Mine's a pint of sulphur and toffee
There are 310 real ales, 180 foreign beers, 40 traditional ciders and 27 bottled beers at the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia. So why have I been standing in a hot little room for three hours without having a drink? What strange Orwellian torture is this? More than 250,000 pints will be sold over the next four days: enough, according to this useful Camra handout, to fill 3,125 fish tanks. So why have I not been offered any? Answer: I have come for the serious bit, to observe the judging of the Champion Beer of Britain.
Great British Beer judges are loath to drink: they sniff, smell, hold the glass up, rotate it, watch the light shimmer on the golden fluid, put their hand above the glass to release the aroma, sniff again, close their eyes, and then, just possibly, take a sip, swill it round the mouth and . . . swallow. They are bitter men – and occasionally women. They believe beer has the integrity of wine and savour it accordingly. The punters will be in for a skinful later, but for now we are talking beauty, complexity, philosophy. True hoppiness.
Eight categories, 48 judges – all compos mentis unfortunately – with each category winner going forward to the final, to be judged by a panel including four men with beards (it is also the Great British Beard Festival), the token woman, and the token chairman of the England cricket selectors, Raymond Illingworth. Tetley sponsors the England cricket team and Illy obligingly keeps his Tetley anorak on despite the 90-degree heat.
He is there as man of the people, pitted against the bearded experts. “It tastes of old clothes,” the ever forthright Illy says. “Cloves?” says a surprised-looking expert. “No, clothes,” Illy insists. Illy is not a great swirler or sniffer: he prefers the old-fashioned method of drinking the stuff. He looks unimpressed and marks low. The beards, meanwhile, are beside themselves, using a tiny torch to explore the intricacies of each beer. One tastes of caramel, another of toffee . . . or is it coffee? This one has a touch of sulphur in the nose; that one tastes of Ribena; the porter is confident, more chocolatey than roasted. Illy looks unimpressed – “Not really my taste, I’m afraid”. Selection meetings must be a nightmare.
After much shaking, sniffing, swirling, snorting – and on my parched part, suffering – we have a winner: Cottage Norman’s Conquest. It is a fantastic story because it is produced by a micro-brewery in Somerset: set up two years ago by a retired airline pilot, it employs three-and-a-half people and produces 20 barrels a week. A triumph of hops over experience and an extraordinary achievement, perfect for Camra, which evangelises on behalf of small, distinctive, local breweries and spearheads the New Beer Movement.
Camra runs the festival with a rare passion. The staff at the show are almost all volunteers – literally here for the beer. And they are winning. Beer is taken seriously these days, the art of brewing treated with due gravity. Even the US, home of a bland, fizzy substance which masquerades as beer, is succumbing. American aficionados are here in force, talking of the boom in real ales back home, where on average three or four “brew pubs” are opening every week. Move over Bud, Old Speckled Hen is coming.
In the sixties, according to Camra’s heroic history of beery struggle, the big brewers had a stranglehold on the market: they had consumers over a barrel and small breweries were ailing. Now, small breweries are buoyant, traditional recipes are being rediscovered (fruity Victorian numbers are in this year) and the big boys have been bearded in their lair, so to speak. I could go on, but a piper is playing Scotland The Brave, the bars are finally opening, the experts are giving way to the eager masses, and there are those 310 draught real ales out there waiting to be drunk. I will have a pint of Foxley Barking Mad and, no thanks, I don’t need a torch.
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