The idea is formed and the journey begins

I never used to go to beer festivals, even when I was a student. Didn't see the point. I mean, why go to a place with a huge variety of beers only to drink pints of the same old stuff you can get at your local? Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all. Never fancied Munich either; Oktoberfest and drinking out of buckets? My idea of nothing to do. And then came Stockholm, and I got a kick out of you.

It was at the Stockholm Beer Festival in about 1995 that the penny finally dropped. And at this year's festival, at the end of September, I resolved to have a year of beer a variety of beer festivals and collect a bit of local flavour. How is beer celebrated?

So what happened in Stockholm that turned me on to the beer festival? The first revelation was the glassware itself. Instead of the standard straight pint glass, the beer was served in an elegant glass designed for tasting, with a line at 15 cl for samples. No big deal to throw away 10cl if you discover a particular choice is not what quite you wanted. The second a-ha moment was when I realised a beer festival, instead of being a fast track to debilitation and hangover, could be a celebration of beer's diversity.

The following summer, I went to my first beer festival in the UK: the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF), applied the Stockholm principle, it worked, and I've been using it ever since. Mostly, it's been CAMRA local festivals: Woking, Bletchley, Farnham, North London, but always interspersed with Stockholm every September (nowadays, the Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival).

At the outset, the itinerary was only partly clear; Copenhagen, in Maya show - case for craft beers from Northern Europe. The Great British Beer Festival in August. Somewhere new, Belgium, or somewhere exotic like Manchester for the Winter Ales festival. What I really wanted though, was go to the Great American Beer Festival. That would be the perfect culmination. Let's start in Stockholm...

Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival: Threatened or Thriving?

I'd been worried about the Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival (SBWF) for about six months. It seemed to me to be under threat from two Scandinavian competitors: the Copenhagen Beer Festival, and oddly, itself. SBWF has such a special place in my affections, it feels like my own pet festival. It turned me on to American craft beer, ignited my passion for whisky, and convinced me that beer festivals can be so much more than the Oktoberfest model. I think it has done the same for tens of thousands of visitors.

Recently though, the burgeoning Swedish microbrewery scene has fallen behind its perhaps more adventurous cousins in Denmark. The Copenhagen festival is full of everything that is hip in the craft beer world. It is "gypsy brewery" Mikkeller's home turf along with a dozen or so others all worshipped by the Ratebeer fanatics. Could Stockholm keep up?

The second apparent threat was from craft beer's nemesis: the wine world. The SBWF has a twin festival called Taste Experience. Was it going to lose out to wine again, dragging attention away from hop and malt under the dastardly trick that wine is supposedly more sophisticated?

On Thursday I walked into the Beer and Whisky hall and had my fears on the beer front well and truly quashed. The food hall had been replaced by a dedicated hall to all things Swedish micro: "A great hall for small Swedish breweries," it proclaimed. And arguably, traceable back to a chance taken by an Englishman in Norway. 

In the mid-90s, an English ex-pat from London, David Jones, took over as head brewer of a small brewery out in the forests, beyond Östersund, somewhere in the middle of Sweden. At the time, With a few notable exceptions, it was hard to find anything but bland lagers and boring imports in pubs and bars.

David Jones, having cut his brewing teeth in a brewpub in Oslo, started brewing an interpretation of a German-style helles lager for the one of those notable exceptions: the world-class Akkurat bar in Stockholm. That beer was called Hell, and in a few years, Jämtlands brewery had practically single-handedly transformed the Swedish beer scene, creating a thirst for all kinds of beer styles.

Jämtlands used to win so many medals in the beer competition at Stockholm, it must have been disheartening for other home-grown brewers. Only Nils Oscar (Tärnö) came close However, this annual chastening served to inspire the others, such as Nynäshamns brewery and Slottkällans. Not all of their offerings were great, but the newcomers were always willing to learn and improve. Year on year, they became more consistent, and began stealing more medals away from Jämtlands. Things started to grow; Oppigårds, Sigtuna, Dugges, Ocean...

After 4pm on Saturday, the Swedish room was heaving with Swedish beer lovers keen to try the established favourites and plenty of great new stuff: Nils Oscar's delicious Sorachi blond (Japanese hops) and the exotically fruity Harvest ale with English and American hops. Närke's monumental Stormakts Porter, the creamy and mouth-filling Bergsmansöl - a Czech-inspired lager from Oppigårds. I didn't even get around to Sigtuna or Slottkällans.

The Taste Experience was nothing to be afraid of either. It was very tastefully done and, as witnessed in the Swedish beer section, it far from diluted the beer and whisky event. A very neat piece of marketing to a sophisticated market.

