GBBF Roundup

The beer arrives

Lots of Mikkeller

New World fridge!

Last week I volunteered at GBBF on the Bieres SansFrontieres international bottled beer bar. I could easily make another mammoth post as I have been wont to do recently, but to spare my readers the agony I'm just going to make a summary of my highlights and lowlights of the week and point you in the direction of some other good reads.

The Good

• All international beer arriving on time, set up and no breakages.
• Awesome tasting beers; especially Revelation Cat South Pacific Ale, Murray's Heart of Darkness and Baird Kurofune Porter
• Getting lager drinkers to try pale ale/IPA and people requesting fruit beer to try revelation cat Mad Walloper
• The variety of expressions of people trying Revelation Cat-3 year old Laphroaig Cask Boon Lambic
• Cask Meet the Brewer events, White Horse Flying Dog Cheese and Beer Pairing
• Making new friends, meeting old ones and the general positive attitude of everyone there

The Bad

• My wink ball video interview (warning large face alert!)
• Far too humid in the room
• Concrete floors and 12 hours on your feet 
• Not enough time to try all the beers I would have liked to
• End of an era at Earl's Court as it is to be demolished next year

Someone had too much Deus...

The Ugly

• People dropping glasses on purpose to get a cheer going
• Lack of sleep
• The amount of money it costs to travel a few stops on the underground!

BSF staff relax on Saturday night

All in all an amazing week and I'm already looking forward to GBBF's return to its spiritual home of Olympia. I hope all of you who went along had a good time (if you didn't go, why ever not?!) and I look forward to meeting more of you next year. No doubt I'll be working on New World beers again.

Here's what some other bloggers thought of the event:

Mark loved the Laphroaig lambic

Reluctant scooper loved the people and dressed in a ginger beard

Pete and Peter made a video blog

Ghost Drinker reviews some beer and the trade day

Tandelman also had achey feet 
Rabid Barfly had a busy week too
Hardknott Ann enjoyed some USA beers
The Beer Monkey tried all manner of beers! 
Whilst Phil only managed two from the UK!
The Beer Beauty missed out on some beers because she spent too much time talking ;) 
James tells us about all the beer he crammed in
Shea likes a pint of the dark stuff

If you were all there than how come most of you bugger's didn't come to say hi?! If anyone else has any blogs about GBBF they'd like to be linked here then post a comment below.

August is beer month!

August is shaping up to be an awesome month beer wise. Here’s why:

1.       GBBF

Everyone knows this is coming up. I travel across on Saturday morning to help with the setup and work all week until the following Saturday. I’ll be working on USA cask with BSF (I hope!).  Expect tweets along the way as beers arrive and I get to taste my hit list!

2.       Three meet the brewer events

Turns out the Cask pub and Kitchen have a meet the brewer event with Doug Odell on the Saturday night (okay 30^th July isn’t quite August, ssshhh) and  if that isn’t enough, one with the Kernel Brewery on Monday 1^st August. We have evenings free until Tuesday; so time to go sample beers that I’ve never tried before. I really enjoyed the Odell beers I tried recently so looking forward to that. I’ve heard loads about Kernel too and until now not got hold of any. Expect blogs on both of these.

Then on the Thursday (yes international #IPAday) there’s a meet the brewer at the White Horse, Parsons Green. The brewery in question - Only Flying Dog! Not only beer tastings, there will also be cheese. It’s a given then that I plan to attend!

3.       Week in Manchester

Outside of London, Edinburgh and perhaps Leeds, Manchester seems to have the highest density of pubs in the UK serving new and interesting beers, and plenty of good cask pubs too. I plan to visit Port Street Beer House, the Marble Arch and the Microbar among others. Also when I’m staying in Manchester I’m making a train trip to a certain Headingley beer shop, which I’m very much looking forward to.

4.       Beer Tasting

One of Craig’s legendary beer tastings is hopefully happening in Edinburgh on the Friday of my Manchester trip. I must have known as my return journey leaves for Edinburgh at 2pm Friday afternoon ;). May also get to visit what is fast becoming my regular Edinburgh haunt too.

5.       Hilden Beer Festival

To round off the month nicely Hilden Brewery has their annual beer festival. Running from the Friday evening through to Sunday early evening the event is set to have over 30 beers, including beers from both Northern Ireland and the Republic, along with select favourites from on “the mainland”. There’s a BBQ all day and bands playing on two different stages. Once the beer list has been released I shall make a separate post, but in the meantime see the website and the flyer below.

Who said you have to go abroad to some exotic location to have an exciting beer summer! If anyone has any suggestions of other places to go/ things to see whilst in any of the fine cities mentioned above then let me know.  Hope to see some of you at any or all of these events!

NB Don’t write a blog post whilst cooking dinner or you’ll end up destroying a saucepan when it runs out of water!

Brewdog Vs CAMRA (again)

Many of you will have seen the recent post by James on the Brewdog blog about CAMRA cancelling the Brewdog brewery stand at GBBF this year.
In an effort to pre-empt the usual suspects reblogging without having all of the information I thought I'd offer a more balanced opinion. I am no apologist for either Brewdog or CAMRA. (Full disclosure: I am a proud member of CAMRA and new shareholder of brewdog but I don't agree with everything that gets said/done).

