It's nice to have the last laugh - Roger Protz
There's an old Gershwin song called "They All Laughed" that contains such lines as: "They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound".
An updated version would have to include: "They all laughed when Camra ran a beer fest in St Albans".
Last week saw the 11th St Albans beer festival and people were laughing - with enjoyment, not disbelief. When the idea of a festival in the Hertfordshire city was first mooted, brewers and licensees split their sides. "It will be a flop, a fiasco," was the considered advice.
The mirth was caused by the fact that not only does St Albans have a lot of pubs - about 60 - but most of them are also packed into the city centre. The reasons are historic. In common with other cathedral cities, inns and ale houses were built to provide food, drink and accommodation for the workers employed to construct the abbey church.
St Albans has a population of close to 129,000 but that includes outlying towns and villages. The city itself is small and compact, many people commute into London, and it is one of the most heavily pubbed urban centres in the country. The facts argued against staging a beer festival that few people would want to attend.
Eleven years later and the festival is going strong. When I dropped in last week the main room and stage of the Alban Arena was so thronged with drinkers that it was almost impossible to move.
The success of the festival, year after year, explodes the myth that nobody wants to drink cask beer.
The crowds were a wonderful mix of young, middle-aged and old. I was impressed by the flood of young people in a variety of stunningly emblazoned T-shirts bursting into the festival in keen anticipation of the beery delights ahead.
At the other end of the age scale, I met an amazingly sprightly old gent of 92 who told me that every day he went to the Jolly Sailor pub and had two halves of Charles Wells' Bombardier at lunchtime and two more in the evening. He was so fit and articulate that he is living proof that a modest daily intake of beer will keep you healthy into late old age.
The second powerful reason for the strong attendance at the festival is that St Albans may have lots of pubs but the choice is limited. The Jolly Sailor is the only pub in town owned by Wells of Bedford.
McMullen of Hertford has a few pubs. They include the famous Farriers Arms, which bears a plaque announcing that the first branch of the Campaign for Real Ale was founded there.
It's not strictly true.
The first branch was in the Midlands but it didn't last long, whereas the South Herts branch is still going strong and is the power behind the beer festival.
Fuller's has a clutch of pubs in the city and surrounding areas but the pub scene in St Albans reflects its past. When I moved there close to 30 years ago, Allied Breweries and Whitbread dominated the city. Those companies no longer exist as brewers and their pubs have been sold on several times to pub companies, with the inevitable result that too many of the pubs in the city offer the usual range of heavily-discounted national brands.
But the beer scene is improving. One legendary pub, the Lower Red Lion - so
called because there used to be another
Red Lion up the hill - seeks out beers from smaller cask brewers from all over Britain.
The Farmer's Boy in London Road has its
own tiny brewery behind the pub that produces beers zinging with hop character. In the Mermaid, a few months ago, I discovered, to my joy, superb pints of Nethergate's Augustinian Ale from Suffolk.
The improved choice has been fuelled by the success of the local beer festival. Last week, ranks of casks offered beers from all over Britain.
The crowds were supping and taking note. They are people who want choice and make their feelings known.
Congratulations to my friends who run the beer festival. As that old Gershwin song says: "Who's got the last laugh now?"
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