2009 Great British Beer Festival Lineup
Our live Twitter Updates will return at the GBBF
Our recent trip to the Scottish Real Ale Festival produced a lot of new and interesting surprises – even though it was our third consecutive year there – underlining why we love going to those kind of events. However, as much as we like experimenting with the output of Scottish brewers, there’s a much, much, larger gathering taking place down south at the start of next month. The Great British Beer Festival is being held at London’s Earls Court from the 4th to the 8th of August – and the BeerCast will be there.
We’re certainly looking forward to it – over 450 real ales, ciders and beers from around the world will be untapped for our pleasure, which is an astonishing number. The domestic beer list was recently put online, giving the prospective attendees a chance to mentally construct a battle plan. And a plan is certainly needed, as there are 26 bars to navigate – a step up from the two at the Scottish festival. That’s only domestic ales too, GBBF has dedicated areas for sampling European and global beers that rarely make it to our shores. The Belgian list alone could take you a couple of days to get through – look out for our global GBBF preview next week.
It’s nice to see plenty of beers on offer that we’ve sampled and scored here on the BeerCast. Examples include Wickwar Cotswold Way (4.2%), Harvey’s Tom Paine (5.5%), and York’s Centurion Ghost Ale (5.4%). The hefty Exmoor Beast (6.6%) scored 73% in our SouthWest special, which also featured Hogsback TEA (4.2%) and St Austell Tribute (4.2%) – the latter still in our top four highest-scoring beers of 2009, and so in line for our Beer of the Year show in December. Our reigning BOTY will also be there – Hopback Summer Lightning (5%), along with their Entire Stout (4.5%), which we have also featured. A personal favourite of mine will be there too – Cain’s Fine Raisin Beer (5%) divided opinions when we tried it, and it will be interesting to try on cask rather than bottled.
Of course it’s sampling new beers that becomes the real joy of attending beer festivals, and with the beer list running into the hundreds there are plenty of things we’ve never heard of that will be out there. Names like Townes Pynot Porter (4.5%), Langton Inclined Plane Bitter (4.2%) and Jarrow Rivet Catcher (4%) really stand out. We have tasting notes, but nothing more to go on. Concertina Bengal Tiger (4.5%) is an aromatic amber ale, Spectrum Black Buffle (4.5%) is a Norfolk stout named after the brewer’s cat, and Butts Barbus Barbus (4.6%) could be just about anything. Cwrw Eryri (3.6%) is a golden bitter from the Purple Moose Brewery in Gwynedd – the name translates as Snowdonia Ale, for the non-Welsh speakers. There are some beers that tell you exactly what to expect however – such as Green Jack Orange Wheat (4.2%) from Suffolk, or the lengthily-titled North Cotswold Vanilla Bumble Beer (4.5%) and Little Valley Organic Fair-Trade Ginger Pale Ale (4%).
The choice is bewildering. I’m a fully paid-up IPA fan, so should I go for Marble Lagonda IPA (5%) from Manchester, with it’s quadruple addition of hops – or Red Squirrel’s White Mountain American IPA (5.4%) with five specialist malts? What about Grain Tamarind IPA (5.5%) from Norfolk? Or Durham Magnificat (6.5%)? What about all of them? I may even finally get to sample Falkirk’s Tryst Brewery Raj IPA (5.5%), which was the potential highlight of the Scottish festival, but was never delivered. Golden Ales are present in abundance too – Conwy’s Clogwyn Gold (3.6%), Cheddar Pot Holer (4.3%) and Funfair Dive Bomber (4.6%) all sound tempting, not to mention Lancashire producer Pictish’s Brewer’s Gold (3.8%). Multi award-winning Purity will be there too, with Pure Gold (3.8%).
There are beers hailing from points far from our Scottish base, such as Wooden Hand Black Pearl Stout (4.5%) from Cornwall. Okells Red (4.7%) comes from the Isle of Man, Hilden Scullion’s Irish (4.6%) from County Down, and there are even beers from Guernsey – Randall’s Patois Amber Ale (4.5%) is brewed about as far away from Edinburgh as you can get. There are several unusual beers that I’ll be seeking out, like Welton’s Pride ‘n’ Joy, which is a full bodied beer deliberately brewed to 2.8% to avoid the pitfalls of alcohol. Dunham Massey’s Chocolate Cherry Mild (3.8%) and Bartram’s Cherry Stout (4.8%) have their extra ingredient revealed upfront, but there are secretive tipples such as Abbeydale’s Matins (3.6%) from South Yorkshire, which uses muesli in the brewing process. Maybe that’s one to start with just after breakfast – it’s going to be a long haul.
The Great British Beer Festival opens on Tuesday the 4th of August at 5pm, running to 10.30pm. It then opens 12-10.30pm Wednesday to Friday the 7th, before finishing off on Saturday 8th 11am-7pm. Tickets are available online or at the door, at between £6 and £10.
