Raiding the Midlands for Winter Ales

It’s always fun when I can take part in judging for Champion Beer of Britain at the Great British Beer Festival, held every in London every August, but there’s one thing I always miss: dark beer. Sure, there’s plenty on the festival bars, but the judging for those categories takes place elsewhere and six months earlier.

Instead of GBBF, it’s at what used to be the National Winter Ales Festival but was renamed GBBF Winter a couple of years ago to reflect that it’s not just about winter ales. This travels around the country, spending a couple of years in each venue – which is usually somewhere in the English north or midlands.

So far I’ve been too lazy to schlep up to Derby, Norwich or wherever and pay for (or cadge) somewhere to stay, when there’s lots of good festival at the same time of year right on my doorstep. Yeah, I know – it’s horribly metropolitan of me!

This year though, I’m breaking my GBBF Winter ‘fast’, thanks to the coming together of two factors: first, it’s in Birmingham his year, less than two hours by train from London, and second, an invitation to judge dark beer at last! 

There’s minor snags, like CBoB judging being in the morning, and being self-funded. Which means I’ve either got to go up the night before and find accommodation, pay silly money for a rush-hour train, or get up at 5am for a train at a sensible price. So night-bus into the station it was, and here I am on a train heading for New Street, which I used regularly as a student but haven’t visited now for maybe 20 years.

Anyway, GBBF Winter 2020 opens this afternoon and runs until Saturday 8^th Feb, so you still have time to get a ticket and make your way there! It’s at the New Bingley Hall, which is about 30 minutes walk (or a short bus ride) from New Street – I’m planning to walk as I’ve not seen Birmingham for so long.

It’ll be interesting to see how much the place has changed – maybe I will find myself planning to come back for a longer visit next time! And if you are coming to GBBF Winter this afternoon, maybe I’ll see you there. Cheers! 

London's Summer of Beer

There’s a lot for the beer-lover to look forward in London over the summer. I guess it started with last weekend’s Ealing Beer Festival, under the giant oak trees and in the grassy surroundings of Walpole Park – and once again mostly in the sunshine this year. A great selection of cask beers this year, all in good-to-excellent condition.

Beer judging underway

Perhaps to show that any style can work in cask, my absolute stand-out there this year was a cask Belgian Saison – but then, the original farmhouse Saisons would have been cask, so why not? Called Go With a Smile, it was a collaboration between two small Kentish brewers, Boutilliers and Iron Pier. By coincidence, my second favourite was also Belgian – but not just in style this time. One of the two kegs on the foreign beer bar, it was De la Senne’s Jambe de Bois, an 8%er billed as the most bitter Tripel in Belgium. Lovely!

I wasn’t just there for the drinking, mind you – I was helping judge CAMRA London’s Champion Beer of London, along with assorted luminaries from the world of brewing and beer writing. For the record, the overall winners were:

Gold:  Five Points Railway Porter
Silver: Tap East’s East End Mild
Bronze: Wimbledon XXXK Vintage Ale

This weekend, there's still a few tickets left for tonight and tomorrow at Craft Beer Cares, which was the subject of my previous post, then in two weeks time on Saturday 3rd August there’s an open-day at the Weird Beard brewery in Hanwell, after which we dive into the week of the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia (August 6th-10th). That kicks off with the judging of Champion Beer of Britain on the morning before the Tuesday trade session.

The 2018 LBA festival in Fuller's sunny courtyard

Overlapping with GBBF this year, which I guess ought to make it easier for some people to get to both, is London Craft Beer Festival (9th-11th August). It’s back at the Tobacco Dock event space this year, and when last I looked there were still tickets left for all sessions. It’s typically £50 for each five-hour session, but unlike GBBF where most sessions are £11 but you buy beer separately, the LCBF ticket includes all your beer. Then again, your GBBF ticket covers twice as long, at ten hours.

And last for now, but not least, the London Brewers Alliance has announced the date of its 2019 summer beer festival: Saturday 14th September. Hosted in the courtyard and carriage house at Fuller’s Griffin Brewery in Chiswick, this is another all-inclusive event. Tickets are £35-ish including fees, and you can expect to find more that 50 of the capital’s brewers, each pouring at least two or three of their beers.

