Christmas Markets

Craft Bottle Beers at Royal William Yard

Having attended a number of markets and Christmas Fare's with Craft Bottle Beers it is interesting to see stall holders different approaches to selling their wares. Our latest market was at Plymouth's Royal William Yard, a popular and growth area of the city it was an interesting venue.  The one thing we have learned and was reinforced at this market is that is you have the give customers a reason to buy and its not sufficient just to make something and then try to sell it.

We were selling a selection of 25 + local South West craft bottled beers from 8 different brewers. All were fantastic beers, a little quirky, a little different but all very tasty beers. Other brewers were also at the same events selling equally fine beers. Indeed, all of the stall holders sell excellent items from pastries, honey, juices to arts and crafts. There is no doubting the quality of their wares.

The one thing we noticed is that it helps hugely if you can give customers a reason to buy. At this time of year people are looking for Christmas gifts. We packaged a 3 bottle pack with simple but clean"Happy Christmas" branding so it looks like a gift. In addition a jute bag 6 pack with a general Craft Beer message had a wide appeal and the customer also gets to select from a range of oddly named beers with interesting labels that suit different interests. Other brewers focused on gift boxes with their own branding, great for brand awareness but not so good for giving customers a reason to buy.

At this time of year the gift pack is a sure fire best seller. However after Christmas the challenge will be to come up with another reason to buy. Clearly with beer birthdays and Fathers Day spring to mind but I'm sure there are other reasons to be found. Its really about thinking from the customers perspective rather than that of the producer.

You also need to make it easy for people to buy with sensible pricing. Remember people only have so much cash on them. We invested in a card reader that worked through the phone. It turned out an excellent purchase with a significant value of our total sales being through this.

Thinking about what customers want rather than what you perhaps want to make or sell is quite a different way of looking at things, but if you can apply this principle to your business it will potentially reap huge benefits.

Christmas Gifts

Bellingers Sleigh Fuel 5.2% abv

What a great opportunity Christmas offers to introduce friends and family to the charms of real ale and craft beers. Beer makes an excellent gift and there are so many different styles and tastes to choose from that for sure you can find something to suit.

The local supermarkets offer a full and interesting choice of bottled beers but often you are faced with the same familiar brands to choose from. What is more fun is to seek out your local brewer and see what they have to offer. Or, find a beer that has a name that suits the person in mind in terms of their interests or character. You might even find a Christmas gift pack or Christmas themed beer.  More brewers are brewing seasonal beers and at this time of year you can expect to find some wonderful full, malty, fruity and spirituous beers, liquid Christmas pudding in a bottle!

Now-a-days, every town, even village seems to have a small but industrious craft brewer, producing beers with passion, pride, often using local ingredients and with names that reflect their geographical locality. You can make this even more appropriate by introducing some local foods - cheese is a great fit for beer. A local beer with locally produced cheese is very tasty and offers something out of the ordinary, plus of course it supports local business!

If you are stuck for a present for a loved one, then you could do worse than find an appropriate beer. Go on line to find a local brewer, you can often buy through the Internet. If you are lucky, some of the larger towns have a their own specialist beer shops which are also worth a visit. You wont necessarily find cheap beer here, but you will find quality beers and often an informed assistant who can help guide you through the morass of labels to ensure you select a suitable beer.

Beer as a gift is great, but its meant to be drunk. To enjoy bottled beer in particular at its best, you need to drink it sooner rather then later. Don't stick bottled beer gifts in the cupboard and forget them - beer ages for the worse unless its designed by the brewer to improve with age, so make sure you drink any beers you receive within a reasonable time frame.

Finally, above all else, beer is meant to be fun, so relax and take your time both choosing and drinking beer at Christmas.

Swindon Beer Festival

 

What a great event Swindon Beer Festival was in 2013. Set in the fabulous Steam Railway Centre, which is the most splendid venue for such an event. The main room where the festival is held can hold over 700 people comfortably in the one session, creating a superb friendly atmosphere.

The big regional beer festivals such as Swindon do a tremendous job in promoting cask ales and their importance should not be under estimated. They offer consumers huge choice and spark real interest and debate, all of which is very healthy, plus of course they are great fun events and there is never any semblance of trouble. In a way they make real ale down to earth and accessible, helping to take away some of the fear of trying new beers. It is a chance to experiment with different tastes and styles and no one minds if you don't like a certain beer.

