Works outing: Jimmy’s Farm Sausage and Beer Festival

We have a couple of festivals on our doorstep here at Drumond Park.

Latitude’s the biggie; a plethora of music and culture across acres upon acres a little way up the A12 from us, near Southwold. And then there’s the annual do at Jimmy’s Farm, an altogether more cosy undertaking and literally a stone’s throw from the Drumond Park Ipswich offices.

Music! Sausages! Beer! What’s not to like? So we jumped in the charabanc once again and headed over on one of the hottest Saturdays of the year.

You’ll probably know of Jimmy’s Farm via the telly. On a normal day, it’s a dreamy, family-friendly place to while away an afternoon. Then, once a year, they do the festival thing, and add in a whole lot of extras: great bands; entertainment; stalls; a couple of huge beer tents and shedloads of street-food vans, majoring on sausages but by no means limited to that.

No board games. They are missing a trick.

Reef headlined on Saturday; support included Norwich’s supercharged, super-excellent Killamonjambo and the ever-brilliant Gemma Ray, who we *heart* big time. A sunshiney afternoon in Suffolk is possibly not her natural habitat; you really want to see Gemma Ray amidst the dry-ice swirls of a dank club, hemmed and jostled by shady characters, their grotesque forms casting menacing shadows upon the sweat-dripping walls. But basking upon a hay bale just outside Ipswich takes a good second place.

Our plan was to compile some tasting notes for the sausages, with a view to a proper sausage report here. But, as we mentioned, there were a couple of huge beer tents, so that sort of fell by the wayside.

If you’re remotely in the region then we’d wholeheartedly recommend next year’s festival as a chilled, family-friendly day or weekend out. Jimmy’s website is here – but first, here’s some Gemma Ray.