The Future of Beer Festivals

At the beginning of 2024, after CAMRA announced that the Great British Beer Festival was taking a year off I published a piece on What To Do About Beer Festivals. Since then I’ve been doing research to get some more hands on experience of their festivals, how they work, who goes to them, as well as the people behind them. I wanted to see if what I wrote held up, what CAMRA were doing at their festivals, and what might be changed to improve them.

As I started writing this piece CAMRA have since announced that after some pretty serious substantial losses this year, GBBF is once again not going to happen next year and GBBF-W the winter version would also not be happening. And maybe not so for a few years.

So what can actually be done about beer festivals to secure both their future, and the future of CAMRA itself?

It’s worth stating right up front that the smaller local and regional CAMRA festivals don’t lose money. In fact some of them make a respectable surplus that is sent off to CAMRA’s HQ and used to fund campaigning throughout the year. But even those festivals might be improved, possibly making them not as profitable initially, but certainly a better experience for the drinkers and the volunteers running them, and therefore a good way for them to grow.

I asked on CAMRA’s forum “Discourse” for ideas for future beer festivals and the first response, from Ben Wilkinson pretty much summed up my thoughts and I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him here:

A bigger focus on customer service. Some festivals still feel as if they are run primarily for their volunteers with the customers a necessary but slightly inconvenient component. Customer service training should be seen as just as essential as other training we give our volunteers. There is of course more to it than this, but a friendly “hello” at the entrance rather than a grumpy “you a member?” can make a world of difference.

Pitching to a broader audience. The whole point of festivals should be to campaign and change perceptions, not just to get together with already like minded people. We should actively want and encourage those who normally drink macro beers or ciders to come to our festivals, advertise to them, welcome them, and consider “gateway” products in our ordering and recommendations – not turn such people off with sarcastic comments or pompous attitudes.

A more professional image. Too many festivals still look like parish church jumble sales, with clutter, tatty old ancient banners, hand-scrawled signage, etc. To a new festival-goer, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression – and such an amateur image doesn’t do justice to what are often otherwise great events. It only takes a small amount of thought, effort and investment to eliminate a lot of this and not undermine ourselves in this way

These three points all lead to a much better customer experience. A better welcome, a better image and a better experience. Really this should be a no-brainer, that it had to be said reveals lots. It’s easy to point out what’s wrong with things though, but where to start with how to fix them?

Glasses seems a strange place, but every beer festival I attended or worked at gave you a glass when you arrived – for a deposit – which you kept for your entire visit. Some of these deposits were non-refundable so you had to keep the glass permanently, whether you wanted to or not – a practice I personally despise.. Although I suppose you could have just left it at the festival site if you wanted to for the festival to clean and sell on again if you didn’t want yet another glass in your cupboard gathering dust.

Throughout your visit you then took your own glass back to the bar to get it refilled with the next drink you wanted to try.

This is the norm at beer festivals, you get a glass, you reuse it. It helps organisers manage the levels of glasses they need and reduce the need for glass washing facilities and the number of volunteers it takes to clean glasses, however, I think this must change. We’ve all seen photos of pints in pubs that have been served in a dirty glass, and imagine reusing a glass every time in the pub? Some pubs offer to refill your glass when you go back to the bar, but most people now prefer to have a clean glass each time and festivals need to move with the times and use clean glasses. Some festivals do offer the option of taking your glass back to the glasses stall and swapping it for a clean one, but I think they’d be a bit put out if everybody did that every time.

Providing a fresh festival glass every time though would mean that festivals would either run out of glasses or order in extra and have a lot of stock left over as everyone brought their glasses back at the end of the night, along with all the fresh glasses stored under the bars. 

Mostly my reasons for believing this needs to change is beer quality. Beer served in a dirty glass is not beer at its best, and if festivals are there to promote beer then every step should be taken to ensure that it’s at its best; including a clean, fresh glass every time.

