CAMPAIGN FOR REAL ALE

• Wetherspoons for St Neots?
• Buntingford Brewery Visit
• October is Cider & Perry Month
• Where is all the Green Beer?
• Cornwall Revisited

On an unseasonal but agreeable warm sunny day in mid-April members of Huntingdonshire CAMRA headed towards Royston in Hertfordshire and arrived at Buntingford Brewery at Greys Farm above Therfield Heath.

The brewery was established in the year 2001 in Leicestershire, and has now been at Greys Farm for around two years, during which time Buntingford have steadily built up a reputation as brewers of some tremendous cask beers with many interesting variants of style.

Our hosts for the day were brewers Steve and Catherine. As the beer flowed freely and the sun shone, they talked enthusiastically about their brewing process and the conservation grade farm on which they are located.

Greys Farm has become known for the work it has done to encourage a variety of bird and animal species and it was a delight to hear singing warblers close to the brewery. A recent impressive addition is a reed bed that was installed to process the brewery's liquid waste and sewage.

Steve modestly maintains that the basis of their production is that they don't do anything different from typical microbrewers of their size.

Brewing water from their borehole is high in calcium, and only needs a pH adjustment for use. Malt from the traditional Warminster floor maltings in Wiltshire is mashed in an unusual German-built square mash tun. Steve hopes to introduce the use of barley grown on the farm, but this would still be malted by Warminster.