A festival that’s worth leaving the pub for
By Phil Mellows
Please keep this to yourselves, but I don’t really like beer festivals. To put it plainly, I’d rather be down the pub, sitting in a quiet corner with my pint. But I make an exception when it comes to the Campaign for Real Ale’s Great British Beer Festival, which starts on Tuesday, August 2, and runs until Saturday, August 6.
Now in its 45th year, the festival is back at London’s Olympia for the first time since 2019, Covid having rudely interrupted the festivities.
The main attraction of a beer festival is the variety of brews you can get to taste, and at the GBBF there will be more than 1,000 of them. That’s many times more than you could possibly drink, even if you doggedly stayed for all five days, and even though we now have the option of third of a pint measures.
Most of the beers are served at long bars organised by region and staffed by Camra volunteers – astonishingly, there will be 1,000 of them on duty, too. Some 500 British brewers are contributing at least one beer, and getting the casks there, setting them up on stillages and making sure they stay cellar-cool under the hot roof of Olympia in summer is a remarkable logistical feat in itself.
There are also 20 separate brewery bars, set up and staffed by brewers themselves, which are popular places to meet up because they tend to be more easily found. Family brewers such as Adnams and Harvey’s have traditionally taken these pitches, but now you can also find names from the craft beer world, from Anspach & Hobday to Wild Beer. Brew 61 and Vocation are among the newcomers this year.
Among the busiest bars will be those serving cask beer brewed outside the UK, and GBBF has engineered an exchange scheme with the New England Real Ale Exhibition, meaning visitors can taste brews that are extraordinarily difficult to find in the United States, and only available in Britain for these few days at Olympia – while they last!
The GBBF is all about discovery, and if you want to go even deeper, there’s the appropriately named Discovery Bar where brewers, cider makers and experts will host walk-up informal tastings and showcase some unusual beers and fresh ingredients.
There are formal tastings, too, that you have to book a seat at, run by luminaries such as Roger Protz, TimWebb and Des de Moor.
Sadly, the unveiling of the Champion Beer of Britain, usually one of the highlights of the festival, has been stalled by Covid. But there are new features including a home brew competition and the chance to be a brewer for a day at Hackney’s Five Points brewery.
Your biggest challenge, though, will be choosing just what to drink and do in the limited time you have there. It’s fun to mix old favourites with beers you’ve never heard of, and those you’ve heard good things about but haven’t had the chance to try. It’s a great adventure. Even I’m getting excited!
Photo © Camra