Thursday 4 August 2011

First love: real ale

One of the joys of GBBF is introducing people to ale for the first time. (Although can you introduce someone for the second time? Never mind...) Yesterday it was a friendly and very interested TV crew from Japan, here to film the festival, interview CAMRA chief exec Mike Benner and then cover the CBOB announcement.

One thing I didn't have time to give them a tour of though was the Japanese beers. Yes, we have Japanese beers - 10 of them, on the New World bar (Urbani/W3) alongside other Pacific Rim brews from Australia and New Zealand.

Slightly confusingly, this part of Bieres Sans Frontieres is also where you will find the Scandinavians, which this year mostly means the Danes, although there are one or two Norwegians as well.

Also here are the stunning beers of Danish microbrewer Mikkeller, although as the eponymous Mikkel doesn't have his own brewery - instead co-operating with other breweries around Denmark and the world to use their facilities - he is listed as a 'gypsy brewer', which may not be politically correct but is apparently one of the terms he prefers.

No comments: