February saw the 16 th Battersea Beer Festival held at Battersea's Grand Hall and it was rightly dedicated to the memory of long serving CAMRA volunteer, John Barry. John had helped Chris Cobbold and the late Ted Higgins run a bar at the Great British Beer Festival for several years and went on to be the Membership Officer and Staffing Officer for Battersea Beer Festival. This annual festival is the showcase event for the CAMRA South West London Branch, which has held its annual beer festival since 1990. This year's Battersea Beer Festival, the 16th (2001 - A Beer Odyssey - was a gap year) set a new attendance record with 4,446 admissions over the three days, Wednesday 8 to Friday 10 February 2006.  Highlighting Britain's love affair with real ale was the fact that UK cask beer sold out with all 125 kils consumed. Apart from cider, perry and foreign beers the festival featured 170 different beers, from 95 breweries, from as far away as Cornwall, Orkney and the Isle of Man. Amongst the beers available to the visitors was Mid Sussex based, Dark Star Brewery's Hop Head - which went on to scoop 'Beer of the Festival'.

Commenting on the event, organiser Geoff Strawbridge said: "The Beer of the Festival winner is decided by the highest number of votes cast by visitors completing the nomination form.  Almost 400 visitors voted this year. Dark Star Hophead was the winner by a wide margin.  Second was Eastwood & Sanders Beyond the Pale, closely followed by Cairngorm Trade Winds and Downton Quadhop in joint third place.  All four are light, distinctively hoppy, bitter beers, two of them just below and two just above 4% ABV.  A strong, dark beer, Downton Dark Delight, came in fifth." A delighted Paul Reed, Director at Dark Star said: "We were humbled to win Beer of the Festival at such a well respected event. It's difficult sometimes to focus on winning awards, impossible in fact, as a brewery of our size has to spend each and every day focusing on the challenges of producing the best quality beer we can for the customer. It's only thanks to CAMRA that sometimes you get a pat on the back like this, so our thanks goes to them and the visitors who obviously think were doing something right."

Note to Editors: Members of the Branch will be visiting the Dark Star Brewery on Saturday 1 July to present the award. Previous Battersea Beer of the Festival winners in recent years have been: Bushy's Ruby Mild, Pictish Brewers Gold and St Peter's Honey Porter.

Dark Star also scooped top honours for the second year running at the Alton (Winter) Beer Festival earlier this month.