Wetherspoons international real-ale festival
J D Wetherspoon, the big national pub chain is advertising it’s international real ale festival from 27th March – 14th April with “Imported beers and ciders” but inside the situation is extremely disappointing:
The only real cider is Weston’s Conquest Scrumpy and in my local ‘spoon the ‘festival’ Conquest box is simply replacing the space normally occupied by Weston’s Old Rosie. Conquest is a pleasant enough drink, which some may know as ‘Bounds Brand’ but the regular Old Rosie drinkers felt it to be a weak substitute at 4.8% instead of 7.3%, with similarly diluted flavour profile when you can actually taste the water in it.
But the really bad news is the featured imported cider for the festival. Is it Breton, Welsh or Basque? From Normandy, Asturias or Canada?
No it’s the usual colourful fruity alcopops from Scandinavia with a slight variation:
Kopperberg Cherry – made with fresh water from Sweden, fermented apples with the added taste of cherry.
For the International beer and cider festival J D Wetherspoons has teamed up with CAMRA, the former consumer organisation, now working in conjunction with the retail industry to promote fruit flavoured alcopops passed off as cider.
Yes, we found the same in the Exchange in Banbury on Saturday – more Krapparberg and the Conquest replacing the Old Rosie.
I do appreciate a weaker real cider sometimes, though – it’s good to be able to have a pint with a meal in the middle of the day without getting completely blotto!
I too was dissapointed with the cider offering, but let’s not get too carried away with the CAMRA bashing. This was advertised as an ‘International Real-Ale Festival’ not a ‘,,,beer and cider festival’ and I very much doubt whether CAMRA had any input or influence in the choice of ciders.
Perhaps of more interest is the small print on the Westons Conquest Scrumpy pump-clip, which states that this is exlusive to Wetherspoons! Either this is a genuinely different cider to Bounds Brand (tasted like Bounds Brand to me), Westons/Wetherspoons are being a little conservative with the truth, or they simply mean that the pump-clip is exclusive to Wetherspoons! Either way I found the half of Conquest I had at the Cheltenham Wetherspoons to be the usual watery, slightly harsh tasting ‘cider’ I was glad I only had a half of. Thank heavens for the JJJ at the Jolly Brewmaster.
Oh, there’s definitely a difference between the Conquest I had on Saturday, and the bag-in-a-box Bounds Brand I have at home: the Bounds Brand isn’t served ridiculously cold…