Where once it had seemed daring to order a Kilkenny instead of a Falcon or a Guinness, Sweden is now a dream country for craft beer and whisky lovers, and a very important market. The Bishops Arms pub chain, had their own stand with a range of Fullers on draught and even a specially-brewed Mikkeller. Oliver Twist had its usual exhaustive range of stellar American beers: boasting Rogue and Stone on draught, and far too many bottles to mention. Wicked Wine were showcasing Sierra Nevada and Flying Dog Ales. No wonder the BrewDog's James Watt attends the event personally. He understand the market here is very knowledgeable, and equally, if not more important than back home.

We have a buoyant craft beer scene based on real ales, but there is so much more to the beer world. I really hope we can learn from the Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival - and Copenhagen, who are helping to put forward the image of beer as a sophisticated beverage.

Marianne Wallberg, the organiser of the festival has, for the 19th year in a row, got her finger on the pulse, and it is very strong. The sophisticated Swedes are showing that knowledge about beer and a thirst for diversity are a sound base for a thriving scene. Threatened? Oh me of little faith.

Woking Beer Festival: The Return of the Native

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of, well, lunch, rather than twilight, as it had been in the opening line of Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native. And as I was seeing Woking Park embrown itself instead of Egden Heath, it could only mean I was on my way to the Woking Beer Festival.

Woking might not seem an obvious addition to a calendar of Around the Year in Beer Festivals that started in Stockholm, and I hope will go on to include Copenhagen, Manchester and Denver, but in my split-level existence, it is one that I can call local - the laziest travellog? Perhaps, but it's hard to pass up a beer festival that you can walk home from, especially when it's as good as this. Anyway, you need to know home culture before you can preoperly assess "abroad".

It was the prospect of BrewDog 5 AM Saint that got me salivating as we walked to the venue: Woking Leisure Centre. I was priming MaltCim, Nathan and Tom on what to hunt down. In fact, so intent was I in getting to there I had forgotten to go to the cashpoint. Heroically, MaltCim offered to zip off to the ATM while we made sure the 5AM Saint was still on. "I'll save you a sip." I said, rather unheroically.

This was the second time the four of us had been to Woking beer festival, but it's the 17th time it's been held. The Leisure Centre is just across the road from Woking Football Club. If the town's football is played in the lower echelons of the soccer hierarchy, the beer festival is grand enough and has a range of beers that might push it into the top division of festivals organised by CAMRA.

No hanging around finding starter beers; straight to the 5 AM Saint. I really liked the bottled version (from Morissons), but this cask is very special: incredibly aromatic with passion fruit, lychees, and pineapple. But if you think you'd be better off with a fruit salad in a Chinese restaurant, the taste leaves you in no doubt this is a beer: richly malty and bitter, with a fight between the exotic fruit and resiny bitterness as you swallow.

MaltCim shows up with the cash, and I have indeed saved her a sip. "What do you think of this?" we enthuse. "It's tastes a bit soggy," she says. Oh well, maybe these Nelson Sauvin and Simcoe hops aren't for everybody. She goes instead for a Bottle Wreck, a porter style from Hammerpot in Sussex. MaltCim has long been an acolyte of the Dark Side.

I like the Woking fest because it is a very friendly, down-to-earth and local festival. It gives flavour of southern England outside London. Not quite Hardy-esque, I admit, but it's the sort of festival you'd bring the Swedish side of your family to (which we did a couple of years back). And if the location is generic-looking, it makes up for it by having a real-live, old fashioned Wurlitzer cinema organ, which is used to full effect every session for a rousing sing-along.

It's quite a big festival, by anyone's standards, with 75 cask ales, some ciders and perries, a respectable "foreign" bar that mostly has Belgian bottled beers. There is a healthy proprotion of micros from London and the South East: Twickenham, Sambrook, Surrey Hills, Ascot... good marks for that. But what elevates the festival for me is the smattering of craft beer gems brought from around the country. As well as the BrewDog, there's Thornbridge, Marble, and Saltaire.

The pick from Saltaire on show this time was the Blackberry Cascade. It might sound a bit gimmicky, but the addition of blackberry was subtle, and with the American Cascade hops and good juicy flavours from the malt made me wonder who has the ideas for these brews. Somebody at Saltaire has a real feel for flavour combination.

Saturday afternoon turns towards evening and before time is called for this session, there's one last call to the Foreign stand for an exclusive carry-out or two, and out back across Woking park. I'll be there again next November, and so should you; Woking is just 30 minutes from Waterloo Station. And maybe I'll get around to reading past the first sentence of The Return of the Native.

