At least Camra are trying to do something a bit different following cancellation of the Great British Beer Festival 2020: The Virtual Beer Experience.
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At least Camra are trying to do something a bit different following cancellation of the Great British Beer Festival 2020: The Virtual Beer Experience.
Quite a few organisations are having virtual meetings, AGMs, and exhibitions along similar lines but well done Camra, of course the loss of income from the physical event must have concentrated their minds. I wonder if they'll get any refund from Olympia?
Cooking Lager's comment: "£46 to stay at home and be told what to drink and what to think of it. Nice." Not exactly my sentiments but £4.75 a pint including a free souvenir glass isn't a bargain deal even if it includes two of the expert's speil. It is very popular though as four out of the seven sessions are sold out this morning.
Virtual Beer Festival? Pah!some blokes are organising a virtual Ploughing Match https://www.vplough.co.uk/
Certainly not a bargain, but if you take out the glass (£3) and delivery (say, £5) it brings the cost per pint down to £3.92 or so. I've gone for the foreign beers, which was the first category I came across that wasn't already sold out. (Probably a few 33cl bottles in there, which raises the price per pint!) £46 is about the same as the cost of a train to get me to Luton, never mind the match ticket, so I don't think it's going to make a huge hole in my pocket.
Looking forward to receiving the package, although gawd only knows where I'm going to find room for another 11 bottles in my cupboard under the stairs. Might have to do some more drinking from home instead of dodging the apparently non-existent and/or potentially harmless virus down the pub.
Last weeks figures show 29.2 cases per 100,000 which is nowhere near as high as Leicester.
It is slightly up on the previous week of 26.3 after several weeks of downward trend, but then again Eid was celebrated during that week and the highest areas for infection last week were Deeplish, Newbold and Wardleworth all with high levels of Asian families. Could be a coincidence, but .............
Our area had either zero or one case, for some reason the figure is given as "Less than 2 or 0" according to Manchester Evening News.
The figures come from this Public Health England map I think.
The underlying figures are here and there's a link to the map on the associated pages. The worrying thing about the map is the two infected areas of North Yorkshire it shows are mostly fields or moors, hardly anyone lives there.
The other worrying thing is that the area I live in is called Healey, Skye & Shawclough on this map.
It's actually Syke, not an island off the west coast of Scotland.
If they can't even get the names right.................
You can check here, using the MSOA codes from the map - a free service from StatisticsGalore!
There is some yardage from rps quote above, I've always considered the GBBF an expensive day out, taking in the travel, entrance fee and cost of beer, bearing in mind I rarely drink more than six pints a visit, usually in halves. However I go there to find and taste new beers , all under one roof, I would be spending a lot more traipsing all over the country, however enjoyable that may be, finding these beers. I personally can't afford to do that too often.
This is true, but for the occasional one off with certain beers It's worth it , I wouldn't go there and drink beers readily available to me in pubs, definitely prefer pubs to beer fests. Last time out had a cracking Tiny Rebel beer , then found it in a pub in Hove a couple of weeks later, unfortunately, though nice , the pub one was nowhere near as good as the GBBF one.
Just looked it up, Tiny Rebel Super Sharp Shooter.
http://forums.pubsgalore.co.uk/showt...h-August-2019)
Yes. I've only been to one festival, around the late '80s at Olympia. The entrance cost, cost of the 'souvenir' glass and beer price - my friend thought the entrance fee would mean cheap beer - was, for me a deterrent. We had a couple of halves and then decided to go to the pub, ironically.
I think that pubs and beer are inseparable. Given the choice, I'd rather forsake both rather than do one or the other.
Much made about the cost of the glass, which is usually (always?) refundable on exit if you don't want to keep it, and I can't remember feeling too aggrieved at pricing at the few festivals I've been to.
That said, I concur that a tour of pubs in a good beer town is far preferable to a single location festival, even when the number of festival beers on offer is greater than you could sample in month of Sundays.
Thing is, good beer festivals tend to be in good beer towns (Reading, Nottingham, Derby - have they got winterfest now?) so the dilemma is always the same. A bad beer town tends not to have a central beer festival...
The Robin Hood fest was a good prequel for mini-Nottingham tour in the past, then full Beeston the following day. Perfect!
Received my beers and glass today, plus a free packet of crisps. The glass looks even worse than I thought, like one of those Christmas highball glasses with snowflakes, for people who only drink once a year.
When you stop and think about how much damage this virus has done, in terms of deaths, permanent or long-term after-effects, anxiety, loneliness, loss or potential loss of jobs and/or homes, lost time in school and university, and general disruption - including diminishing use of public transport when the climate crisis means we should be moving from cars to less damaging ways of getting around - the last thing we needed was a souvenir beer festival glass.* OK, it doesn't actually celebrate but rather comemorates the advent of these strange times, but really, did no one at Camra have second thoughts before pressing SEND?
* Forgot to mention pubs closing, and other businesses going to the wall as a result of lockdown and home-working.
See photos below for the glass and the 11 beers.
Festival beer selection:
Eyam Plague Stout 4.4%
Oakham Citra Session IPA 4.6%
Grey Trees Afghan Pale Ale 5.4%
XT 15 English IPA 4.5%
Drone Valley Candleriggs Strong Mild 5.8%
Foreign Beer selection:
St Bernardus Pater 6 6.7%
Kiuchi Espresso Stout 7%
Fruh Kolsch 4.8%
Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier 5.1%
De Molen Hop & Liefde American Pale 4.8%
Maredsous Brune 8%
These will all be new to me, except for the rauchbier, which is an old favourite (and I've even drunk it at the tap in Bamberg). The kolsch and the citra are known to me as beer types but not had these examples before (though I don't know how I've managed to swerve the Oakham for so long). Not sure I'll be tuning in for the "live" tastings, though. I mean, it's one thing to "taste" a beer at a festival - you just have a half or a third and if you don't like it you just shrug and move on. But opening five or six bottles or cans and having a taste leaves you with an awful lot of beer to either drink or throw away. An awful lot of rather expensive beer...