You realise that some of the buildings are designed to be seen from the river.
And you get to see sights you wouldn't normally.
If you look closely you'll see that this sail boat is in fact a fake - that's right there are no sails. In fact it was motoring along like everything else.
Surprisingly enough beer festivals are quite quiet on Thursday afternoons.
So we could get on with important beer research.
The beer range didn't seem as good as last year. There seemed to be fewer breweries on offer this time. Last year we went on Saturday, so many of the beers we'd hoped to try had sold out anyway (and the lovely Lisa missed out on Sarah Hughe's Dark Ruby mild yet again!), although we did discover the delights of the excellent West Berkshire brewery though and Twickenham Original and York Guzzler were also on top form.
This year only Wolf's Lavender Honey, a very nice pale hoppy and refreshing beer stood out. It didn't taste of either lavender or honey but that was in its favour. The Nelson Brewery and Meantime had their own bars but the beers didn't seem up to much. Commendations go to Purple Moose Dark Side of the Moose (smooth and drinkable with a taste of chocolate malt and plenty of hops) and Oak Leaf Nuptu' ale (floral hop taste) but otherwise the beers we tried were OK but nothing special.
The fact that this year there were no tasting notes in the programme may have hampered our efforts to find beers we liked, as could the fact we were there in the afternoon and we're heading off on holiday tomorrow so we were strictly limiting our intake less than our body weight.
On the plus side the Jazz wasn't offensive.
Some people even thought it was nice
Though something was making Captain Cook scowl.
It's a good festival in a great venue and even though we thought the beers were mostly pleasant, not outstanding I'm sure we'll be back next year.
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