Swindon CAMRA had done a great job in selecting a fine beer list with beers from all over the UK, including CAMRA GBBF winner Elland 1872 Porter. Three South West brewers had separate bars. St Austell Brewery, as I was there with my day job show casing our beers. I'm really very lucky to get to do that as there is no better selection of ales to represent. The other two brewers were Ramsbury and I've written previously about what great beers they brew and Box Steam, the Wiltshire brewer who also have a fine selection.

Both of the aforementioned brewers have won Champion Beer at Swindon before. Ramsbury with their excellent Silver Pigs Stout and Box Steam with Derail Ale. The latter is a big tasty IPA, full of hops and plenty of citrus, its a very popular style at the moment and Derail is one of the best examples you can get.

However, back to the festival. for me one slight disappointment was not to see local Swindon Regional Brewer Arkells with a brewers bar. They have a new young brewer now in Alex Arkell who I believe is brewing some interesting and different beers and it would have been great to try some of these. Hopefully next year they will attend again. I've known Arkell's beers for many years having grown up around the Swindon area. They would not be favourite beers but I do have a certain fondness for them so hope to enjoy them next year.

Finally, congratulations to Swindon CAMRA for organising another excellent beer festival and also to the venue for hosting such an event.

Weymouth Octoberfest



CAMRA organisers Dave, Russell & Rich.

A recent visit to Weymouth Pavilions for the CAMRA organised Beer Festival (or Octoberfest as its called) turned out to be a excellent couple of days. The pavilion is no longer council run and was due to be demolished, but a community group has now taken over the venue and although the building is run down, its good to see this great facility looks likely to be saved.

The Beer Festival on the other hand has gone from strength to strength. A very well run event by West Dorset CAMRA, it attracts people who are both local and those from further afield. This year the beer list focused on brews from the South West and what a great selection of beers it was too.  Across the UK many smaller craft brewers are brewing some good and interesting beers and its great to see the South West has a fine selection.

However, it was not just great beer that made the festival. Friday evening featured a quiet session, but it was actually a really sociable night with lots of people wanting to talk about the beer selection available. This is the opportunity for people who are genuinely interested in beer to meet and discuss all things beer. I was doing my day job show-casing St Austell ales and there is no better selection of beers to represent and be proud of. Needless to say the St Austell beers were very popular, so much so that Big Job was runner up in the champion beer competition.

Festival goers enjoy the music

The Saturday evening featured two great bands, selected by a local licensee who new their music and they turned out to be great choices. Beer and music go together so well. This year the bands played at the right volume so chatting was still possible. I was able to enjoy the music as the St Austell bar had been drunk dry by 9pm on the Saturday leaving time to sample some delicious beers from competitors!

All told this was a great event and over 4750 pints were consumed. I'd certainly recommend a weekend in Weymouth in early October if you want to enjoy some great beers at a well run festival in a town that's really very welcoming. Congratulations to West Dorset CAMRA and we look forward to 2014.

A Favourite Glass

Used in pubs but still a goody!

The first piece of advise I often give when doing a beer talk is to get yourself a glass you enjoy drinking from. A favourite glass can add hugely to ones enjoyment of drinking at home and rather like a favourite beer, the favourite glass becomes a welcome friend and is a signal to the brain that its time to relax.

When choosing a glass there are a few tips to consider but it's still a very personal thing. Some people help themselves to pub glassware and although the branding can look great, they are not always a pleasure to drink from. Pub glassware is designed to withstand the rigours of the glass washer and they are often made from toughened glass. This can make them a little clunky when placed to the mouth and also the toughening limits the shapes available to choose from.

A visit to the local engraving shop will offer far more interesting shapes to choose from and the glass is much finer allowing the tongue to do its work much easier. However for real choose in glassware you need to look at what happens in Europe. Here there is huge choice, where the limitations of toughened glass seems not to apply. Each beer has its own branded glass and they are sometimes bespoke to the beer - you wont find the same shape for another beer. Many of these glasses are stemmed glasses and that would be my personal choice for a beer glass.

My current glass

I like the stemmed glass that narrows to the top concentrating the aromas allowing them to blossom within the nose. Glasses with wider heads allow all of those delicate smells to dissipate quickly into the atmosphere and one of the main enjoyments of drinking a fine beer can be lost. The draw back with the former style of glass is that those beers that are well conditioned such as some German and Belgium beers, can pour with too larger head, so one needs to be careful of this.