Cask goes Continental at GBBF

The trade session at GBBF, the day after the guild get-together, was preceded by a morning judging golden ales for Champion Beer of Britain. The tasting is all done "blind", but we find out later what we judged, so I can tell you that Salopian's Oracle was totally justified as the gold medal winner for the category! In the main halls downstairs afterwards, the beers were in good condition, better than in some previous years. Some were a little 'green' but this was the very first session, and from what I hear they improved just as you'd expect as the week went on.

The big 'gap' was the American cask-conditioned beers, which had been delayed arriving. Fortunately the organisers were able to fill the hole left on the bar using something that was new this year – cask-conditioned Dutch and Belgian beers! I hear that arranging these was a logistical challenge, as casks had to be sent over there for the brewers to fill, and then collected and brought back, but I'm glad they did it as some of the results were great. (By the by, I've seen old British-style bellied metal casks on show in Dutch breweries, so I assume they must have used them once upon a time.)

I only tried a few of these, but two in particular were very memorable – the dry-hopped Beluga 10% Imperial Stout from De Kromme Haring, burnt yet smooth and hugely flavoursome, and Brouwerij 't Verzet's Oud Bruin, a massively sour and tart Flanders Old Brown.

Of the British ales tasted, Lymm's Dam Strong Ale was lovely – malty, estery and earthy-bitter, and tasting rather lighter than its claimed 7.2%! As I said, the others I tried were maybe a bit too green, with the exception of some from the Thornbridge bar, most notably their creamy-dry and hoppy Green Mountain Session IPA (keykeg-conditioned, rather than cask) and the rich and weirdly tasty Salted Caramel Lucaria Porter (right).

Oh, and I also at last got to meet Ben Palmer, who writes about his experiences of being an Englishman training as a brewer in Germany on his blog Hop & Schwein. We'd chatted online – shared interests! – but not actually met before. 

Next: Franconia comes to London

Drinking the world from London

3.5% is the strongest you can get in a
Swedish supermarket

Late July and early August are busy times for the London beer scene. The proximity of the London Craft Beer Festival (which I hear went very well this year) and the Great British Beer Festival gives bars and pubs around the city reason to hold all sorts of other events in parallel, such as mini festivals, tap-takeovers and meet-the-brewer sessions.

However, late July and August is also when the schools are closed for the summer, which means that many of us are out of town on family holidays. On the plus side, the holidays did enable a bit of beer shopping in foreign parts. Only in Systembolaget (the Swedish state alcohol monopoly shops) and in various German, Danish and Swedish supermarkets, but all of those carry pretty good beer ranges now – I even scored a bottle of the stonkingly good Limfjords Porter in Danish Lidl, of all places – so it was a nice change.

Anyway, it's why I only managed to get to two of those London beer events, or two-and-a-half if you count catching the last couple of hours of the Beer Writers Guild pre-GBBF summer get-together. I missed the speeches and brewery tours at the latter, as it took me that long to get there from Heathrow airport – it was hosted at Heineken's very shiny new Brixton Brewery site in the wilds of Herne Hill. But the company and the food were good, and some of the beer was excellent.

Among the stand-outs were Renegade India Session Ale, from the craft arm of West Berkshire Brewery, and two Americans, namely 2x4, which is Wyoming-based Melvin Brewing's massively hoppy yet smooth and rich Double IPA, and Hardywood's Singel from Virginia. The latter is in the style of a Belgian blond ale, and is lovely and spicy-estery. The name's a silly joke, though. The idea being it's below Dubbel and Tripel, hence 'Singel' – but Belgians don't call them that. It's not even a Dutch/Flemish word – the translation of single would be Enkel.

Next up: Cask goes Continental at GBBF

Fuller's & Friends at the Cask Yard

Pic: Fuller's

By all accounts, “The Cask Yard” at this weekend’s London Craft Beer Festival has been a great success. As last year, it’s presented and anchored by Fuller’s but features others too – not just cask ale from Sierra Nevada (Fuller’s distributes SN beer in the UK) but also the likes of Redemption, Thornbridge and Wimbledon.

It’s quite a change from the first LCBF events when there was cask, but nowhere near as prominently. Given the major part real ale plays in London brewing, a big cask presence is entirely fitting – no, entirely necessary!

It’s also been the first public outing for a project I heard about in confidence a few weeks ago – Fuller’s & Friends. Fuller’s brewers have been working with colleagues from around the country on a new set of collaboration brews. So far we’ve seen four of what I’m told will be six beers:

#1 – Flora & The Griffin, a 7.4% rye ale, collaboration with Thornbridge.