Looking at the practicalities of this, Peterborough Beer Festival is one of the largest beer festivals in the UK for attendance with around 26,000 people through the gates over the five days that it’s open. If that was spread out evenly that would be 5,200 people per day. But it’s not even and the Friday night gets closer to 8,000. CAMRA works on the principle that the average person attending a festival drinks 3.2 pints per visit. That would mean for a fresh glass each time with no glass washing facilities during the sessions, you would need 4 per person, or 32,000 glasses. This doesn’t seem that much more than the 26,000 that would normally be ordered, only another 6,000. But that’s a lot of investment when margins at festivals are so slim.

To have that full number of commemorative glasses would mean that the festival would be constantly gaining a stock of unsold glasses each year, three per person attending the final session at the very least. So the practical way of avoiding this is to keep a stock of non-commemorative glasses too. That way festival goers that don’t want to keep their glass can get one branded purely with the CAMRA logo, or that of the CAMRA branch or just that of the event. These glasses can be returned by the drinkers and then reused each year, with minimal ordering needed to replace breakages.

This would mean additional storage for the branches, or for CAMRA itself if the stock were shared across all festivals and stored at the central warehouse. A pallet can hold about 700pint (depending on the type of glass) so even if the festival were to just maintain that stock of 6,000 pint glasses, that’s 9 pallets that would need to be stored somewhere. Fortunately that fits nicely into a 20ft shipping container, and a friendly farm owner could store one of these relatively cheaply – a method of storage a lot of festivals already use.

From the practicality of service, drinkers would still need to collect a glass as they arrive, paying their deposit and choosing whether they wanted a commemorative or a generic glass, and would be informed that they had to keep bringing their empty glasses back to the bar. This last part shouldn’t be an issue at festivals, unlike in pubs, as festival goers are already used to the idea of taking their empties back with them. Bar staff would then initially fill their new, clean glass with their order. For future orders however, the dirty glass would need to be stored underneath the bar and swapped for a clean alternative.

With enough glasses on site it should be possible to merely have volunteers remove the trays of dirty glasses and replace the boxes of clean, new ones throughout the session without any need to rush through glass cleaning and cooling to replace them, however, there would be a need for longer glass cleaning hours than normal or for additional glass washing facilities. This does mean there would be a need for additional volunteers on that duty – and a lack of volunteers is something that seems to affect most festivals.

But by using a clean glass every time, those festivals that use handpulls could also start to use sparklers. While this is a contentious and argumentative subject the use of sparklers have become the norm in pubs up and down the country and brewers have tweaked their recipes to accommodate them. 

At the CAMRA Members Weekend in Torquay this year we did something a little different for the Discovery Bar, we ran The Great Sparkler Debate. One cask of beer hooked up to four handpulls, as well as gravity dispense. The first handpull had no sparkler, the second had a “flat” sparkler, the third a common 1mm sparkler, and the fourth a reasonably rare vortex creamer. There was no suggestion of what was right or wrong, or good or bad, but by talking people through the samples and having them see what the different sparklers did to the beer, we were able to help people understand why they liked, or didn’t like sparklers. But we were also able to show that by changing the sparkler you changed the beer, and some beers were generally better with sparklers and some without. Although stouts are almost always better with a sparkler. 

But festivals can’t use sparklers while they’re reusing glasses, even if the brewer intends the beer to be served with one, and therefore aren’t presenting the beer in its best condition. But by offering a fresh glass every time, sparklers could be used – where appropriate, and showcase the beer as it’s intended to be.

And to carry on the controversial modernisation of CAMRA beer festivals, I believe that for them to not just survive, but to thrive, they have to get rid of the (Key)Keg Bar.

