CAMRA champion beer of Britain

[Strongers]

A few questions from a layman:

1. How did GK IPA win silver in 2004?

2. Is TT Landlord the greatest beer ever with this impressive Beer of Britain Record:
82 – win
83 – win
88 – silver
89 – silver
90 – silver
92 – silver
94 – gold
99 – gold
10 – silver

Are people becoming sick of seeing it everywhere?

3. My favourite tipple of London Pride won in 1979 but it seems to get bad mouthed on here now. Was there no other competition then or has the taste changed. Maybe it is because it is in loads of pubs and non Fullers pubs don’t know how to keep it properly? I don’t see many people complaining about it in Chiswick and Brentford!

4. Finally, what does beer of Britain mean? Could I make a few barrels of beer and take them to GBBF and win with no intention of making any more?

[oldboots]

A few answers from a CAMRA person

1. it's a blind tasting in the final stage so the judges shouldn't have known what any of the beers were. There is a description of the process somewhere but I can't find it at present (see 4). The judges presumably like that style of beer and thought it was the best on the day, there were dark mutterings at the time about "special barrels" and so on. We had comments about the judges being flat capped old men with whippets about this year's winner.

2. I think so but I'm biased

3. In 1979 there were 144 separate breweries in the UK producing real ale, this includes home brew houses and different breweries owned by the same companies, for example the 8 breweries run by Whitbread, it also includes the then popular flirtation with real ale by the big brewers like Watneys (Tamplins, Stag, Trumans Tap). However there are some names like pre Whitbread Boddingtons, pre Watneys Ruddles, Smiles, Donnington etc plus a couple of the new fangled "micro breweries" some of which are still with us, Goose Eye, and pre Marstons Ringwood, and some like Penrhos (run by Terry Jones of Monty Python) that disappeared a long time ago. However in 1979 London Pride was an excellent beer but only available in Fullers pubs - no guest beers in those days, I used to travel miles to drink it and ESB (the strongest draught bitter regularly brewed at that time of a whopping 5.6% or so ).

4. No is the short answer. The process has several stages at local and regional level before a short list goes to the finals (one at the Winter Ales the other at GBBF). Hardknott Dave's blog has some bitter comments about the local process if you like conspiracy theories.