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It’s Sheffield Beer Week this week (14-22 March) which got us thinking about beer weeks in general — where did they come from, what are they for, and where are they going?
In the UK arguably the original beer week is Norwich City of Ale, which first*took place in May 2011. It involves mini-festivals in pubs across the city featuring breweries from the region, and special events designed to create a buzz such as tasters of beer being given out in the street. It was the brain-child of lecturer*Dawn Leeder and publican Phil Cutter, AKA ‘Murderers Phil’. As Dawn Leeder recalls there was no particular inspiration except perhaps, obliquely, Munich’s Oktoberfest.*Its launch was covered by an enthusiastic Roger Protz in this article for Beer Pages*which concludes with a call to action:
It’s an initiative that could and should be taken up other towns and cities in Britain with a good range of pubs, craft breweries and a public transport network. Nottingham and Sheffield, with their tram systems, spring to mind.
http://i0.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/w...size=500%2C418Norwich City of Ale promotional bus, 2013. SOURCE: Norwich City of Ale website. In 2012, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) ran a*London City of Beer celebration*piggybacking on the surge in visitors to the capital during the*Olympic Games.*But it was two months long, not a week, and didn’t turn into an annual event.
The next British city to get a beer week proper, and the first to bear that specific description, was Bristol. It launched in*October 2013 when, having bubbled under as a beer destination for a few years beforehand, the city was just on the cusp of a*boom in specialist bars and breweries. The initial idea came from Lee*Williams who was born in Bristol but lived in the US for ten*years where he ran a blog, Hoptopia, and*wrote a guidebook called*Beer Lover’s Colorado. When he returned to Bristol to work in the beer industry he brought with him experience of several US beer weeks and suggested the idea of running something similar*to a friend and fellow beer blogger, Stephen Powell.
Bristol Beer Week*featured more mini-festivals, talks, tastings and special one-off beers brewed in collaboration with beer writers who duly plugged the event.
Organising a beer week is not without difficulties*as Stephen Powell explains:
The biggest challenge is coordination in an industry full of organisations who can be, putting it diplomatically, free spirits! Convincing people that it would be good for them to be involved, as long as they put the effort in, is harder than you would think. One of my biggest frustrations has been the few participants who have treated it like a free lunch and just used it as a bit of advertising. Beer Week lives and dies on local venues and breweries putting something together that’s special and unique. I think we’ve been really lucky that the majority of people have come around to that way of thinking after three*successful*years.
Bristol*was followed closely by Glasgow whose beer week ran in November 2013. It was inspired equally by US beer weeks and by the Glasgow Beer and Pub Project organised by Eric Steen in 2010, a six-week arts and culture event*which culminated with a home-brewing event in a pop-up pub. Glasgow Beer Week co-organiser Robbie Pickering recalls some of the difficulties faced by amateur volunteers:
We had our disasters, like the time we managed to schedule a meet-the-brewer in a pub where a live band was playing on the same night. I am very lucky that brewer still speaks to me. I am still proud of some of the events we put on even if hardly anyone came to them. We did the first beer and cheese tasting in Glasgow and the first UK screening of the US Michael Jackson documentary, and got Ron Pattinson over to speak about British lager together with people from the Scottish Brewing Archive Association. And I have a lifetime’s supply of beautiful letterpress beer mats with a spelling error.
But that was the first and only Glasgow Beer Week:
I think GBW collapsed in the end because of lack of interest. After the first year most of the other people involved had moved away and I was left running around on my own…*I announced the dates for 2014 before deciding not to go ahead with it. Nobody ever asked what had happened to it which kind of suggests it was the right decision.
From our distant vantage point it also seemed to bring to a head tensions in Glasgow’s beer community with expressions of*ill-feeling still being expressed via*social media three years later.
Robbie Pickering sees some positives in it, however: the kinds of events that the Beer Week was built around now occur organically and frequently in Glasgow negating the need for a special event.
http://i2.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/w...size=500%2C333Photo by Diane Tanner. SOURCE: London Beer City/Will Hawkes. London got its own beer week in 2014. It was organised by journalist Will Hawkes who has written about beer for the*Independent, the*Financial Times and the*Washington Post among other big names. He was inspired partly by the examples of*Norwich and Bristol but also by a visit to Philly Beer Week in the US, which stakes a claim to being the world’s first having been inaugurated in 2008. He says:
I contacted Paddy Johnson at the London Brewers Alliance and we managed to pull something together in about two months. It wasn’t perfect but it was a start.*The idea was to provide a selection of events to complement the [Campaign for Real Ale’s] Great British Beer Festival. There’s loads of people in town that week and it seemed a shame not to capitalise on that by showing off what London beyond Olympia has to offer.
The event was actually called London Beer City and included*guided brewery tours, tastings and meet-the-brewer events across the city.
Will Hawkes’s motivation was and remains, he says, simply to have some fun:*‘I like beer, I like pubs and bars – I wish it was more sophisticated than that but it isn’t.’
