The Great British Beer Festival

This is the big one – it comes around once a year in August and is organised by The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). It runs from Tuesday 2nd August until Saturday 6th August and takes place this year at Olympia, in London.  The previous few years have been at Earl’s Court, also a London exhibition centre.  The numbers from the previous years festivals are impressive and tend to increase every year.  Although it’s mainly a British festival, beers from other major ale producing countries are always featured – Germany, Belgium and the United States among others.  The first day of the festival is trade only, so a good opportunity for foreign beers to present themselves to the domestic market.

It is by far the biggest beer festival to take place in the United Kingdom so let’s have a look at the history of this fantastic event.  CAMRA started working as an organisation in 1971 and organised the Covent Garden Beer Festival in 1975 – the first large scale festival and the precursor to today’s event.  In 1977 it was renamed the Great British Beer Festival and Alexandra Palace was chosen as the location.  All beer festivals have been run by volunteers and there are never any shortages of real ale fans to staff the events.

It actually drifted around the country in the earlier years, Leeds, Birmingham and Brighton all hosting the event, before returning to London in 1991 where it has remained ever since. Visitors can now expect to be able to sample hundreds of British beers as well as several hundred foreign beers.  Over the course of the event, hundreds of thousands of pints of beer will be sold, not to mention the varieties of Cider and Perry (made from pears) that will be on offer.

Advance tickets will cost you £8 (or £6 for CAMRA members) and the price goes up by a couple of quid for tickets bought on the day.  Expect to share a drink with something approaching 100,000 people over the five days of the event.