Aberdeen and North East Beer Festival

Early doors at the Aberdeen Beer Festival

My Scottish travels took me, via an overnight stop in Stirling, up to the north-east coast and to the metropolis that is Aberdeen.
Yes!  By the seaside.  Glad I packed my shorts....oh...

With rotten weather there would be no guilt about spending the afternoon indoors working through the beer list at the 30th Aberdeen beer festival.
This was located at Pittodrie, home of Aberdeen FC.  The Richard Donald stand, even being the football-ground geek I am, is a towering 1990s monstrosity of red brick and dullness on the outside. It's huge size (it seats 6,000, looming over the smaller stands to the either side of it) means that the ground floor concourse is big enough to host this annual beer festival.  

The first time it was held here in 2007 was in November when snow and bad weather made far too cold for the beer or visitors, prompting a move to May.  Today, it feels pretty much to me like it could be November. The mist is hanging over the town, with a chilling rain coming down and, despite it being May, I kinda wish I had my gloves with me. 

The beer selection is superb - travelling some distance from home means that I'm seeing lots of beers that often don't make it down south.  Ratebeer lists 132 breweries in Scotland, some 28 of which are represented on this beer list. 

🏢 Venue
Football stadia concourses are designed for quaffing lager far too quickly from a plastic cup, not really for beer festivals.

🍴   Food 
For us weird vegetarian folks: veggie haggis, neets and tatties for £3.50 which really hit the spot and beats the food I've had at many festivals.  The ton of spices in the haggis were nicely offset by a super-hoppy 6.2% IPA by WooHa Brewery. 

🍺  Beer
Great list - black IPAs, smoked beers, hazy IPAs...
My scribbled notes on the beer list insist that 'Island Bere' from Shetland brewer Valhalla was my favourite of the day.

Being as I was heading northwards towards Thurso, which I'd heard was something of a real-ale desert, I decided to make the most of the beer fest and pay it a second visit on the Friday afternoon.

I did also get to a handful of bars in the city...

Ma Cameron's (6-8 Little Belmont Street, Aberdeen, AB10 1JG)
There's a lovely little snug to the right of the entrance.
The pub is deceptively big, stretching into further rooms at the back. 
My pick on the bar was the Inveralmund 'Ossian', a 4.1% bitter.

Casc (7 Stirling Street, Aberdeen, AB11 6NB)
A craft beer, whiskey and cigar bar, although we only partook on the craft ales.
Somehow I managed to end up drinking a beer by West Sussex brewery Burning Sky, 579 beer miles.  That blew the plan to stick to the Scottish ales.

Brewdog (17 Gallowgate, Aberdeen, AB25 1EB)
This is the original Brewdog bar, opened in 2010, 3 years after the brewery opened in Fraserburgh.
I also made it to a second city centre venue on Union Street, which had recently been opened by Brewdog, the premises previously occupied by the Athenaeum Bar.