No matter how much you love beer, you may want to think twice before going to the Great British Beer festival. Or, you might just want to get your head around what it’s really like before you go.
Laura Silver and I attended the GBBF earlier this week, and what a night it was.
Upon entering the venue, I was immediately overwhelmed.
I had stupidly pictured that the Great British Beer festival would be like an indoor version of The Taste of London. Perhaps the Ideal Home Show and the Bavarian Beer House’s bastard love child.
What a fool I was.
In reality, Earls Court is basically converted into a dingy pub for a week. There are uncovered concrete floors, hot dog stands, crudely designed make-shift bars and men with truly horrific hair. At one pont Laura looked at me and said, “It’s like a mid -life crisis exploded.”
Would you like a golden door knocker in the shape of a Celtic lion's head? Of course you would. Hippy jewlery that will cleanse your Chakra? Yes, please. A child's t-shirt with the head of a dead queen or faux nipple tasselson it? Why the hell not.
However, the first thing I noticed beyond the baby nipple tassels and Twisted Sister hair was the deafening roar of testosterone.
OK, so maybe it wasn’t “deafening”, but the only way to describe the noise in Earls Court on Wednesday night was “male”. It sounded male, shouty, and possibly grabbing its own crotch. It smelled... male. And, with the exception of a few gaggles of girls clutching pint glasses and/or wearing sparkly red cowboy hats – it looked male.
Despite the GBBF immediately feeling like we had accidentally wandered into The Great British Scrotum, there were tons of cheap beers and ales to drink. If we ignored the semen sea of men, and kept our eyes on the various menus of the different brewery’s “stands” that are divided by the different regions of Britain – we would be fine.
Our task was actually quite simple: Make it about the beer, don’t make it about the men.
In effort to do just that, Laura and I signed ourselves up to the Girls Guide To Beer, led by notorious expert and beer writer, Melissa Cole. The minute Melissa walked into the room, bellowing enthusiastically about how she wants to hear our opinions on the beer and asking why the hell weren’t we drinking cask ales already, I fell in love with her.
Melissa Cole is awesome.
And she’s probably the only woman in Britain I’d be comfortable with leading this discussion and tasting tour, as you can imagine a group of women parading around the Great British Beer Festival, our dainty little 1/3 pint glasses in hand, drew a bit of attention. Perhaps the same amount of attention that a gigantic, bloody steak placed in a lion’s den would receive.
It didn’t help that we were lead over to the tasting area in a big long trail, with one of the CAMRA girls holding up a “Girls Guide to Beer” sign raised over her head like a neon, flashing beacon of oestrogen. We were tourists or there to drink beer? It was hard to tell.
We stood perched next to Justin 'Buster' Grant’s Breconshire Brewery stand, and Melissa started sharing with us not only how beer was brewed, but other interesting facts about beer. For example, did you know as that it used to be women that brewed beer? Well, at least up until the Industrial Revolution happened and brewing beer actually started making money, and then suddenly it was a man’s job.
Multiple times throughout the tasting and despite Melissa being in the middle of her shtick, some drunk idiot would come up and either try to stand next to us and seamlessly blend in with the group, or start talking to one of the girls.
Each time this happened, Melissa, the look on her face pleasant with just a hint of “I will kill you without a second thought”, patiently explained that: “This is a female only event, and I would appreciate it if you would move on.” It had to be repeated a few times, but the men always ran away with their brew tucked between their legs.
The first few beers we tried felt very “introductory”. While I don’t always drink “real ale”, I prefer beer to anything else. (Except maybe a French Martini when I’m feeling particularly sorry for myself.) So I wasn’t overly impressed.
However, suddenly something magic happened.
Buster very graciously gave the girls on the tour a jug of their Ysbrid Y Ddraig, Breconshire’s coveted “Spirit of the Dragon” ale. Upon hearing this, Melissa nearly passed out, and so we knew this beer had to be good. Described as being the “rarest brew at the Festival”, Ysbrid Y Ddraig is only available in rare quantities, and only brewed for special occasions such as St David’s Day in Wales.
If you want Breconshire’s fancy description of the brew, you can visit their website. But my much less refined description would be that Ysbrid Y Ddraig smells like whiskey, oak and sex.
You drink it, and all you can think of is ale, sweaty tanned men in kilts (Do they wear kilts in Wales?) oak, whiskey and more whisky. It’s a sexual ale. (Sexuale?) And should be bottled not only for drinking, but as a new Welsh male cologne. Tom Jones could be the face of it and they’d make a fucking fortune.
The whole “whiskey” flavour in Ysbrid Y Ddraig is caused by it being matured in oak whisky casks, and while whiskey in your beer may put you off –don’t let it. It’s absolutely amazing and Laura and I were so grateful that Buster shared his “spirit of the dragon” with us, we had to stop ourselves from trying to bribe him to give us another glass.
While it may have been the residual high we felt from scoring some Ysbrid Y Ddraig – Melissa next had us try Devon Ale’s Thick Black, a dark stout which its brewers describe as having “oak and smokey” tones and smelling like “liquorish and barley”. I say it simply smells like Guinness dipped in orange and chocolate cake and tastes even better.
All in all, the Great British Beer Festival is not to be confused with any of the other foodie type conventions that go on in London. It can be female friendly, if you ignore the hoards of drunk men that would like to know you biblically, and then never call you again.
There are other women there, but they're mostly wearing ridiculous hats. So, if you’d like to learn more about beer and try some brilliant new beers for free –stick with Melissa Cole’s Girls Guide to Beer tour. Trust me.