The first LBC*generated a little controversy with some perceiving it as an attempt to undermine rather than complement GBBF — an assault by the Craft Army on the citadel of Real Ale. That wasn’t helped by the omission of a mention for the GBBF, even in passing, in the beer week’s calendar of events.
London being a big city in the midst of a furious expansion in the number of bars and breweries it was perhaps inevitable that someone would come along and take the vacant name London Beer Week for a rival event. A more out-and-out commercial project it first ran*in February 2015 with the slick Craft Beer Rising festival as its centrepiece, and bars across the city running special offers for those wearing LBW wristbands.
http://i1.wp.com/boakandbailey.com/w...size=503%2C320The cover of Pete Brown’s report. SOURCE: Sheffield Beer Week (Jules Gray). Sheffield, for many years a city with a cult following among British beer lovers because of its many great pubs and nearby breweries, got its beer week only last year. The driving force behind it is Jules Gray, formerly an employee of a large industrial brewing concern, and now a writer and the proprietor of The Hop Hideout, a quirky beer shop in Sheffield’s Abbeydale district. She explains her motivation:
The three key ‘things’ that inspired me were, first, seeing events like Norwich’s City of Ale and London Beer City. Secondly, SIBA [formerly the Society of Independent Brewers] hosting a beer trade and consumer beer event in Sheffield. I was afraid [SIBA’s BeerX] might leave the city and also thought that, well, there are all these brewers in Sheffield, I’m sure they’d love to do fringe events. And, thirdly, *unity and collaboration — a sort of lets- beat-a-unified-drum about Sheffield. I was getting tired of visiting other cities such as Manchester and Leeds to attend exciting beery events so why not make it happen in Sheffield?
In the last year or so that final point has become a recurring, motivating theme — if them, why not us?
There is Sheffield Beer Week and Manchester Beer Week why on earth is there not a Leeds Beer Week?
— HopZine (@HopZine)
January 13, 2016
I’m a proud Mancunian so although I was pleased to see similar festivals enjoying success in London, Bristol and Norwich, there was always that nagging thought in the back of my head:*‘Why doesn’t Manchester have something like this?’ In the absence of anyone else doing it I thought I’d take up the mantle.
Stephen Powell of Bristol Beer Week talks about the pride he feels in*getting people to visit his home city who might otherwise not bother:
We had some guys come over from Italy last year who had never been to Bristol before. I helped them pick the right hotel and made sure they were comfortable where they were going during the week. That was pretty awesome.
Sometimes, there is also a desire to wade into the (low key) cultural battle between the cults of real ale and craft beer, as in Connor Murphy’s case:
I also wanted*to start bridging gaps between the traditional ale scene and the modern ‘craft beer’ movement. Up to this point it’s been a bit of a case of never the twain shall meet, particularly in Manchester, but I’m keen to encourage drinkers from both sides to understand and experience what motivates the other. This is why I was as keen to involve CAMRA in my plans as I was many of the more modern breweries and venues throughout the city.
A cynic might suggest — in fact probably will, in the comments below –that the organisers of such events also have an eye on raising their own profiles, though if that’s the case, aren’t there less strenuous and more effective ways of doing so?*We tend, in this case, to take declarations of motive at face value, not least because we’ve met Jules Gray and she struck us as*genuinely idealistic and community-minded.
In 2016 there are, by our count, nine*beer weeks scheduled for 2016 (the London Beer Week was in February). The most recent additions to the calendar are Leeds (apparently prompted by the Tweet above), Stockport (unusual in being CAMRA-led) and Birmingham, the latter building*on the buzz that already surrounds the three-day independent Beer Bash festival.
As they proliferate and become annual events they perhaps seem less special and lose some of their*allure. Even at present numbers some gentle argy-bargy is already under way around dates — no two beer weeks want to be in competition with one another for the limited amount of dedicated beer geek trade. But the organisers of existing beer weeks seem, in general, to welcome those emerging in other cities, as expressed by Will Hawkes:
As long as it comes from that place – like with Manchester, where Connor, who’s running it, lives there, knows the city and what’s happening – I think it’s great. It’s a reflection of local beer culture and the energy in a place. I’d like to maybe get some sort of link-up with the other weeks. I’m going to Sheffield. I know one northern brewery is keen to introduce a competitive aspect… That might be fun.
We’d be surprised if next year doesn’t bring several more and would be willing to put money on Newcastle announcing next.
Kinda feel like Newcastle should have its own beer week. A good platform for our local Brewers to showcase their talent.
#NewcastleBeerWeek
— Myles Lambert (@MylesLambert)
February 15, 2016Increasingly it feels as if a couple of breweries and a few good real ale pubs aren’t enough: these days, a*town*without its own*beer week is in danger of losing any*claim it might have to*being a real*Beer City.
* * *
Beer Weeks Scheduled for 2016
This post is based on email exchanges; small edits have been to some quotes for clarity and style.
A Brief History of Beer Weeks from Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Beer blogging since 2007, covering real ale, craft beer, pubs and British beer history.
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