The 2025 CAMRA Good Beer Guide was published a few days ago, bringing with it joy to those had been included, particularly for the first time. The day after publication I visited one such place and then called in a former Guide regular only a couple of miles away that had failed to make the cut once again this time.... Pecket Well is a small village situated on the edge of the Pennine moors a couple of miles out of Hebden Bridge. To get there I turned off the main A646 Calder Valley road as I arrived in the town and then took the A6033 up the hill towards Oxenhope. Houses, some of them over-and-under-dwellings, a feature of this part of the world where flat land is at a premium, were perched on corners at crazy angles and clung to the side of the road for dear life as I began to leave the town behind. Following a twisty and vertiginous climb through dense woodland the road eventually emerged into the open at the fringes of the tree line as the slope began to lessen. Here I came to a we
York CAMRA were holding their 50th Anniversary Beer Festival last week, so I decided to head over to the city and check it out. Here's my reflections on what was a splendid afternoon there in a rather historic setting.... The first York Beer Festival took place at the De Grey Rooms in the city centre way back in March 1974. Times were very different back then; it was was the year that Richard Nixon resigned as US President in the wake of the Watergate scandal, there were two General Elections in this country, Leeds United won the First Division title ( no Premier League in those days! ), local team York City finished 3rd in the old Division 3 ( Halifax Town were 9th ) to gain promotion to the second tier for the first time in their history, the Volkswagen Golf made its debut, and a Swedish group called Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest with their song Waterloo . The real ale scene back then was also very different to how it is now. CAMRA had only been formed a year or two before