Perfect Imperfect

Fourteen quid on a train to Doncaster. Four more of your stinking English pounds spent on a certain taxi to a certain venue, all this effort to find a beer festival, drinking beer for the use of.

And here is Mikey's quick review of the Doncaster Beer Festival.

Oh bum.

To be honest, I was rather displeased with that. On top of the trains being late on the way in, and the last train back being an hour earlier than advertised it was not the ideal way to progress my evening to an enjoyable conclusion. Harked back to the incident a couple of years ago when I travelled to Hull for their beer festival to be met with a sign that said "We've run out of beer, sorry". With extreme irony, this year's Hull festival was starting at the same time as the Donnie one, and I'd clearly made the wrong choice of which town to get beered up in. Cobblers.

Oh well. Unusually philosophic for me, headed back to the station on foot, determined to find a decent pub to have a drink in, to salvage something from the night. The Station, the nearest pub to.... erm.... the station looks a bit of a dive but thirty yards further down the road, The Leopard looks more promising. Tiled front, signage for a long extinct brewery in foot high letters. Upon closer examination, a warm bar with gig posters on every wall, local Glentworth microbrewery on pump, Black Sheep in the other bar and The Smiths on the jukebox. Think I've found my brand for the night, folks. Aces High bitter all night, 4.1%, a bit citrus and very drinkable for all all night session beer. Very surreal moment, reading an HST book at the bar while the juke was banging out that "Aww mama, can this really be the end" stuff by Dylan that HST pinched so effectively for F&L, Las Vegas. All in all, a nice time was had and if I'm in Donnie again, I'll say hello to that pub. Hell, almost worth missing a beer festival for. But not quite.