Ale Trail

   
An excellent way to try out some new pubs in your local area is to find out if your local CAMRA branch runs an Ale Trail.  In our part of Sussex, the Brighton & South Downs CAMRA runs an annual trail, which was sponsored this year by Harvey's of Lewes. 

The concept is simple.  You pick up a Passport from the advertised location - in our case the excellent Duke of Wellington in Shoreham, one of the brewery taps for the great Evening Star brewery.  This proved to be an entertaining little document, which lists all the participating pubs as selected by the local CAMRA branch.  Not all are in the Good Beer Guide, but most are definitely worth a visit.  You then set your targets.  The aim is to have a pint of real ale at each pub (or cider if you're doing the parallel Cider Rider course), and collect a stamp in your passport.  20 stamps gets you a T-shirt, 30 a sweatshirt, 40 a sweatshirt plus a T-shirt or souvenir glass, and over 40 gets you free membership of Alcoholics Anonymous!  (I made up that last bit!)

Although 40 pubs may seem a lot, you don't have to do it all in a single pub-crawl!  In fact we had from 29th May to 30th September.  That sounds plenty of time, but this year we did a lot of travelling and were out of the UK for a big slice of that time.  Come September the stamps on our passports were looking a bit meagre even for our modest target of T-shirts, so we invoked the help of some friends.  Nigel and Pam acted as our knowledgeable guides to the watering holes of Lewes, while Brighton resident Debi took us around the narrow byways to seek out previous unvisited havens of real ale.

Of the 20 pubs we visited, 15 were previously unknown to us, and a high proportion of the discoveries we classified as real 'finds'.  Having met the target within the deadline you send in your passport and eventually collect your award.  The venue for the collection was the Evening Star in Brighton.  We were well pleased with the elegant style of our new designer-wear.  The only difficulty was the agonising decision between the wonderful Dark Star beers on tap and their amazing collection of Belgian special Christmas ales!  Look out for Ale Trail 2007 - we heartily recommend it!