The Long Haul Part 3 (The Last Word From The GBBF)
American Cask Ale At The GBBF
Les has now returned from his adventures in London and below is his final report from The Great British Beer Festival. Great stuff, many thanks to Les for taking the time to keep us informed.
By Friday morning, all but 4-5 of the American cask ales were gone, about half the bottle inventory was left. All Maryland beers were gone. But the “punters” as the customers are called, still found plenty of other beers to drink. Friday is typically the busiest day at the festival and I call it “foreign” day because it’s when lots of folks from other countries in Europe show up and several don’t speak much English. Luckily beer drinking is universal. As long as they have a pint in their hands, they’re usually happy. Just to give you an idea of how busy Friday was, the festival was open from Noon-10:30. During those 10 hours, we averaged pulling 145 pints per minute! That’s double the festival overall of 75 pints per.
Saturday was a slower day. Less crowded mainly because folks know the selection will be smaller on the last day. Still, of the 700 ales, ciders and foreign beers we started with, there were still over 250 different beers to select from at the start of Saturday. Our organizer said Friday night that if anyone complained about selection on Saturday to tell them to come see him After they had sampled all 250!
Just some stats for the overall festival. We broke a record for attendance. Just shy of 67,000 “punters” through the doors in 5 days. They drank over 200,000 pints of beer. And over 75,000 pints of urine were pumped from the pot-o-pots (this didn’t include the built-in facilities in the hall). As they say, “Beer – you only rent it!”.
