London: The tastes and surprising smells of the Great British Beer Festival

Me abandoned by soldier

Soldier

If Italy was about not drinking beer (no beer for 4.5 days – I think that’s the longest I’ve gone in months!), then London was its opposite. We did little else but drink beer. That little else including walking by Buckingham Palace and trying to take a picture with a guard who, despite letting lots of kiddos take pictures with him, stomped off as soon as I tried to pose with him. It also involved feeding the ducks in St. James Park, getting lost for an hour on the way to the British Museum, stopping in the British Museum shortly to see the Rosetta Stone and some mummies, and getting soaked by rain, of course. What British vacation would be complete without rain to complain about and to make me glad to arrive home to a very sunny San Francisco earlier this afternoon?

SE England Booth at GBBF

The highlight of the weekend was the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF), which to be entirely honest, was not so great. Admittedly, part of this was my own fault, and I’ll get to why that is in a minute, but I’m going to suggest stacking it up against the criteria I mentioned in the post about the WABL Mother of All Fathers Day Festival. Yes, I know this isn’t the closest American comparator, not by a long shot, but I think the criteria I’m about to use should apply to any festival, so this is less about comparing GBBF with WABL than GBBF with an ideal festival. I’ve rearranged the criteria in order of approximate importance (in my mind).

1. Breadth and Depth of Selection: I’d say that the GBBF probably scored somewhere between moderate and high on this dimension… if I had attended earlier in the week. The festival ran Tuesday through Saturday and because we attended on Saturday many of the beers were gone. The brews/breweries were arranged by region with about 20-some taps per booth and some of these booths almost empty when we arrived and were entirely closed just a couple hours into the 8 hour-long Saturday session. There is no way they should have run out of so many beers. Why keep the festival open if over half of the beers (the good half) are gone? If you’re going to sell people tickets, you ought to have some beer for them. No American festival I’ve been to has run out of more than just a select few of the most popular/rare beers, and usually only in the last hours of the day, not as the last day of the festival is just beginning. Most breweries were only offering one brew, so it wouldn’t seem like such an imposition for them to donate more than one cask of it. With a convention center full of real ale enthusiasts, I can’t think of better publicity for them, I would think it would pay for itself several times over. So, if I were going again next year, I’d arrive in town sooner, and be there from the start. I’d also ask CAMRA what the point of a 5-day long festival is, and whether they wouldn’t be better served by starting Wednesday or Thursday if the logistics of a 5-day festival are just too tough. The cynical side of me thinks this is all about ticket sales and the extra day lets them rake in more dough at no extra cost, since they’re obviously not tapping new casks of stuff that’s running dry. For a group that’s making a gigantic stink over getting a “fair pour” (they get enraged by 15 oz pours in 16 oz glasses), it seems awfully hypocritical to sell festival tickets to a room full of empty casks.

As for the beer that was left, well, suffice it to say there was nothing that wowed me. Sure, as my friend Chris (one half of The Beer Geek) pointed out, these make great session beers since almost all are below 5%, so they are particularly suited to a festival-type situation where you’re drinking many beers for many hours. But you know what? So what! I’d rather have a few 4-oz tastes of stuff I loved (even if it’s 6, 8, or 10+%) than a dozen half pints of beer that not going leave me feeling anything other than an extraordinary need to pee. The range of styles represented was narrow, sticking almost entirely to traditional British styles, especially Bitters and Milds, as far as I could tell. Now I know that their mandate is to serve “real ale” and this might preclude them from some stuff with wacky additives. However, (A) one brewery was serving an elderflower beer, so that suggests many additives are allowed, and (B) there is still plenty of latitude that has nothing to do with additives and that easily falls within the real ale definition that I didn’t see them exploring. For instance, why no American, Belgian, or German style real ales brewed by British brewers? There may have been a few, but they were just that, few and far between. I’m not saying the British beers have nothing to offer, but aren’t diversity, experimentation, and playing on a theme the absolute best parts about the craft beer scene? Or, if you’re a regional purist who only wants to see British styles in Britain, how about some punchier, more flavorful versions of those British beers? Yes, yes, those 3.5% Milds will allow you to drink all day, but don’t you even want to try an Imperial Stout every now and again?

On thing I did like was that they had dozens of taps serving Cider and Perry, which added to the tasting options. Unfortunately, this was not the boon I thought it would be, for reasons I’ll go into below.