#2 – Rebirth, 6% “the original 1971 ESB reborn”, a collaboration with Moor Beer.

#3 – Big Smoke, a 7% smoked Porter with Hardknott.

#4 – Matariki, a 5.5% New Zealand Saison with Marble.

Two more to come, then – possibly during today’s final LCBF session. Sadly, I’ve neither a ticket nor the time to get over there this afternoon, but I’m hoping and expecting that all will also be on draught at this week’s Great British Beer Festival. My information is they will then be bottled and sold as a package.

Edited Addendum: Sadly I didn't see any of them at GBBF, but there's also visits from Cloudwater and Fourpure mentioned now on Fuller's Twitter feed, so I guess they are the 'missing' two that'll make it six.

More usefully, I've now heard from a second source that the six-pack will be sold exclusively through Waitrose. True or false, my Fuller's friends?

London, the Beer City

The 2017 London Beer City programme, or festival, or whatever you want to call it, kicks off tomorrow, with events all over the city for the next 10 days.

The anchor events are of course CAMRA's huge Great British Beer Festival from Tues 8th to Sat 12th. As usual this is mainly British real ale, but with the addition of foreign real ale and bottled beers, plus English wines and ciders.

Before that though, there's the London Craft Beer Festival from Fri 4th to Sun 6th in Shoreditch - this is a smaller event but more focused, with 45 breweries, many of them bringing new brews and serving them themselves.

A new thing this year (at least, I think it's new) is the beer embassies. Hosted at various venues around the city they will show off some of the best beers - both modern and trad - from elsewhere, for example the USA, Germany and Scandinavia. There's also a load of collaborative brews and other new beers around, including a competition where each of London's top beer stores collaborated with a local brewer on a brew.

For the full programme pick up a printed copy (as seen here) from one of the venues, or visit the London Beer City website.

When beer weeks are like buses

Photo: Craft Beer Rising

Typical! You wait months for a London beer week, then two come along at once… First up is DrinkUp.London's London Beer Week 2016 on 22nd-28th February. This is hubbed at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in the East End. Here you can buy £10 wristbands which get you access to special beers at 100 bars around the city – you still have to buy the beer, mind!

Then on the Friday and Saturday of that week (Feb 26-27th) comes the week's anchor event: Craft Beer Rising London, also at the Old Truman Brewery. There's over 150 British and overseas breweries due to take part with 600ish beers, plus this year they're adding a cider zone called 'Lost in Cyderspace' and rooms for mead, rum and whisky. CBRL tickets are £15 to £20 per six-hour session; this covers your glass, programme and musical entertainment, but not the beer – it's cash bars.

Then today comes notice of this year's London Beer City week and its anchor event, the London Craft Beer Festival, on August 12-14th in Bethnal Green. This is an altogether more bijou (and comfy) event, with 26 breweries taking part last year (this year's brewery list is due out in April), but it also works rather differently.

LCBF tickets are twice the price of CBR (currently £35ish per five-hour session) but they include unlimited tasters of all the beers, as well as music, glass and programme. I suppose it all comes down to whether you think 50-100 beers is enough to try or you'd prefer a choice of 600, plus whether you think you can drink £20-worth in five hours….

The one thing that raised a smile here was the LCBF assertion that “Once again we'll be the central part of the London Beer City week in August.” I presume the organisers are once again glossing over the fact that their event clashes with an ever-so-slightly larger one just across town. But hey, the Great British Beer Festival only has a mere 1000-ish beers, ciders and perries to choose from.

Then again, GBBF probably won't feature too many keg Double IPAs, Pink Peppercorn Saisons and the like. Plus I suspect the GBBF organisers don't really feel the need to link up with the crafterati of London Beer City!

Whatever, GBBF is on at Olympia from August 9th-13th, day tickets are £9/£11 (members/non-members) or £24/£29 for a season ticket – the latter usefully includes the Tuesday afternoon trade session that's not otherwise open to the general public.

Drink beer, talk (non)sense

There is a bit of nonsense – and to be fair, a bit of sense – being talked this week about craft beer and real ale, as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive. CAMRA, we are told, is out of touch and needs to change the Great British Beer Festival – which is currently focused on cask-and bottle-conditioned beers – to include the new kegged craft beers that are stealing all the headlines.

