongue and thick with pungent flavour. Maybe my tastebuds had been affected by the jagged smell of disinfectant, but the pint I had, and admittedly it was only one pint, seemed insipid.

As I took my first sips, a rather excited man with slightly unmatched eyeballs appeared at my face and asked me which road I lived in.

I politely lied to him, and he said with a look of barely controlled glee: "You're lying". 

Luckily I was called away to the karaoke area at the back of the pub, which is decorated with framed photographs of pop stars such as Oasis. I'd happily say if the customers looked like they were enjoying themselves (which they do in a pub I have already admitted I don't much rate on the atmosphere front: Wetherspoon's) but there was an air of desperation in the corners. Pubs have always had their natural share of melancholy, I suppose.

While my nose and mouth learned to adjust to Sherry's, and what it offered a pub loving man, my ears and brain were assaulted by the sound of the karaoke. Again, just as Guinness is a good beer if properly kept and served in the right environment, so singing in pubs is, at the right time and with the right tune and atmosphere, a good hear. But a metaphorical photocopy of a bad Robbie Williams song, sung with as much soul as a plastic bag, is my idea of pub misery. Then our lot started singing and things really deteriorated; I felt sorry for the regulars.

Sherry's Tavern, Boutport Street, Barnstaple

Adam's Ale Rating: One out of Five

Drink This: Whisky?

Indecorous eccentrics and eccentric decor (an unexpected encounter in a fine public house)

One cooling summer dusk I found myself, energised by a sweet spicy dinner and a few kitchen ales, bundling into the Reform Inn, where yeasty pot-wallopers were stood on wooden chairs, screaming to the ends of their lungs through tobacco smoke.

It was almost 11pm and I wanted to look around my new "local". On that distant evening three years ago, I was unprepared.

An emotional and physical weakling would have fled, I told myself, so I shuffled through the blur to the bar, where I was greeted by a silver-haired gentleman bristling with a stripe of friendliness more usually reserved for the leprous thief. Yes, I was a thirsty stranger too close to closing time, who had neither the elbows for pool nor the eyebrows for darts...you know those special targeted brows...

But no matter. I got my pint of Barum Original above the yowling and through the haze I tried to analyse my amazing environment. Everything seemed somehow too luminous, too...yellow...orange...but worn in. This was unlike any public house I had ever visited.

I registered the pleasingly eccentric decor and the pleasingly indecorous eccentrics, some of whom were wobbling about on chairs, brow-furrowed with exertion. They were screaming sounds...words...song lyrics.

The song Livin' On A Prayer by 1980s permhead rockers Bon Jovi, was being screamed as, and acted out as, Standin' On A Chair. Not every night did this happen, I learned; that would be a bit much. But the singalong, a dead pleasure in most pubs, or a pleasure brutalised in to delusional carcrasheeokee, had not perished in the Reform.

Comfortable in my new tangerine/soft rock/real ale club for singing eccentrics, I drank my pint of Barum Original, which is made in a shed in a yard behind the pub. Original is superior home brew, perhaps not as light and sophisticated as some other Devon beers, but with an earthy personality and a certain puppyish moreishness. Some of my friends claim Barum is "rough as dogs", and I know what they mean, even if they are wrong. It is an acquired taste and I acquired it.

As I digested my first pint that evening, the evening dissolved in conversations. Three years after that first visit, and after 18 months away from North Devon, I went to the Reform and spent an hour talking to a man I had never met before. That doesn't happen everywhere.

The Reform is not a venue for cappucino, wi fi, student cocktails, designer lager, or brunch. But if you have a belly for beer, and a brain for conversation, the Reform is your man.

THE REFORM INN, PILTON STREET, BARNSTAPLE

ADAM'S ALE RATING: 4 out of 5

DRINK THIS BEER: BARUM ORIGINAL (4.4 %)

Barum Brewery website

Permhead rockers

Pilton's Green Man Festival