I would also tend to avoid the pint glass. I like to drink my beer in smaller amounts, savouring the flavours and treating the drink like a bottle of fine wine, pouring smaller amounts at a time. The advantage here is that the beer stays fresher with more condition for longer.

Whatever glass you settle on make it part of your enjoyment of drinking a beer. After all, most of us have a favourite coffee or tea mug so why not do the same with your beer glass. Cheers!

Great British Beer Festival London

Devon & Dorset bar at GBBF

I have just returned from a week in London at the Great British Beer Festival in Olympia and what a wonderful event this is. The word "Great" in the title is very appropriate indeed. It's the biggest beer festival in the UK, lasting for five days, attracting over 50,000 visitors with over 800 real ales and ciders, plus a huge range of bottled craft beers on offer.

The beer festival is manned by an army of volunteers from CAMRA. These are people who have day jobs so they are not experts in event organisation but one has to say they do a tremendous job. Also, serving this many beers at cellar temperature in a venue such as Olympia with its greenhouse effect natural lighting is no mean feat. 

The nice thing about the GBBF as its become known is the great spirit and atmosphere with which customers attend. It attracts a wide variety of people. From the tickers who rate beers, groups of friends on a night out, office workers looking for a beer after work to stag and hen parties that come on the Saturday. There is also a good proportion of ladies that attend and this is great to see.

GBBF is a real show case for cask conditioned beer. The first day features a trade session where licensees, brewers, buyers and others connected to the trade muster for a few hours of drinking and networking. The remaining days are for the general public to enjoy and they certainly do that, but then beer festivals are about more than just tasting delicious beers, they are a chance to socialise and meet new people, beer is just the common interest that brings them together.

GBBF is an event that CAMRA should feel very proud of and one that is going from strength to strength. If you get a chance to visit the festival in future years then do so, or try a local festival near you. it wont be on the grand scale of the London festival but you will enjoy yourself for sure. Well done CAMRA for the Great British Beer Festival and here's to the event in 2014.

Champion Beer of Britain

What a wonderful title and how proud the brewers are to win the coveted CAMRA Champion Beer of Britain which is awarded annually at the CAMRA Great British Beer Festival. However are CAMRA really making the most of this accolade? As a CAMRA member I love real ale and thoroughly enjoy trying different brews, but I'd certainly challenge them on their choice of winners in recent years.

I have no axe to grind over the winners themselves, they are all wonderful beers and very worthy of the title. However I do have a concern that CAMRA have chosen winners that are not very accessible to the general public.  Recently they tend to come from small micro's who just don't have the capacity or marketing knowhow to exploit the win. Arguably this is a loss for the general public and to CAMRA.

Last years winner was Coniston Brewery No9 Barley Wine. I did not have the pleasure of trying this beer and have never seen it at any of the regional beer festivals I've attended. What chance then do the general public have to try this wonderful brew. I think the point I'm making is that it would be great to see a commercially available beer chosen as the winner for once. This probably means it would be one of the established Regional Brewers ale brands who have the marketing muscle to maximise the win. The last beer of this type was possibly Castle Rock Harvest Pale Ale in 2010 or looking further back, more likely Caladonian Deuchars IPA.

Just imagine if a London Pride, Wadworth 6X or even dare I say it, a Greene King Abbot Ale from an established Regional were to win.  Or, perhaps  a beer from the more recent powerful micros/regionals such as Thornbridge or Butcombe. These brewers are all capable of getting a winning beer into the market place quickly and on a wide scale, where it can enjoyed by the mass market of real ale drinkers.

I believe in an ideal scenario CAMRA would want their flagship champion beer for the year to be available for as many people as possible to try. CAMRA's objective is to promote the sales of real ale, so what better way than to have their best beer on show. If the champion beer is on a bar I think more drinkers are likely to try it, switching from their regular drinks, which could recruit new drinkers to the real ale category.

 In conclusion I think it's quite marvellous that we now have so many more smaller brewers all brewing great beers and in many cases these are at least the equal of those produced by their larger established competitors. So I'm not sure what CAMRA do to resolve this as the competition is based on a blind tasting. I'm just hoping that for 2013 we see a beer win that more people will have the chance to enjoy. A contentious blog post perhaps, but I really do enjoy the GBBF and most of all want real ale to prosper and grow.