Beeraction: A visit to the GBBF

A few weeks back we attended the 30th Great British Festival for the very first time.

We had decided to get there early so the decision was to attend the festival on Tuesday and Wednesday only. And I think that this was definately enough and how long you can appreciate a enormous building, with an ridiculas amount of beer and loads of beer geeks at the same place.

The 2 days very fast got very different approaches.

Day 1 started out with us being stunned by the amount of beers and the size of the festival, we could not compare that to any of our earlier experiences with festival like in Copenhagen, Stockholm or Boston, simply it was huge.

So what could be the result except that we simply started to drink what ever you seemed to like in what ever order you found them.

To add that to the fact that we very early came to the "Cider and Perry" and found out that it was not simply the fact that you could decide on a particular perry and then buy it, NO you of course had to sample "a few" of them first, before you could decide, at least according to the bar staff.

This simply resulted in a few of us sampling 2,3,4,5,... perrys before they actually bought one for 90p!. Great to have the possibility to sample (thanks to the man in big glasses), but the heavy part is that perrys are quite strong and with the result that it was spinning a lot afterwards :).


A Cider Bar Virgin?

After that experience I tried to have same english real ales, but could not find anything interesting, problably not the beers fault. So the only way of continuing was to get over to "Bieres Sans Frontieres", meaning the International Beer Bar at the Great British Beer Festival, and then taste through my favorite brews from the US. This resulted in a few new beers and breweries that I have not tasted out before. Some of the found favorites included;

1. Gritty McDuff's IPA
2. Three Floyds Romulus
3. Gardner Ale House Facelift IPA

And the winner, that must be the Gardner, a brewery from Gardner, Massachusetts USA. A IPA with a leafy hop aroma and some taste of grapefruit, not so balanced, but good enough for my hop head. Otherwise except the new ones for me, the winner was of course the Stone IPA!

Ending up with heavy beers from Sweden (like Kaggen Stormakts Porter) and something from Finland it was time to finish of the night and the first day of GBBF.



To be continued with day II.