First off it needs to be remembered that we have only heard Brewdog's side of the story so far; so before we can go jumping to conclusions we should wait to see what Marc Holmes/ the other GBBF organisers have to say. I have tweeted as much to the editor of What's brewing and the official Camra twitter and will try through other contacts if this has no success. Until that time we should hold off from forming an opinion (regardless of our natural prejudices).

I, like many of you, am disappointed that Brewdog beers will no longer be available at GBBF this year. It would have been a fantastic platform to showcase the beers and a good start to an at least cordial relationship between CAMRA and Brewdog. Not least it would show the (few) unconvinced CAMRA members that Brewdog has nothing to hide.

Will update as more info becomes available. In the meantime read Brewdog's side of the story here. Marc's orginal comments re. Brewdog appearance at GBBF (as taken from here):
"Some facts to answer questions floating about here and elsewhere:
- CAMRA buys the beer from the brewery, CAMRA sells the beer to the public, Brewdog are paying for the privilege of having a dedicated bar.
- The beer will be in 50l Keykegs. Unfortunately this will limit the amount we can order so it may run out.
- The beer will conform to CAMRA's definition of real ale - unpasteurised, unfiltered and with enough viable yeast to allow secondary fermentation (don't worry, we'll be checking...).
- It will be served using compressed air, as James says as per the foreign beers. At no point will the beer come into contact with extraneous CO2.
- If James wants to work behind the bar he can, as soon as he joins CAMRA, as per the terms of the contract."


EDIT: MArc has now replied to Brewdog's post as follows:
"James,

The reason Brewdog are not coming is that you didn’t pay the outstanding balance, as per the terms of the contract.

- The contract stated payment for the bar was due by May 27th. Giving you until July was very generous, nearly 7 weeks.

- The ultimatum was Thursday 12pm, you kept arguing and didn't agree until Friday 11am. Too late, we had programme deadlines to meet.

But to answer some of your other points:

- Right from the very start we said your beer must be supplied in large containers. We were happy with 50L kegs (as long as the beer contained live yeast) but you persisted in wanting to use 30L keykegs. Thornbridge did use 9G casks last year but it didn't work - they will be using 18G casks this year. We were looking at ordering in excess of 60 kils (equivalent) of beer, which is just not practical in 30L keykegs.

- You were the one that offered to supply cask beer in 18G casks.

Happy to start talking about GBBF 2012, and feel free to pop in this year to see how it works. I’ll even send you some tickets.

Cheers,
Marc Holmes
GBBF Organiser.

marc_holmes     19.07.2011"

It seems therefore that Brewdog broke the terms of the contract and it was therefore nulled.

James mentioned receiving an email extending these deadlines, but the question is why did they wait so long to pay the balance?

BSF Beer List

CAMRA Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) 2011 is almost upon us, with the first staff being on site at Earl’s Court in less than a fortnight.  I will be there from Saturday 30^th July until Saturday 6th August to work on Bières Sans Frontières (BSF). Yesterday the beer list was released (handily pasted here by Craig) and my, what a beer list it is too. Bigger and better than ever this year with four separate bars (one bar per stillage) there will certainly be plenty to try. In total there will be beers from fifteen different countries for sampling (in addition to the four that make up the UK of course!)

  

American cask beer at GBBF 2004 (from BSF photo gallery)

I’m hoping to work on USA cask beers and decided to take a look at how many beers to potentially expect.  There are 189 beers (cask and bottle) from 89 USA breweries. This is by all means a small proportion of the total but certainly more than in previous years of GBBF. Of these 80 have a cask offering and 9 are only available in bottles. They range in size from big players like Sierra Nevada right down to micros such as Franklin's Restaurant, Brewery & General Store.

Some stats for tickers: 21 states are represented with the top five origin states being Oregon (11), Maryland (10,) California (9), Colorado (8) and Massachusetts (7). 5 breweries from Portland, OR; 4 from Baltimore, MD and 3 from Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s possible to drink beers from breweries whose names begin with 19 different letters of the alphabet.

I’m not sure the exact number of new breweries represented this year, though I’m sure this information will be available in the BSF programme during the festival. There’s a handy list builder on the CAMRA website which can aid you in designing your own drinking plan. There is also a rating and comments system which may give you some indication of what beers will be the most popular. Bear in mind that there may be last minute substitutions or that a beer may sell out before you get a chance to try it; so don’t go getting disappointed if the one beer you visited the festival to try just isn’t available. Deal with it, there’s plenty more to choose from!

I’m not going to go with any plan in mind for which American beers I want to try, I’m hoping to taste as many as possible. There’s plenty of my favourite styles (IPA and porter) and some intriguing other beers (barrel aged, added chillies, rye) to keep me satisfied during the festival. And for post festival I have a shopping list of bottles which I’ll have to narrow down into what can fit in my suitcase. Notice I’m naming no names for a better chance of the beers I want to try being available!

See you all there soon!