Yet I look around GBBF and I see craft beer everywhere. Some of it is 'traditional craft' – breweries that have been in business for decades or centuries, making finely-crafted ales the way our forefathers did (and all that jazz). Some is old brewers learning new ways – there is a Brains Craft Brewery bar, for instance, offering four or five of its newest craft ales. And others are new-wave craft – Hardknott has beers here, as do Burning Sky, Arbor, Ilkley and lots more.

At the same time, the London Craft Beer Festival opened today – I'll be along there tomorrow, I hope. It's promising draught and bottled beer from two-dozen breweries, mostly from the UK and the rest of Europe, plus two from the USA.

The only thing that divides the two is the method of dispense. CAMRA favours cask-conditioning, and with good reason – plenty of the modern craft brewers also put (some of) their beer in casks because they know that, properly treated, it can be a superb way to develop the flavours and carbonation over time.

Most keg beer on the other hand – though not all, because some can and does condition in the keg – is intended to be drunk the way it leaves the brewery. That is not a bad thing at all, although it can be limiting.

Yes, CAMRA has its Puritans, but I'd bet that most members here at GBBF will drink anything that's well made and flavoursome. And they won't care whether it comes out of a handpump or not (just as well really, because most other CAMRA beer festivals serve their beers by gravity, straight from a tap on the cask).

The odd thing is that craft keg has its Puritans too. They regard cask conditioning and especially handpumps as signs of 'old men's ale', stuff to be revolted against – just as CAMRA revolted against the fizzy, homogenised and often tasteless keg beers of the 1970s. On Twitter, they complain that this year's Champion Beer of Britain, Timothy Taylor's Boltmaker, is a boring bland brown bitter instead of a hop-forward tastebomb.

It's funny really. Plus ça change, and all that. Sometimes you need subtlety rather than obviousness, and sometimes you ought to wonder why some of those US craft brewers you idolise are so intrigued by cask ale – to the extent that they will do collaborations with JD Wetherspoon in order to brew a properly cask-conditioned ale, based on traditional craft methods, and then see it get a national release served in ale-led pubs on handpump.

Sometimes you really do have to say, "A pint please" and get on with it.

GBBF 2014

The 2014 Great British Beer Festival is well underway. The trade session opened a few hours ago, and the first real public session (although if you buy a season ticket, it also covers the trade session) starts this evening. This year's Champion Beer of Britain will be announced in a few minutes...

London Beer City

So, London Beer City starts this week. When I first read about it, I was a bit narked, mainly because there was no mention at all of the real reason why so many beer fans come to London in early August: CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival, which opens tomorrow at Olympia. Instead, it was promoting the new London Craft Beer Festival, which seemed determined to compete head-on with the GBBF.

What made it more galling was that it was CAMRA that ran the first London City of Beer promotion in 2012. (I assume this is why the latest version is 'Beer City' not the more usual City of Beer – and as a disclaimer, I did a bit of work helping write and edit the LCoB guidebook.)

In the weeks since, I have mellowed a lot, and am now very much looking forward to attending as many LBC events as I can, from GBBF and LCBF onwards.

To be honest, while LCoB did cover more than just real ale, and while there were associated events and tastings, and the tourist agencies were on-board, it was not as broadly-based as it should have been. Part of this came from its focus specifically on visitors to London. And while it wasn't the doing of CAMRA's Puritan regiments – LCoB was mostly the work of CAMRA's urban liberals such as myself – there is inevitably a real ale focus to everything CAMRA does. Even the vital pub preservation work it does is driven by the fact that the pub is the main outlet for real ale.

It has also helped a lot that London Beer City now recognises and mentions GBBF (“the world's greatest cask ale event”), and has developed a distinctive identity of its own, as a celebration of London beer and of London's brewing renaissance, and pulling in support from the London Brewers Alliance.

So I'm looking forward to it – and I'm especially looking forward to the London Craft Beer Festival, as well as to GBBF. There is definitely room for both in a city this big and diverse! LCBF is a lot smaller for a start – just 24 breweries from the UK, the rest of Europe and the US – but the beers should be rather different from the GBBF range.

PS. A word to the LBC team – London's a big place. It's great to have links to venue maps in the schedule, but what could be more useful is an overall map showing where all the events are, so we can see what's local, which ones could be done together, etc. There could even be one for each day...