A NEW Huntingdonshire beer is set to make its festival debut at Booze on the Ouse in St Ives on Friday and Saturday.

Hereward bitter is the latest brew to emerge from the award-winning organic Glebe Farm, at King’s Ripton.

Hereward, a traditional beer from grain grown on the farm before being brewed by Elgood’s in Wisbech, will sit alongside Gladiator the first spelt beer brewed in the UK since Roman times, also grown and malted in King’s Ripton, at the 36th St Ives beer festival.

“We wanted to name Hereward after a local character, and we thought Oliver Cromwell had been overdone a bit,” Rebecca Rayner, who runs the farm with partner Marc Marshall, told The Hunts Post. “So we have a wild-bearded long-haired chap on the label.”

Glebe Farm plans to brew 2,000 litres of Hereward each month, and is also now selling a medium dry cider made from Cambridgeshire apples, called Side-R, which is on sale at the nearby Crown at Broughton.

There are plans for cider flavoured with other fruit and flowers, Ms Rayner said, along with Gluten-free Pathfinder ale and Lancaster lager – the farm is under the flight-path of wartime RAF Wyton – to complement her gluten-free fours and bread.

The Campaign for Real Ale festival will be open all day from 12 noon on Friday and Saturday, September 9 and 10, at the Burgess Hall at the St Ivo Recreation Centre.

CAMRA says it has ordered around 70 draught real ales and ciders including around 40 cask ales from East Anglia and the East Midlands, “aimed at encouraging local pubs to stock local real ales for their pubs, supporting local breweries and saving beer miles”.