Eating pie

2. Short/No Lines for Beer and Food: I do have to hand it to them here. This didn’t even cross my mind until I sat down to write about it because we never waited for anything. Of course there wasn’t much left to wait for… but I won’t back into that again. I’ve griped about the selection enough; I’ll get back on point and ust say that their waiting lines were non-existent. Oh, and I almost forgot! The pies were amazing! They had tons of savory pies (I got the chicken and mushroom) and they were delicious. We should have these at EVERY beer festival!

3. Friendly and Knowledgeable Pourers: They got this about half right. Almost all of the folks I spoke to were very friendly, but they were almost all CAMRA volunteers instead of representatives of the respective breweries. The only breweries with their own people there were the large commercial ones with their own booths. This meant no brewmasters or brewery presidents certainly, but not even any brewery sales reps or cellermen to talk about what makes their beers so unique. Even if this is mostly about sales and promotion, it’s still one of my favorite parts of a beer festival, partly because it’s never all about sales and promotion. One generally doesn’t go into craft brewing to make a fortune (and those who do are easy to spot and often the ones with a lonely patronless booth), so it’s always a matter of some pride for brewery representatives to talk about their beers and listen to feedback from customers. I’ve found this group to be some of the most sincerely welcoming people in the world, and I miss them when a festival is all volunteer run. There’s nothing wrong with volunteers, I am sometimes one myself, but they generally don’t have the same depth of knowledge or personal investment in the beers as a representative of the brewery. I can see why the logistics of having so many brewery reps on hand might be difficult, since 280 breweries are represented at the festival, but surely there’s got to be a way to incorporate them somehow. If there are 10 breweries with two taps a piece represented at a regional booth, and only room for five pourers behind the counter, why not have the breweries take turns on alternating days? Or have one group work the first half of the day and the other group work the second half? Do the reps not want to be there? Maybe the sales reps don’t, but if I were a brewery owner, I’d want to be there, or if that wasn’t possible, I’d certainly make one of my reps go.

4. Great Location: Maybe they did the best they could? The Earl’s Court Convention Center was dark, gloomy, and uninspiring – all of which you can tell from my photos. That said, it was raining cats and dogs all day, so I can see why they wouldn’t hold their festival outside in nature. There was nothing wrong with their venue, just nothing special either. And on a side note, I think this factor has an interaction effect with the type-of-beer-on-offer factor. If I’m drinking session beers all day, instead of special beers for a couple hours, I want to be somewhere pleasant that makes it worth sticking around for so long. If I’m just at a festival for three hours and preoccupied with novel beers, it almost doesn’t matter what the space is like. But if I’ve got hours and hours with nothing but 4.0% Bitters and Milds ahead of me, I’m hoping I’ve got some good friends to keep me company and picnic bench out in the sunshine. Not only was there no sunshine on offer, but seats were pretty hard to come by. There were few relative to the number of attendees, they got taken early, and were guarded zealously. Sometimes a table with 10 chairs would have two attendees sitting there, warding off approaching hopefuls as they saved the other 8 chairs for friends off carousing somewhere across the auditorium.

5. Abundant and Sanitary Bathrooms: This one they got spot on. Maybe this is why they chose the Earl’s Court location, despite its gloom. There were no-port-a-pots or men peeing against walls in sight, just gleaming real toilets around every corner.

6. No Inebriated Mayhem: Remarkably, considering how long each daily session ran, and the preponderance of guys in costume (including one in nothing but a woman’s nightie and thong), there was no mayhem. Of course, serving all beers at under 5% helps this, but certainly a lot of credit goes to the patrons themselves, for knowing their limits.

As I’m writing this though, I realize that I still had some small dissatisfaction with the crowd in attendance that may bring the difference between American and British beer drinkers into relief (or maybe I’ll just make vast generalizations that convince everyone on both sides of the Atlantic that I’m a total snob).

In the US, there seem to generally be two types that make up the majority of beer festival attendees: (1) craft beer fanatics and those who are learning to be craft beer fanatics: these guys and gals are here to taste and savor, and while they may end up far from sober by the end of the festival, that’s a byproduct of their goal of tasting as many delicious beers as possible, not their primary reason for their attendance; (2) the fraternity-like crowd: quantity is the name of the game for these guys (so be it if this means they can pay less attention to what they’re drinking), and they can usually be spotted by their costumes and pretzel necklaces. I like group 1 a lot because I can learn from them and trade opinions with them. I like group 2 in small doses… at the beginning of the day. Sure, festivals would lose some spark if there were no stories of the occasional oddball costume or guy who starts spouting hilarious gibberish. But when they start pounding their tastes like shots, in front of brewers who watch their limited store of barrel aged brew get swallowed without a second thought or their Rauchbier poured out with a “yech!”, then it’s insulting. And when they start breaking glasses or fighting it’s dangerous.

