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BOSTON SPA BEER FESTIVAL BRINGS COMMUNITY TOGETHER

Boston Spa Beer Festival organisers are delighted to report that their first event on Saturday 21 February was a resounding success, raising much needed funds for essential maintenance and building works at St. Mary's CE School and Boston Spa Village Hall.

Such was the popularity of the 20 Yorkshire real ales on offer that the barrels - between them containing 2000 pints - ran dry at 4.30pm and emergency rations of bottled real ale lasted another 45 minutes. The Festival saw over 750 people through its doors, with a queue forming outside the entrance well in advance of the 12 noon starting time.

The event attracted the attention of national radio. Rachel Bentley, speaking for the organisers, said

"Our team found out that we were featured on Radio 5 Live on Saturday morning after a customer contacted the show to say they were coming to the Boston Spa Beer Festival and no doubt swelled the numbers on the day. Afterwards, the weight of traffic on our website crashed the site! "

"We recognise that we did run out of beer earlier than expected in spite of careful planning and discussion with other similar beer festival's organisers. We know running dry affected some people's enjoyment of the event."

"We have already made plans to drastically increase the capacity of the racking we had this year to get over the problem in future. We hope you will understand that as a charity event run by a team of volunteers, for the first time, we could not anticipate fully the level of support we received so early in the day, especially in light of the current economic climate. It simply was overwhelming."

So, what happened? The beer was supplied 48 hours prior to the event in barrels to allow time to settle and reach cellar temperature. Whilst there was one large barrel in reserve there physically was no more room for any more beer on the racking. In addition, there are no gauges on the barrels to see how much beer is left and picking them up to try their weight is not an option as that would disturb the sediment.

Therefore simply calling for more supplies to the breweries was not an option but rather than have no beer at all for those already in the festival, once closed to new entries, action was taken to provide bottled beers as well as the ciders, lagers and wines on offer.

The majority of people who attended spoke of the fantastic atmosphere and how much they enjoyed the event.

Chris Flint, one of the local men who had the idea for holding a beer festival as a community event in the village said

"We would like to thank all of our customers, sponsors, helpers and other supporters for making the first Boston Spa Beer Festival a success. It went so well we recognise that we will need to provide even more real ale next year. We thank everyone who was understanding about the event running dry earlier than expected and hope that no one was disappointed. We are led to believe that the party spirit continued in local public houses."

The Festival is planned to run again for a second year at the Village Hall provisionally on 20th February 2010. It is planned to look at doubling the amount of real ale next year. The organisers would be grateful to hear from individuals or organisations that would like to become a sponsor for future events.