Cornish Church Installs Bar to Serve Beer on Tap: St Ia’s church in Cornwall is offering a different kind of service as they installed a bar with two temporary beer taps through which visitors to the Church can enjoy a pint on a pew.
The Grade 1 listed building has become one of the main music venues for the St Ives September Festival, a two-week music and arts event showcasing local talent.
Reverend Nick Widdows, vicar at the Parish Church explained according to a news release by Cornwall Live that: “We’ve had this bar constructed, partly for coffee on Sunday, but also, for when we run events.”
“St Ives Brewery has kindly come in and installed these beer pumps for us, so we can serve drinks as well for when people come in for concerts and choirs and various other events that we run here,” he explained.
“We got a local carpenter, Joel, to come in and create this for us, and he’s done a beautiful job. I think the highest compliment we could pay him is that it looks like it has always been here. It’s a fantastic piece of local craftmanship that he’s done for us,” he added.
The church has hosted performances during earlier iterations of the festival, but this year it has become one of the main music venues for the festival, second only to The Guildhall. Additionally, a bar with wine and water but no alcohol has been installed in front of the church’s organ.
While acknowledging that “a few” members of the church were not “particular fans of the beer pumps,” Rev. Widdows emphasized that the pumps “are only temporary.”
“What I say to them is that this is just part of our way of welcoming all sorts of people into the church. Above all, we want people to come in and have a positive experience of their time here. Many people don’t come into the church building at all, and actually, if people come in and have a great time at a festival event, then who knows, maybe they’ll come in for something else as well when we put it on.”
St Ives September Festival is scheduled for September 9 – 23, with live music most evenings at St Ia’s Church.