Rainbow festival

Spent a chilled afternoon at the Siren Rainbow Project beer festival yesterday, much laughter and great beer with good friends, followed by a delicious curry in town, what more could you want? The sheer quantity of different beers on offer was too numerous to cover in great detail here, but suffice to say the quality was excellent and everyone tried at least 2 or 3 new beers that they really liked! Luckily the weather held out and although it wasn't a scorcher it was sunny (in between the clouds as per the photo above!)

The background of the "Rainbow" project (started in 2013) was to bring together leading UK craft-breweries and US craft-breweries in order to collaborate on producing a beer, each pairing was allocated a particular colour to use as inspiration hence the Rainbow label. For example the brewers who got "red" chose to age their beer in old red wine barrels, i.e. it didn't mean that the beer had to be that colour!

The Rainbow beers were as follows,

Red – Wild Beer Co. & Side Project – A sour saison, barrel aged with pomegranate and rose petals
Yellow – Hawkshead & Modern Times – Barrel aged saison with apricots
Blue – Beavertown – Barrel aged with Pinot Noir grape must
Orange - Burning Sky x 3 Floyds - Barrel-aged Barley Wine
Indigo – Magic Rock & Casita Cerveceria - Barrel-aged Sour w/Blueberry, Apricot and Pea Flowers
Green – Partizan & New Belgium – Wood aged saison aged hops
Violet - Siren x Sante Adairius - Red Wine Barrel-Fermented Saison Blend

There were many other guest and house beers there too, here are a few we tried between us (comments in italics),

Little Sicily – 4.1% Sicilian Lemon Meringue Milkshake – Slim Pickens x Beavertown (OK)

Yellow Belly – 11% Peanut Butter Biscuit Stout – Buxton / Omnipollo (bonkers!)

Hop Fizz – 6% Brut IPA – Siren (good)

Red Berry Sour Shake – Sour Berry Smoothie 5% – Siren (the girls loved this, the boys less so)

Suspended in Rainbows – 4% Hazy Pale Ale – Siren (solid)

Sound Wave Sessions Double Simcoe – 4.3% Session IPA – Siren (double-solid)

Much Ado About Muffin – 5.5% Blueberry Muffin Pale Ale – Siren / Lervig (meh)

Low Side – IPA 6.8% – Siren / Finback (Outstanding)

Broken Dream – 6.5% Breakfast Stout (Champion Beer of Britain) – Siren (v. good)

Yu Lu – 3.6% Loose Leaf Pale Ale – Siren (solid)

My favourite beer of the festival was Low Side IPA a collaboration between Siren and Finback, a brewery in Queens New York, an excellent hazy IPA made in a typical East-Coast style, delicious!

All in all a great day out, congratulations to Siren for hosting the event, it seemed to go off without a hitch, shame its the last Rainbow festival but hey ho, next year you'll just have to think of something else! (TBH any excuse to sample beer this good and this "local" would be just fine with us!)