As Gavin Haines reported last week Bournemouth will get its very own beer festival this year.

The Big Bournemouth Beer Festival, in association with East Dorset CAMRA, will be held in the Purbeck Hall of the BIC over the Easter bank Holiday weekend.

Tickets are available from the excellent BIC website.

One hundred and fifty beers are planned to be at the event and a provisional list is available on the BIC website.

I’ve taken a quick look at the list and there are some really nice beers on it and some I haven’t tried yet.

I’m really looking forward to the event and I will be casting a careful eye over the beer list in future articles.

Last weekend I attended the Dorchester Beer Festival, held at the Corn Exchange. It was an excellent festival, organised by the West Dorset CAMRA. Highly enjoyable.

However I do have one small criticism of the event; well two if you count the slightly over-priced food - £1.50 for a small sausage in a finger roll without butter or onions!

Every festival I’ve been to operates a token system. These are purchased when you enter the festival, and when you are at the bar you use the tokens to pay for the beer.

This saves an awful lot of hassle at the bar trying to deal with cash, handing change etc.

At the Norwich Beer festival the vouchers are in units of 10p and each beer is marked with it’s price in tokens.

At the Dorchester festival each beer was the same price and so each token equates to half a pint of beer – a very good system.

However, every festival I have been to, prior to Dorchester, had a system where unused tokens could either be cached back, or donated to charity. I was therefore surprised that the Dorchester festival didn’t have either a cash back or charity system. CAMRA does promote the drinking of beer but it has a clear policy on alcohol abuse and a clear mandate on drinking responsibly.

I do feel that not having a cash back system rather encourages a visitor to use up the tokens and therefore drink more than they would have done.

On entering a festival I do not know exactly how many beers I will try and what strength they will be. I’m never one to over do it, and I like to think that nearly all festival goers are the same.

I can’t recall ever seeing excessive drunkenness at any festival I’ve been to, though I’m sure it must happen.

I do think the system of caching unused tokens helps with this, ensuring that people are not just drinking to use up their tokens.