It’s been a while now since CAMRA members voted to support all good (live) beer regardless of the container it is dispensed from, and as part of the latest rebrand the campaign’s name even changed from “Campaign for Real Ale” to just “CAMRA” as a further move to show that it’s support of Pints, Pubs and People, not just real ale from a cask through a hand pull on the bar – often with a dubious pun-laden name. Nudge, nudge, wink wink.
Yet at almost every CAMRA festival the keg beer is shoved into a corner as a begrudged afterthought. If there even is any keg. It’ll invariably be a small, tatty affair with the longest queues as once people have found the cold fizz that they like, they hang around there to get more of it, often then ignoring the rest of the festival. People want keg beer, and there is a lot of really good (live) beer in keg. By not supporting it in equal measure to the cask, CAMRA festivals are admitting what the majority of the public already think, that it’s the Campaign for Cask And Not What You Like.

Surely if CAMRA supports cask and keg equally (as long as the beer is good), then keg and cask should be together along the festival bars? The time of segregation is past, it only reinforces the idea that one is better than the other. If a brewery has both cask and keg at the festival, why should they be at opposite ends of the festival site?

If we go into a pub as a drinker we don’t find all the cask at one end and all the keg at the other; with the cider in a different room. So why is this done at festivals?

Continuing on this vein, why is keg not included in the Champion Beer of Britain competition?

Each year that goes past without keg included is a year that CAMRA reinforce the idea that a beer in keg is substandard to a beer in cask, that by putting the same beer into a keg to keep it fresher, to retain carbonation and conditioning for a longer period, that that beer can never be as good as the same beer served from a cask. Usually decanted by gravity into a jug to then be repoured into tasting glasses for judging.

And that brings me onto a bit of a side point, I think that Champion Beer of the Festival competitions need a bit of an overhaul, not just allowing kegged beer. Whenever I could I would talk also to those organising their local competition, and these were without exception some of the most passionate people about the quality and promotion of beer. They all had their own ways of being able to run the competition in ways that suited their festivals, but I think that may be the problem with them. What it takes for a beer to be considered beer of the festival in one festival could well be totally different to another festival, and while this is the case there is a limit to the amount of kudos there is from winning the accolade.

So I would like to propose the introduction of a centrally controlled Festival Beer Competition with a standardised set of categories for the beers that are used across the country based on the flavour profiles of the beers, not the strengths. And a standardised way of judging these beers – including having them poured directly into the tasting glass so they’re presented at their best, rather than decanted from a jug.

What makes a Beer of the Festival competition so special though is it’s the beer of that festival. The beer that the local people like the best. And I think that needs to be leaned into to make it stand out as an award. To this end, I think the judges in the heats need to be made up half and half from qualified beer tasters guiding members of the public and local celebrities, politicians and festival volunteers to choose the best in each category that suits the local tastes. But for the final, it really should just be qualified beer tasters.

And why is the judging always done behind closed doors? The judges don’t know what they’re drinking so there’s no bias involved, and it’s very likely that any members of the public will recognise a beer just by looking at it. Unless Vault City are involved in a round. So why is the judging behind closed doors and not made an attraction? Many years ago at Peterborough I occasionally had the opportunity to be a judge and it was held on the main stage in view of everyone. Most folks weren’t interested, no-one interfered with the judging, but it was open, transparent and public. There were never any calls of fixes. So why isn’t the festival beer judging more public if the venue and space allow for it?

I think this should also apply to the Champion Beer of Britain competition. Amongst several changes to overhaul it. 

Admittedly, CBoB is a separate issue from beer festivals, except that its rounds are generally held at a beer festival, so I’m including it here. Plus I think it should be more integrated within the national beer festival calendar.

At the moment it takes two years from start to finish, nominations to final judging to decide and declare what the Champion (cask) Beer of Britain is. It’s quite a simple process, and it’s pretty fair. But it is very time consuming. This time lag in a way reduces the respect that the award has, and it adds to the perceived complexity of it. Add in the behind doors judging and lack of promotion about the competition and it’s no wonder that pretty much every year, regardless of who wins, there will be complaints about the result. Over the years I’ve talked to many judges who have been involved in the final rounds of CBoB and every single one of them, without exception, has steadfastly stated and defended the unbiased nature of the judging. That it’s totally blind, and that the best beer is always the one that won. I have no doubts in my mind as to the honesty of the competition. I’ve doubts as to the honesty of some of the brewers in providing “standard” batches to the competition, but then I’m a born cynic.

