A GREAT British Beer festival!

And great it definitely was this year - a fantastic nine days of meeting up with masses of the best friends imagineable. Looking after and serving up some fabulous beers, and plenty of drinking them too!
It all started for me back on Friday 9th when I jumped on Tube and then train to travel round to Olympia to start setting up the bar. For those who don't know, it takes  5 days to set everything up ahead of opening, and then a further 3 to take it down once we've closed to the public - so some members of staff are on site for a whopping 13 days. When I arrived some of the work of installing the stillaging for the beer, and erecting coldboxes had already been done, and the Grand Hall looked like this...

You can see our bar right at the back of the picture, to the left of the staircase. A quick wander downstairs, and shortly after I was joined by fellow Deputy Manager Brian, and we set to unpacking crates of equipment and setting up the all important cooling equipment which has to be fixed to the stillaging before we put the beer in place. Initially this just looks like a confusing muddle of plumbing, but once you've put it all together a few times it's surprisingly quick to install - in fact cable-tieing it all into position takes longer than putting it together! Once that was done and lunch consumed, we headed off to assist where it was needed elsewhere in the festival - which mostly involves a lot of walking from place to place pushing or pulling items of equipment - nobody goes to GBBF and comes back having put on weight I can tell you!
Saturday morning is when the majority of the rest of our team arrive on site - shortly to be joined by that all important component of a beer festival - the beer, of course....

That's just some of it - we had rather a lot more than that in total, starting the week with 110 "kils" - or 1,980 gallons of the stuff. We start from scratch with an empty stillage and cold-box, and put all the beer in place - none of us are professionals on our bar - this is something we do as volunteers - accommodation is provided, we get subsidised beer and meals - but there is no actual payment involved - we do it because we love it. Once it is in place it sits for a while to settle before we proceed with "venting" and subsequently (usually 24 hours or so later) "tapping" the casks. Over time you get to know how the various beers will behave as you're dealing with them - some are more lively than others...

...I mostly left that one to others to deal with! ;-)

It's not all about the beer itself though - the bar "front of house" area also has to be set up ready for opening - so handpulls all put in place and linked to the system of tubing that will deliver the beer from the casks, those lines have their own system also to ensure that the beer stays cool from cask to glass - so there's a fair bit of plumbing to get right! Then the housekeeping side of things, the metal sections of the handpulls get a good old going over with Brasso...

...and then the clips are added which show which beer is on sale from which pump. While that's going on, some of us are checking the beers to see whether they are ready for sale or not - some take longer than others, and once we know how the first cask of each is behaving we know whether we will need to work any differently with the subsequent ones. This year we opened on Tuesday with 25 of our 28 beers ready for sale if I remember rightly - a number we were quite pleased with.  Also on Tuesday is the judging of the "Champion Beer Of Britain" competition and this year we were delighted to have the beer that was placed second overall on our bar - Steve & Catherine from Buntingford Brewery were absolutely delighted - if a little shellshocked!

Within the industry this is a hugely prestigious competition, and from the bar's perspective it guarantees a good flow of customers to our side of the hall all week with people eager to try the beer. It also meant that we got a further 12 casks (108 Gallons) delivered to us to sell - we have to have the beer available at each and every session, something which we managed easily this time round by ensuring mostly seamless changes from one cask to another. There is a degree of skill in making sure that the next one is ready at precisely the right time, and you do feel a huge responsibility to the brewers to ensure that the beer is as good as it can possibly be. My own personal drinking seemed to extend to a large number of fruit infused beers through the week, and any chocolate ones I could find! In the course of the 9 days I tried two different Blueberry ones, a Chocolate Cherry mild, and then at the staff party Titanic's wonderful Plum porter and chocolate & vanilla Stout and Saltaire's gorgeous "Triple Chocoholic" - all of which were equally enjoyed by my tallest friend...

Photo courtesy of CKD - I think!

...so think on that the next time you want to suggest that chocolate or fruity beers are just for girls! ;-) On our bar we were fortunate to have Isle of Skye's lovely Hebridean Gold, and a glorious mild from our local Brewery Sawbridgeworth too.

Beer festival folk are incredible - some of the warmest, most accepting, non-judgemental people I've come across. Through CAMRA I've met barristers, brewers, builders and bin-men, conservationists, civil servants, carpenters and computer programmers. Some of those are married to one another, and one is even married to me! Sure there are people you get on with better than others, but for the most part it's a very "live and let live" environment - we're all there for the same reason, after all!

Bring on GBBF 2014!

Robyn