Searching for a New Order at the Manchester Winter Ales Festival

There ought to be an extra factor in the equation that defines where in the calendar "Blue Monday" falls: the distance in miles you are you away from a winter beer festival. January is bad enough as it is, but what makes it worse for me is the envy I feel towards those lucky enough to live near a festival of winter beers. Finally, I've done something about the problem that January gives me every year: I've broken my winter beer festival duck at the National Winter Ales Festival in Manchester, the third stop on my journey Around the Year in Beer Festivals.

Winter was made for strong, dark beers; not the other way around. Only, it's not always easy to find them. What you need is a festival. As my epiphany in Stockholm showed me, I think the point of a beer festival is to sample, to taste something new. The sampling aspect is near necessity if the majority of the beers you want to try are stronger than 5.5% ABV.

When I was planning my year's tour of beer festivals, the UK's National Winter Ales Festival (NWAF) filled a sizeable gap between Woking in November and Copenhagen in May. Winter and Christmas beers seem to be more part of the culture of countries in the rest of Northern Europe, so how would Manchester fare? Could it be part of the change to beer culture in the UK that I'm looking for? Are we embracing greater diversity in our beer styles?

 There's no doubt that the NWAF showcases winter ales, but it's not exclusively the winter warmer style throughout. In fact, the beer list has a wide representation of ales that could conceivably turn up at any time of the year. I was disappointed by that at first, but the reality is, you could do all four sessions of the festival and not come anywhere near exhausting the winter stuff. Even If dark-and-strong's not your thing, you could just stick to the impressive range of non-seasonal beers local to the North West of England.

And that's just where I started, with Hawkshead Red. I've heard a lot about this brewery from the Lake District, and good though the Red was, with its malt-dominated flavour (you can guess the colour), it wasn't what I'd come for. But the winter ales weren't at the standard bars; if you wanted a beer entered in competition (for best winter ale), you had to go to the Competition Bar. Confused me at first, but the organisers got this right; it meant you only needed to visit one bar to satisfy your winter ale craving.

So, after a quick grand tour to scope the breweries arranged around the hall from A for "Amber Ales" to Y for "Yorkshire Dales", the Competition Bar became irresistible. Brodie's Prime is Hawkshead's entry. It's in the winter warmer style, medium bodied and fruity with a hint of roasted malt. Thankfully, the Mwnci Nell from Bragdy'r Nant, failed to live up to its printed tasting note of "fish", but the Port O Call from Bank Top did indeed turn out to have a hint of port. Really quite Christmassy, without being over-spiced and gimmicky.

I've championed Thornbridge before and was drawn to the cask St. Petersburg imperial stout. A favourite of mine from 2010 in the bottle, what would the cask version offer? At 7.7%, it is satisfyingly warming, but it has the body and the roasted flavours to balance. Definitely one of those "what winter is made for" beers. As was Thwaites OBJ. Rich, fruity and sweet almost to the point of a barley wine, but without quite the strength. There aren't many beers like this, and it's good to see one of the traditional Northern breweries (they are from Blackburn) keeping up the interest alongside the micros.

A predictable demographic or are we missing a trick?
The festival is a success, no doubt. It's hard to fault, and yet something is bothering me. It's not the venue, which is pleasant enough and big enough for the occasion. It's not the beers; the large range of interesting beers includes a "foreign" beer bar boasting beers in the winter styles of their respective countries.

There's something very different about the NWAF compared to its summer equivalent, the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) held in August in London. And it only hits me when my festival companion introduces me to a friend, who opens by quoting Captain Beefheart. Of course, I get the  reference - Dave has set me up. And I've been thinking music references all day, all associated with Manchester: from Joy Division and New Order, to the Smiths and Oasis. Surely I could come up with a more modern Manchester band or musical icon. But I couldn't, and it didn't look like there were many other festival goers who could either.

Now, I suppose a Friday afternoon is not the best session to assess whether the younger population of Greater Manchester has completely deserted the dark side of the beer world. I just wonder if there is an image problem with dark beer. I've noticed a marked decrease in average age at the GBBF as well as a lurch towards blond and golden ales. Are the two perhaps related? If you look at the photo, there are some under 40s, but not many. Please, somebody who went to any of the evening sessions, set me straight, if you can.

In trying to make ales look more like (ordinary) lagers in order to entice a new generation, are brewers merely exchanging one style monoculture for another? Mild ales are already on the endangered species list, what needs to be done to stop winter ales joining them?

Given the opportunity, when people are introduced to the darker beers; whether from the forward-looking micros like Thornbridge (St. Petersburg) and Marble (Chocolate), or even some established bigger players like Fullers (London Porter), they often really like them. And my experience from the south of Argentina to the north of Sweden, is young people go for the dark stuff in a big way.

