N. Oxon branch webmaster visits Norwich, City of Ale

Now in its 4th year, the Norwich City of Ale event started on 22nd May, which by chance was the day we arrived, and lasts until 1st June.
We'd done little research, and began our journey round the city's pubs after picking up a programme in the Duke of Wellington, which wasn't far from our B&B and is a Victorian pub with links to a local brewery and, unusually, its very own bomb shelter.

The event has clearly taken some organising, with over 40 pubs right across the city participating. Each had a banner outside, plenty of bunting, and a good stock of programmes and beer mats.
The programme was packed full of useful info (along with the odd advert as you'd expect), including descriptions of each pub, the local breweries, and an extensive list of local ales likely to be found in the city's pubs, each with a description and PintPicker diagram indicating colour and flavour attributes.
There was also a list of events laid on during the week (around 200 of them!), a map, and details of a free smartphone app which could be downloaded to help plan your visit.

Participating pubs were split into different 'trails', named after areas within the city. Each trail included 6 or 7 pubs. We quickly picked up on the idea of following a particular trail; a commemorative badge could be claimed at the last pub in each, and for anyone managing to visit all 44 pubs, there was a T-shirt on offer.

7 trails with 44 pubs in all was a bit of a stretch for us to manage in our 3 day visit, but by sticking to halfs we did manage to work our way around 5 of the trails (and have a fine badge collection as a result - were we only supposed to claim 1? Sorry City of Ale organisers).
Following the trails also provided opportunities to tour round various parts of the city we might not necessarily have seen otherwise, we put a fair few miles underfoot as we went, and thankfully the weather was kind to us. There are some well preserved sections of the city walls to be seen, a magnificent cathedral complete with swooping Peregrine falcons keeping the pigeons at bay, and pleasant riverside paths. We also jumped on the train to nearby Wroxham for an afternoon boat trip over some of the Norfolk broads which was very pleasant indeed.

We were surprised by the number of city pubs having not just 2,3 or 4 ales available but 8, 15, 20+. This wasn't only due to the City of Ale event either, a local CAMRA member we spoke to was telling how the branch picks one weekend at random each year for a massive city-wide survey where they typically find a total of over 260 DIFFERENT ales are available. A good number of the branches 3000+ members must be involved to catalogue all those beers in one weekend.

All that trail following meant we didn't attend many of the events that had been laid on, although we did enjoy meeting some of the local brewers at their stalls outside the forum in the city centre, we saw Roger Protz in the Earlham Arms (we arrived too late for his talk unfortunately), and in the Blueberry Helen took part in a competition for the best decorated pair of pants (no, that's not a joke, and the pub provided the pants!), for which she chose a City of Ale / CAMRA theme.

All the pubs we visited had their charm, and every one without exception was serving very well kept ales, there was never even a hint of a bad half.
If I had to pick any highlights - the friendly welcome in the Duke of Wellington set the tone for our visit. The Fat Cat has won National CAMRA Pub of the Year twice and didn't disappoint, neither did the tap of the brewery of the same name. The Adam & Eve is an old building full of character (and they had Old Peculier on - although we were trying to stick to LocAles, I couldn't resist). The Jubilee and Kings Head are cosy little pubs, and Plasterers Arms is a nice traditional boozer with a vaguely familiar looking figure in a portrait which dominates the back room - is that really Bill Murray?

I'm sure there are many more gems in the southern part of the city which we didn't get to... not this time anyway, but we're already planning to return!

Well done Norwich, and thanks very much. We thoroughly enjoyed our visit, and see no reason why more of Britain's cities shouldn't follow suit with similar city-wide real ale oriented events. Any takers?