The 6th Festival, organised by Philip Tolley, also Branch Chair, pictured below, ran from Monday October 17th to Saturday 22nd in St Andrews Hall, organised by Adrian Wood
Thanks to Barry Wilkinson for these images of the 1983 Beer Festival Programme.
Opening times which were pretty much unchanged until the late 2010s, admission was 25p at lunchtime, 50p in the evening except for the Saturday party night at £1 – no free entry for CAMRA members yet!
Yes, CAMRA do pay for the beer at our festivals, and beer from outside the area may be ‘a few pence higher’ in price!
The beer list, with over 90 beers, almost all bitters and milds. Note no ABV is listed – this didn’t become common practice until a few years later. Instead the beers show the original gravity, OG, a measure of the amount of sugar in the liquid, in brackets after the name, usually somewhere between 1030 and 1065. The ABV of a beer can be calculated from the OG if you also know the final gravity, FG, using the formula (OG – FG) * 0.13125, but as a rule of thumb, just use the last two figures, so 1041 is 4.1%, and you won’t go far wrong!
A ‘special bottled beer’ was produced by an unnamed Midlands brewery at an OG of 1055, so around 5.5% – I wonder why the secrecy!
The three pubs advertising on this page are still operating in 2025, although the Hog in Armour has been the Strangers Tavern for a few years. An interesting claim from the Wildman that it’s at the top of ‘Norwich’s only hill’! I suspect the old Shirehall and Le/La Rouen might have disagreed!
Can anyone put a name to either of the volunteers pictured here? (I’m not sure that’s the direction the beer should be ‘flowing’ in!)
A ‘busy’ (apparently!) lunchtime session at the previous year’s Festival – note the banked seating at the back of the Hall, which was still there when the Halls closed for restoration work on the windows and roof in early 2024!