Obviously, we are at a festival that celebrates the diversity of beer styles, especially if you include the dunkels, the smoked trippels and bocks of the foreign beer list. The list of winter ale styles in competition shares the diversity, even if you might argue about defining styles:

• Old Ales and Strong Milds
• Porters
• Stouts
• Barley Wines

The existence of new micros, brewing such delights as the fantastic Superior Damson Stout from Liverpool's Wapping, alongside Robinson's promoting its established favourite Old Tom, is very pleasing. But I wish more UK breweries would be a bit more exciting with their winter beers; most are lagging behind the lead of the US, where craft breweries who boast a broad range of styles. Be braver! Sure, have a flagship beer, but promote the range, forget the bland marketing of promoting The Brand - it's old hat. 

CAMRA organises the National Winter Ales Festival, and should take credit for it. I would certainly go again and take more friends. And even if I happened to attend The Antiques Roadshow session, I hope both CAMRA and the breweries build on the success by encouraging even more of a younger crowd to attend - It's certainly a good antidote to Blue Monday.

Copenhagen Beer Festival 2011: Micros and More in the Giant's Den

"So, the festival glasses?" I asked. "Are they just behind that stack of whisky tumblers? What do you mean those are the festival glasses?" A voice in my head pipes up. It is late great jazz club owner Ronnie Scott intoning "You're not here to enjoy yourselves!" It dissipates, the krone dropped; we are here to sample. It was 2009 and my intro to the Copenhagen Beer Festival had me smitten. I knew I would be back. Hope they still have poletts.

Jump-cut to May 2011, a changed flight, altered venue, and here I was again: Copengagen, the third stop on my journey Around theYear in Beer Festivals. The venue is Tap 1 Exhibition Hall at (sharp intake of breath) the Carlsberg Brewery?! Shurely shome mishtake, as Lord Gnome of Private Eye magazine might have it. Is this not some kind of sell-out? No! This must be one of the least sold-out beer festivals there is. Apart from in the sense of ticket sales. 

 It does make some kind of sense holding a beer enthusiasts' festival at the home of a giant industrial brewer. At least Carlsberg has their own micro: Jacobsen, with their own stand at the festival. They make some varied and pretty tasty beers. And it's variety that makes the Copenhagen festival.  The festival organisers are the Danske Ølentusiaster (Danish Beer Enthusiasts) Association; by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.  In its own way, Carlsberg has its place in spreading the word of the craft beer revolution.

If we are not exactly rejoicing to see the biggest brewery is here, then it is thrilling to see some of the two-man, five-barrel operations - not to forget the breweries where women take a central role, such as at Wintercoat, where Disa Fink with her husband Nils Thomsen comprise the workforce at this English-inspired brewery near Aarhus. Some might look down their pint glasses at handpumps dispensing non-cask ale, but they did have two genuine cask-conditioned beers: the Cockney Imperial Stout at 8% ABV and the Wintercoat Old Ale. Both were great, and the Old Ale, even if the programme notes said it wasn't fully matured, already tasted delicious.

There was at least one other old ale to be had, also in cask form: Gales Prize Old Ale, imported by the One Pint specialist importers of British, Belgian, US, German, Czech and that other legendary brewing nation, India. Even though we are here to celebrate and sample Danish craft beer, it's hard to resist the Prize Old Ale, so hard to find in the UK. It was the best I've tried: a complex meld of sweet, bitter and sour, satisfying and refreshing. Well worth a polett.

A what, sorry? You said that before? A polett (or possibly polet) is a token in Danish, and you get ten as part of the price of entry (200 kr) along with your sample glass. The deal is, you swap a token for a sample, which is usually 10 cl, but there is a line for 5 cl for very strong beers. It's a very sensible system - I've seen similar at some CAMRA festivals - it saves all that rummaging around for change while juggling your glass and festival programme.

You might think 10 krone (about £1.20) for 10 cl of beer is steep, but the Danish craft beer scene is inspired by the US, so there are some big beers. The likes of Amager, Croocked Moon (sic), Hornbeer, NØrrebro, Kissmeyer, and of course, Mikkeller parade their 8.5% Rye Porters, their Extreme Imperial IPAs at 9%, and their Black Hole Barrel Aged Imperial Stout series - at gone 13%.

And on the more usual side of the ABV tracks, you get American-style style variety: dry-single-hopped Bitters, Doppelbocks, Red Rye IPAs, Coffee Porters, Saisons, Bieres de Garde, as well as IPAs sporting the new hops on the block from the Pacific, such as Citra and Nelson Sauvin.