In Britain though, there seemed to be a third group that inhibits the conceptual space somewhere between groups 1 and 2, mentioned above. This group isn’t a bunch of rowdy drunks, but neither is it necessarily all beer fanatics. A lot of them are quiet beer appreciators, many of whom seem to have a favorite style or two, and favorite beer or two that they return to over and over again. If I’m right, then this might explain why even though the groups at the GBBF was perfectly well behaved, something still seemed missing – that drive to for new and exciting brews! And this lack of demand for it from the patrons would also help explain the lack of supply of it from the vendors. Much is made of the American entrepreneurial spirit, and while again there’s that cynic in me that usually makes me think this is a bunch of self-congratulation and self-promotion, the festival made me think there really is something to this old stereotype.

7. Special, but Not Too Prominent, Members-Only Features: As a non-CAMRA member, I don’t know the full extent of special member features, but I do know that there was a CAMRA lounge upstairs during each of the sessions. It had a few taps and some (much coveted) places to sit down. Sounds good to me, but then, not enough to make me join either.

So, as far as the official criteria go, this was only a moderately successful beer festival in my mind. On the plus side, it was a great learning experience for me, since I came in having drunk very little English beer. I also got the chance to spend times with friends, including my college friend Dave, who is working in London now, and my new-ish friends Chris & Merideth of The Beer Geek.

Rudgate Ruby Mild

My favorite beer of the festival was the Rudgate Ruby Mild from York, England. This is a Dark Mild Ale, with 4.0% ABV. This is a British style that has low alcohol content (2.0% – 6.0%), a dark color from toasted malts, and very little hop bitterness, flavor, or aroma. It was a translucent medium brown with a persistent tan head. The body was, while still pretty light, just a touch weightier than several of the rest of the beers I drank that day, which is part of the reason I enjoyed it. It had a rich nutty-sweet fore-flavor that paired well with its dryer, roastier finish.
Another beer that deserves a call-out is the Green Jack Summer Dream. This is a Blonde Ale brewed with fresh elderflowers. The taste of the beer itself is nothing particularly remarkable, but its smell is absolutely intoxicating. I think I remarked at the point at which I was trying to inhale it in nose gulps, “This is what I want my life to smell like!” I also think they deserve credit for not going ahead and making an absolutely sickeningly floral or fruity soda-tasting beer, as many places would have done. The elderflower here dominates the scent so completely, but is extremely restrained in the taste, which was that of your typical British pale session beer.

Drinking the Cider

Cider and Perry Booth

I mentioned above that I’d get back to the Cider and Perry, and I think I’ll end on that, since it may have been the biggest shock of the festival. After a few beers, Dave and I made our way over to where the apple cider and pear cider (a.k.a. Perry) were being poured. I was excited because there must have been at least five dozen varieties. This is something you’d never see in the US, because we just don’t have that many artisanal cider makers, period. They had also rated each of the ciders 1 through 7, with 1 being very sweet, 4 being neutral, and 7 being very dry. This meant I could tell what I was ordering, as opposed to the beer, where the only description available was the name and whatever I could get out of a pourer, since the festival program was not available for free, only for sale. Dave and I each got a Perry. Mine was ok, not as pear-like as I expected in aroma or taste, more of just a neutral ever-so-slightly fizzy fruitiness, but I was willing to chalk this up to its being “real cider” (I wish CAMRA would come up with better terms, since the use of “real” seem so aggressive and vague at the same time). By real cider, they mean non-pasteurized and bottle conditioned instead of artificially carbonated. I would think this would add to rather than detract from the intensity of the pear flavor, but maybe this real cider is delicate stuff and let’s face it, it’s been the better part of a year since cider season. Whatever the case, I was just glad I didn’t order the one Dave got. It smelled gut wrenchingly of rotten eggs. I couldn’t make myself take a sip the first time I tried, and on the second time I had to hold my breath until my nose was out of the glass. We asked the pourer about this and he told us that they add sulfites to stop fermentation, this gives the drink is sulfur-like smell. We just stared at him, mouths agape: so it was supposed to smell like this? No thank you! I can think of few smells more universally reviled by humans than the sulfur-egg smell, and none of those other smells below to anything I’d voluntarily drink. It does make me want to ask Ace Cider, up in Sebastopol, about their cider making process. I wonder how they make their delicious ciders, and how many of their steps would violate CAMRA rules. Real or no, I’d take the Ace Perry over that stinking “real” perry any day. Hell, I’d pay not to have to drink that real perry.