CAMRA’s Members Weekend presented a problem for those of us who volunteer for the Discovery Bars: How to show what we do without coming across as patronising.
For those who don’t know them, the Discovery Bars are part of CAMRA’s Learning & Discovery arm, the area of the campaign that sets about to educate people about beers, ciders and perries, pubs, pints, people, and the industry as a whole. There’s lots of different things that it does, but I only really deal with the Discovery Bars that go to beer festivals around the country; getting people to think more about what they’re drinking and in turn appreciate it more.
We usually do this with our partner breweries for the day, guiding festival goers through a theme. The themes are quite diverse but always fun and always involve free samples of beer. Comparing cask and keg versions of the same beer side by side is always an interesting one where we get to explain how the packaging differs and what that actually does to the beer as it comes to the drinker. Hop varieties are another great one, having hops on hand to get the drinkers opening them up to see the lupulin, to rub and sniff the cones and pellets to get the direct aroma from the oils, and then tasting beers made with those varieties to see how those oils come across in the final beer. And malts too always make for an interesting chat with people, getting them to chew some Maris Otter for its biscuity flavours and then some Chocolate malt for its taste of old ashtrays (I’m not a fan), before pouring them samples of beers made with those malts so they can see how the flavours of the malts can come through, and how they all affect the colour of the finished beer.
But the problem with CAMRA’s Members Weekend is that the attendees will most likely have done those things before. Several times. So how to showcase the effectiveness of the Discovery Bars and get people interested in hosting them at their local festivals in a way that’s more than just a slideshow full of photos of people enjoying themselves?
Well, the team excelled themselves with a new theme: Settling The Sparkler Debate.
Let’s be honest, people have views when it comes to the use of sparklers on their beer. And their views are usually very ingrained and never going to change. It’s either Sparkler Good or Sparkler Bad, there is no middle ground.
But what sort of sparkler? And what do they actually do to the beer? And how do they actually work? These are just some of the questions we thought we’d try and get people to think about and we needed a way to achieve that. We don’t teach people at the Discovery Bars, we don’t lecture them. We try to get them to think, we provide them with the information they need to educate themselves. It works better.
So how to achieve that?
It turned out to be quite simple, we attached a single cask of beer to a gravity tap and four hand pulls. It looked a bit bodged together, and being honest it was. We had no idea going into this if it would be popular or if we might do it again, so a bit of behind the scenes bodging was perfectly fine for this one occasion, and if it was popular, we could then invest in the more expensive kit to do it again.
This allowed us to present attendees with five samples from the same cask: gravity, hand pull with no sparkler, with a “flat” sparkler, a 1mm sparkler, and a vortex creamer. All five samples poured one after the other and set out in a line on the bar.
We were then able to talk people through the beers, getting them to focus on the mouthfeel of each, and on the bitterness and flavours that they picked up. As we went through the samples we talked about how the hand pulls worked, a simple beer engine that pushes the beer into the glass, quicker than just opening the gravity tap. How the flat sparkler has an internal cone and two large holes, forcing the beer out and to the sides of the glass. How the 1mm sparkler had lots of little holes (all 1mm in diameter, hence the name) and squirted the beer through at a higher pressure onto the bottom of the glass, and how the vortex creamer had even smaller holes and then a cone on the outside of the nozzle that caused the beer being poured into the glass to form a swirling vortex as it hit the bottom.
As we did this we got people to give us their thoughts on the difference between the beer they were sampling and the previous one. In general these were small increments, slightly less flavour and bitterness, slightly more body and smoothness.
Then when we’d sampled the fifth one, we got them to try the first again, the gravity pour. Each increment between samples may have been small (which is why we chose those sparklers we were using), but the difference between the first and last samples was “like night and day” and “you’d not believe it was the same beer, let alone the same cask” according to those who came and chatted (and drank) with us.
By talking with people, and getting them to understand how sparklers work, and what each type of sparkler actually did to the beer, we got them to form their own opinions and come to their own conclusions. And the conclusion they came to wasn’t sparkler good or sparkler bad, but was instead whether they preferred their beers with more or less of a smooth body to it or more or less bitterness. The sparkler is just a tool to achieve that.
We then followed on our chats with people, going into how breweries can add extra hops to their beers so that when the sparkler strips out some of those hop flavours and bitterness, there’s still enough left to achieve what the brewer planned the end pint to taste like. About how it’s not just hop bitterness that the sparklers remove, but also malt astringency making them good for stouts. And also how they can remove the “tired” flavours of ageing beer, giving them a new lease of shelf life.
We didn’t know whether our little stand tucked away in the far corner of the Members Bar would be popular, but it was. We went through our entire cask in the first afternoon. Two and a half intense hours and we’d run out of beer. We had to “borrow” a second cask from the main bar itself just so that we’d be able to do it all again the following day. That one lasted three hours and we finished early. It seemed that the decision to present five different types of sparkled/unsparkled beers side by side was incredibly popular, something none of those who came to us had ever had the chance to try before. Amongst the chat about the sparklers we got to chat about the Discovery Bars and festivals, and there is a definite desire for them amongst the CAMRA branches, so expect to start seeing them around more.
Perhaps for me though the best comment of the weekend was from one member after we’d gone through the samples: “I have to admit, I came over here really sceptical but it’s been great and I’ve learned something.” And that’s all we can hope for, that people enjoy what we do, and that they go away a little bit more knowledgeable about what they’re drinking.
As for what people preferred, it’s really down to personal tastes.
