Festivals stalwart Alan has tasted delights of 9,000 ales

Mar 28 2008 by Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

THE dictionary can only go so far. Ticker n 1 Sl. 1a the heart. 1b a watch. 2 a person or thing that ticks. A ticker in the beer world, however, is defined differently.

Tickers “collect” beers in much the same way as train spotters gather numbers. Their preoccupation, often greeted by shaking heads and spluttered mirth, is surely no more obsessive than the blind, faithful following of an underachieving football team home and away, yet the head shaking continues.

Tickers will form a tiny proportion of the 6,000 visitors attracted to next week’s Newcastle Beer Festival, organised by the Tyneside and Northumberland branch of the Campaign For Real Ale (Camra), where 120 different beers will represent 69 British breweries. A special selection of 30 beers from Kent and Sussex will complement the same number of North East beers, with 30 ciders and perries acting as delegates for the nation’s finest.

This year’s ale choice and logistics have occupied Camra member Alan Stobbs’ spare time for several months. He is a regular at beer festivals across the country, monitoring how problems are tackled, then noting, checking, querying, and yes, ticking. Alan is a self-confessed ticker with an astonishing 9,000 cask-conditioned beers tasted, then tucked into a notebook, a palm recorder and his home computer. “I’ll note where I’ve tried a particular beer and can point to any pub, any hour, any year,” he says. “No matter what style of beer it is I’ll try it, drinking a half-pint at least – but if I were to put it in footballing terms I’d be Second Division. Some tickers take the beer’s temperature and some grade them on a one-to-five scale.”

Alan, a former railway man with a round ticket to roam, has been to beer festivals in Sheffield and Doncaster this week and was an observer at Leicester and Leeds the week before. His experience is invaluable in the smooth running of the Newcastle event. “I have a budget to work to and have to be cost-effective,” he says. “The local Camra committee asked if it would be possible for a certain area to be covered, so we’ve got the Kent and Sussex ones, but part of the festival is to promote local beers. It’s a nice little split and we’ve tried to mix up milds, IPAs, porters, stouts and bitters. It’s a very time-consuming job and all voluntary.

“Two festivals in London aren’t running this year because they can’t find anybody with the time to take it up. It’s all unpaid and some people will take the week off work to help out at our festival. We’ll go in on Monday morning about eight o’clock and start setting up with about 25 volunteers. The scaffolding lorry is generally there by then. The beers are all due for delivery too, so we’ll put them into place and start tapping them and get the cooling system into operation. We used to have cooling blankets but we now have a sort of piping system – which is a bit like a probe which goes into each cask – where cold water is circulated. Then all the glasses (sponsored by The Journal) have to be individually washed – 400 boxes of a dozen each – because they’re coated with a protective film. “All beers go through handpulls. It’s hard work, but once it’s set up it makes life easy. We’re the biggest festival to use all handpulled beers; most of the others also have gravity dispense. By Wednesday we should be just making sure everything is working – then we’ll break it all down again on Sunday.”

Samples for the Newcastle notebook (though many tickers these days key information straight into laptops) include Durham Brewery’s Orang-a-Tang (3.9% alcohol by volume) and High House Farm 5th Anniversary Ale (3.5% ABV). Kayani Premium (5.0% ABV) from Wear Valley Brewery in County Durham should be on everyone’s list, and the Somerset visitor Silver Berrow is a beer, not what people in Darras Hall use to cart their money around.

So, is the purpose of a beer festival merely the opportunity for a handful of tickers to start a new chapter? Some carry that notion but beer festivals are for everybody with the merest interest in beer and brewing to look at new ideas, study interesting developments and to embrace old favourites.

“There will be people at the Newcastle festival with trollies full of little bottles which they’ll fill up and have at home,” says Alan. “They’re the serious ones, they’re on 20,000 beers. Mick ‘The Tick’ Baker from Birmingham will be there, as will Brian ‘The Sheffield Whippet’ Moore. The local enthusiasts will be joined by tickers from Wolverhampton, Stoke, Derby and Manchester – some of them coming for the Kent beers which they might not have tried before.”

Alan’s beer passion extends to being part of an internet group called Scoop Gen which has about 700 members circulating one another with beer, brewery and pub information. Within the organisation, the 10K Club – a 40-strong subsection – is devoted to those “with time, dedication and a lot of ching” who have reached the 10,000 beer-tasting milestone. The website reads: “The aim is to reach 10,000 ticks.”

In a seamless link, the band 10,000 Maniacs’ first album in 1983 was Secrets Of The I Ching. There’s no music at the Newcastle festival this year, so it’s the perfect opportunity to discuss beer. And to indulge in tick talk.

The 32nd Newcastle Beer Festival, Wednesday March 2, 6pm-10.30pm; Thursday 12 noon-10.30pm; Friday, 12 noon-10.30pm; Saturday 12 noon-7pm.

For beer list and details visit www.cannybevvy.co.uk