Beer festivals however are an ideal opportunity to publicly promote CBoB, to have promotional material explaining how the competition works, to encourage the membership to get involved. It’s even possible, and to me desirable, to have the festivals across the country, throughout the year, host an individual round of the competition. Whether that be one or two categories, spread throughout the year, taking in nominations in the run up to the festival, keeping it current, and then having the final judging at one of the larger festivals. 

If there is the shift to having just trained beer tasters for the beer of the festival competition, then they’re already onsite to judge that heat of the Champion Beer of Britain competition.
And having that heat at the local festival would provide great publicity that is needed to help stabilise and support the grassroots element of CAMRA.

As well as adding keg to CBoB in some manner, why does CAMRA not have a Champion Cider of Britain award? It used to, so what happened? It’s definitely time to bring it back.

Which nicely leads me on to the cider offering at beer festivals. Again I will state up front that there are some truly passionate people putting on some of the best ciders that the country has to offer, but it always felt as though they were the proverbial Sisyphus pushing the idea of modern cider up the mountain of The Old Guard.

There were very few keg ciders at any of the festivals, if any at all even though there are lots of great real cider in keg available. But there were lots of non-real ciders full of artificial flavourings, the very thing CAMRA campaigns against, served from room temperature bag-in-boxes getting steadily warmer as the days went on. Rows and rows of them on display “because it sells” to quote the manager of one cider bar. Well, Guinness and Stella sell, but they weren’t on any of the beer bars. 

For CAMRA to be taken seriously with its stand on cider, the cider bars at their festivals must be taken in hand and modernised. At the very least the non-real ciders must not be on sale and cooling must be used.

When I talked to another cider bar manager (as those that know me will agree, I talk a lot!) about the lack of cooling he explained that the cooling probes they used caused condensation making the boxes soggy and leading to them collapsing. That there was so much condensation proves that cooling is needed more than anything else. Perhaps if they also reduced the huge range somewhat the boxes wouldn’t be sat there long enough for the condensation to completely dissolve the cardboard.

That the cider bar had artificially flavoured ciders rather than ones with real fruit, and that keg is generally shoved into the corner I believe highlights an issue with the ordering, that it’s possibly not as aware of what people are out drinking as it should be. Most festivals seemed to have the same breweries they had the year before, and the year before that, and before that. Two breweries who had beer up for Champion Beer of Britain didn’t even have any beers at GBBF before those two beers were ordered in for the competition, a huge oversight seeing as they were rated two of the best breweries in the country by CAMRA themselves, and highlighting one of the problems with a two year cycle for CBoB.

At each festival where the volunteers were allowed to have drinks from the main bars I couldn’t really find anything that jumped out as something I’d want a pint of. There wasn’t anything bad as such, just nothing that really grabbed me. It could easily have been the spoilt for choice problem, where things tended to blend into one after a while or it could just have been that after you’ve tried twenty different pale, hoppy, session ales you’ve tried them all; which is possibly why some overly flavoured beers do so well at festivals, they’re something different.

But I do think that each year, between festivals, whoever is doing the ordering should go around the local pubs and chat to the staff about what sells well generally, and what attracts people’s interest. 

When at the pub, people tend to drink what they’re comfortable with, but after a couple of comfortable pints at a beer festival, people tend to be a bit more adventurous.

It’s also worth noting when doing the ordering, that once a festival gets to a certain size, or a certain reputation, it will get visitors from further afield and they’ll have different tastes. They might even want sparklers, so maybe it really is worth looking at fresh glasses every time?

It really comes down to the best presentation, which neatly leads onto the equipment being used at the festivals. Whether it’s the beer or the cider, the bars and the stillaging used at festivals seems tired. It’s used, it’s abused, it’s battered and tattered. It feels that because the festival doesn’t “own” it, they don’t “care” about it. It has a purpose, it serves that purpose, what else does it matter?

