Rather to my own surprise and several other people's, I went to the beer festival last night.

This was the first one I'd been to since 2004, and not surprisingly since coeliac disease renders me permanently incapable of drinking (normal) beer, so one would naturally expect that beer festivals were things to which it was pointless for me to turn up. I was persuaded to come along anyway by a variety of lovely people, and I spent the evening drinking cider, which wasn't bad.

I've often said that the thing which annoys me most about cider is that very tart dry cider seems to be in the overwhelming majority, whereas my taste runs more to sweet cider. (And, to be honest, sweet alcohol in general; for example I'll always pick sweet sherry over dry even if the former is cooking-grade and the latter really poncy, and I'm a great fan of mead.) This was illustrated particularly graphically at the cider bar last night, where they had about thirty different ciders available of which about five were sweet – and yet, when I went back to the bar for my second pint, all the sweet ones had sold out first and I had to make do with medium-sweet. What's with that? Everyone appears to want to drink sweet cider, but nobody seems interested in making it. Aren't market forces supposed to sort this kind of thing out?

Two people went out of their way to tell me that before I arrived the Tannoy had announced the availability of a gluten-free beer. So naturally I went in search of that at one point. I couldn't find it, and eventually resorted to asking a staff member – who turned out to have just spent an hour searching for it on behalf of another drinker, without success. So I didn't get to try that, which was a shame.

My usual irritations with the beer festival as a drinking venue were somewhat mitigated by the fact that for a change it didn't rain. In fact I think this might have been the only time I've ever been to a beer festival and not had it rain us all into the inadequately sized tent. The bar was still a mad scrambling crowd and I still wished I'd brought a chair of some sort, but it could have been worse. And I got to see lots of lovely people and even meet a new face or three, so for socialising sorts of purposes I was definitely glad I'd gone.

As usual with beer festivals, I felt hung over this morning in astonishing disproportion to the number of units of actual alcohol I had. Never quite sure what that's about.