A day at the Great British Beer Festival 2014

I’ll start this review out with an admission: I’m not really a beer festival kind of guy. They conjure up images of cramped school halls and leisure centres, of floors covered in booze and vomit, of standing for hours on end because there aren’t any seats, of being surrounded by a curious mix of pony-tailed men and morons, all of whom are incredibly rude. In the age of the craft beer pub (I use that term for want of a better one, I mean the likes of Craft Beer Co., the Exmouth Arms etc.) which stock hundreds and hundreds of beers, every day can be a beer festival for a London resident. That said the capital has seen an explosion in festivals in the last couple of years and the Great British Beer Festival seems more popular than ever.

I would be quite happy to go to a good pub, try half a dozen beers and not have to pay a £10 entry fee. However, I’d never been to the GBBF before and I’ll quite happily try most things once. So I booked a ticket, made my way over to Kensington Olympia and the rest is history.

I arrived at around 3pm which gave me a good seven and a half hours of drinking time before the venue closed at 10.30pm. Getting in was smooth and things seemed quite quiet although it was the Thursday and I was quite early. The Olympia is a huge, cavernous space and you are met with the enormity of the arena on arrival. A big front desk (of sorts) allows you to pick up a festival glass; these cost £3 (although you could get a refund if you wanted to return it) and were available in pint, half pint and 1/3 pint sizes. As I walked up to the desk the bloke placed a pint glass in front of me before I’d even opened my mouth. I asked for a 1/3 glass at the precise moment that the bloke next to me was explaining how it was a “more girly option”. Ah.

I was meeting my friend Murry and his dad Luke, and I made the mistake of trying to find them without consulting the map in my programme....

Ten minutes later I decided to grab a beer and bought a glass of Salopian’s Lemon Dream (Beer #292) to imbibe while I consulted my map. Having gathered my bearings I supped on the Lemon Dream – a lovely light wheat beer with a hoppy Cascade punch – and finally found my companions. They had devised a simple system of starting out with bitters before moving on to the more flavoursome stuff later in the day, which seemed sensible. 

The festival was organised geographically and in alphabetical order, which on the one hand made it incredibly easy to navigate but on the other didn’t always seem to make a great deal of sense (for example, the Tight Rope bar was home to beers from locations as disparate as Glasgow, Glamorgan and London). I guess it has to be organised somehow and it didn’t really bother me. There were also numerous brewery bars offering the likes of Brains and Fullers and a couple of foreign beer bars too.

So to the bitters, I started with a Fellows Full English (Beer #293), a fairly bog standard English bitter without any notable properties and followed that up with a Red Mission from Cornish brewery Driftwood Spars (Beer #294). The Red Mission had a lot more going on with a fuller mouthfeel and a robust hop profile that lent it a citrus finish. Up next we went for a third of Cumbrian brewery Coniston’s K7 (Beer #295), a golden ale that also packs a reasonable hop punch.

As we were now moving to some more hoppy stuff I opted to follow that with Burning Sky’s excellent Plateau, which I have had before (Beer #229). That was closely followed by an English Summer Ale from Maldon Brewing (Beer #296), an okish summer ale.

Some sustenance was required, as well as a sit down and we were easily able to secure a seat within handy reach of the pork scratching stall. The scratchings were excellent and very reasonably priced (as this was the only food I bought I figure I should probably mention it).

I think we got a bit confused by whose turn it was to pick beers at this point, so I took full advantage and went for Tiny Rebel’s Fubar (Beer #297) which turned out to be my beer of the day; a really powerful golden ale with lovely bitter orange flavours and floral hops, really, really good. Next up was Cross Bay’s Zenith (Beer #298), this IPA from the Lancashire brewery was a bit stronger at 5.0% ABV. It was reasonably be good but it probably suffered from following the excellent Fubar.

We then moved on to some dark beers before the system broke down completely. First up was Orkney’s Dark Island (Beer #299), an old ale from the Scottish island. A nice beer with decent dark fruit flavours but a feint sourness which was a bit odd. That was followed by a Welsh Black (Beer #300) from Cardiff’s Bullmastiff Brewery that was probably my second favourite beer of the day. The aroma of blackberries was strong and the beer was rich and very fruity with berry flavours balanced nicely with the roasted malt. Next up was another Scottish beer, Silkie Stout (Beer #301) from the Loch Lomond Brewery. This one was also delightful with beautiful coffee tones, a really great stout.

The last two beers went a bit left-field, I was charged with getting a wheat beer but it was off (I forgot which one it was) so I traipsed around the hall trying to find a replacement, eventually coming across Pitfield’s organic Raspberry Wheat (Beer #302). This was nice and light after some of the heavier stuff and the acidic tang of the raspberries offered a welcome respite to my palate. We rounded the night off with something from the American bar as Murry went and picked up a huge bottle of Gigantic IPA (Beer #303), the signature brew of Gigantic Brewing Company of Portland, Oregon. At 7.3% ABV this was by far the strongest beer of the day although fairly typical for a US IPA of course. The beer has flavours of tropical fruit with a bitter grapefruit finish. I probably would have been able to appreciate it more if I hadn’t already tried so many beers.

After polishing off the Gigantic IPA I headed for home and mentally reviewed the day in my head. I had a really enjoyable day and couldn’t really complain about any aspect of the day, which is to the credit of the festival organisers and of course, the brewers. The fact that Olympia is such a huge space meant that at no point did I feel crowded, I was able to sit down when I wanted and I didn’t really have to queue for anything. On that basis, I probably would attend the event again and indeed I probably will next year, although I'll be doing a lot more research on the beers available before I go. I’m still not convinced that a day spent in Olympia is necessarily any better than day spent in, say, Craft Beer Co., but it’s the one-off nature of the GBBF and the fact that it is an event that provides the main attraction.