Well this comes back to that need for a more professional image. If someone comes into a bar and sees the place looking like it’s falling apart, they’re not likely to stay, let alone come back. Why do we think that beer festivals are any different? That just because they’re put on once a year the bars can be covered in scratches and years old ends of sellotape and greasy bluetack smears? That the stillaging can be scaffolding with bits of old mortar hanging off it, or racking units that are more rust than metal?

The equipment used at the festivals absolutely must be maintained, not just to make sure it still works, but that it looks good. A few tins of metal paint and a couple of roller brushes can make a huge difference to the racking units, some brasso can make the handpulls look cared for, some kitchen paint on the bars can rejuvenate them while keeping them easy to wipe. All in all, vastly improving the image a festival portrays.

Entertainment at beer festivals is one of the most contentious issues there is. Whether to have it or not is only the start. Every festival appeals to its local audience, or at least the audience it currently has. A festival with no music will appeal to a certain group, but adding music may encourage another group to come along also. Although it may put off the first group from staying.  Peterborough Beer Festival for example would likely not survive without the music tent. It’s become the biggest event of the local social calendar and attracts thousands of visitors purely for that social aspect. At GBBF however when the music started it drove people away. The main difference between the two venues is that Peterborough has its music in a separate marquee, away from the bars. Those that wanted to listen to the music are able to do so, and those that want to be able to hear themselves trying to order a bar at the bar are also able to do so. Before deciding on any entertainment at beer festivals, organisers absolutely must look at the venue itself and judge its suitability. If you want people to come along and chat over a few beers, don’t make it difficult for them to do so.

Perhaps the strangest thing I encountered at all the CAMRA festivals I was at is that CAMRA seem almost embarrassed to promote themselves. There was little to no presence anywhere. At not a single one was there a CAMRA stand. Not one. There were no pull up banners, no banners over the bars, no posters and not even any leaflets to let people know what CAMRA was; what it stood for and what it did. At the majority of the events the CAMRA logo was a small part of any publicity, tucked away almost as a begrudged afterthought. This was emphasised by the attitude of a lot of the folks involved in the beer festivals, a distinct Us & Them attitude. CAMRA don’t run beer festivals – CAMRA branches do. And a lot of the branches seem to have a disconnect from the national campaign. This puzzles me, absolutely everybody involved in the festivals that I talked to had a huge passion for good beer, whether it was cask or keg, local or foreign, sparkler or no sparkler, there was no lack of passion. But there was a lack of cohesion to what should have been the glue binding them all together. I think that this is possibly the biggest hurdle for CAMRA to overcome. While the branches aren’t pro-national, it will always be a movement moving in different directions, tearing itself apart.

Perhaps the closest that the festivals I attended came to a centralised CAMRA stand was the Discovery Bars. Okay, I’m biased, I was working these and by the end of the year was running them (due to ill health of others). But not being biased, the Disco Bars were awesome and should be at every CAMRA festival. Along with the always understaffed Membership stands that they shared space with, they were CAMRA’s shop window, the point of information for people wanting to ask questions about CAMRA and the campaign. A lot of those questions I couldn’t answer because I was just a volunteer myself, but I was able to listen and chat about all the topics that were brought up. Given this experience CAMRA need to have a CAMRA stand at every CAMRA festival. And they need to have people there who can answer all the questions. The Discovery Bars became the point of contact for everyone who wanted to just have a chat or a whinge, or to get more information, and going forward having someone “From HQ” there to interact with people and put minds at ease, public, members and volunteers would be more than worth the expense. It would be especially good if that person was on the National Executive, chipping in along with the rest of the volunteers. 

The Us & Them mentality has to be broken down, and that will only happen if those on the NE get involved at a public facing level, on a revamped version of the Discovery Bars that take on the role of a CAMRA stand. Promote beer, promote people, promote pub, but also promote the campaign.