Even if the website's list of "exhibitors" is a couple of scrolls long, it still feels like a manageable festival; the enthusiasts know what enthusiasts want. The feel is like a local festival. There are plenty of guests from foreign climes too; it is more than local beer for local people. The Dogs are here: BrewDog and Flying Dog, there's Italian beer brewed to rival wine for its food matching capabilities, and some Swedish micros - after all, Sweden is a short train journey across the Öresund bridge.

The Danish don't limit their enthusiasm to beer. News that day had come through that some bureacrat had "banned" Marmite from the country, so of course, I had to smuggle some in and create a photo opportunity. I had several offers for that jar...

Marmite smuggler

Of course it would be impossible to try everything you came for, even by sharing 10 cl samples. So the sensible thing is to come along more than once. At one point it looked like we'd have to stay the night. All trains back to Sweden and "home" for the festival were stopped from going across that bridge. Or maybe they just wanted my Marmite.

Final stop: Great British Beer Festival. All change?

And so, my journey Around the Year in Beer Festivals that began in September 2010 in Stockholm, comes to a conclusion in London. The final stop on my trip is the Great British Beer Festival. And what was that conclusion? Well, as far as the GBBF goes, it was mostly Great and it was mostly British.

Mostly great? It’s not quite right to say there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, but Marcellus (who spoke those words in Hamlet) might be forgiven for reporting that he has detected some off flavours. However, GBBF is a real celebration of beer from the UK and abroad, and that’s what these Around the Year... posts are about. I will save the investigative stuff for another day.

As was widely publicised in the run-up to the festival, there was a falling out between a certain Scottish brewery and CAMRA, the organisers of GBBF. This Brewhaha ™ was not resolved and so BrewDog – whom we are almost obliged by law to describe as “maverick brewers” - did not have their Brewery Bar. This did not lead to mass protest or boycott, but did lead to some funny hats.

Thursday is (silly) hat day. I’m not mad about the hatters, would a “posh” festival do the same? Oh, yes, I almost forgot: Ascot. What is it about silly hats that so attracts the British? I don't know. Back to the beer…

You could spend the entire week at this British festival and not touch a drop of beer from these islands. The Bières Sans Frontières (BSF) bars mean you can get your hands on cask and bottled beers from Alaska to New Zealand, taking in Italy and Japan, as well as the more expected Belgian and German beers. Around the World in one beer festival perhaps.

Some of my favourite beers were the American cask-conditioned ales. The Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA at 7.2% ABV was terrific, and best sampled as a third of a pint, so it wouldn’t have a chance to live up to its name. At the same strength was the Wet Mountain IPA from Il Vicino. a peak experience at this festival, maybe. I lured some of my “traditional British” friends into tasting some, without giving away the what, where from or how much. They were enamoured until, even when I revealed its secrets. It felt like a victory.

Britain produced some big hitters too – it’s not all boring brown session beers, here. Thornbridge Raven, at 6.6% was remarkable and in the oxymoronically named beer style “black IPA”. Sorachi Ace hops, if I’m not mistaken. Subtly showing its odd aromas of Play Doh and rotten mandarins. Doesn't sound good, I know, but these notes had to be coaxed out; malt is integrated with hops and you're left with a beer of great complexity.

Titanic’s Nine Tenths Below was a point under 6%. It was my first IPA on the day nominated as IPA day (but not by the festival). Full of flavour from the malt as well as the hops, and some estery bubble-gum aromas reminiscent of a Bavarian wheat beer.

Fullers were not to be outdone. It’s become something of a tradition for them to launch a special edition beer at the GBBF. There’s usually only one cask per day, and it’s highly sought-after,  leading to long queues. This year the Brewers Reserve No. 3 was the draw. Matured for  800 days in barrels that had previously held whisky from the Scottish Lowland distillery Auchentoshan. Lots of Christmassy cake spices and rum, surprisingly. Can’t quite forgive them for decorating their stand with a huge image of Top Gear’s James May.

Half the other point of GBBF is finding new (to you) beers from your own country. Some very promising brews from Oldershaw, Brewsters, and Brodies, whose Amarilla was a tropical hoppy delight, but I would love to have tried their Superior London Porter. I also wish a few more Brits would be a little more daring with style. If a Czech brewery can do an American style IPA… (Klasterni Svaty Norbert IPA, by the way.)

As well as my final stop this 12-month, it was also the final stop at Earl’s Court for the Great British Beer Festival. Next year, this will be an Olympic venue. With a touch of irony, GBBF will return to Kensington Olympia. Then it's all change.. I will still champion it, wherever it is, at the same time looking to right those off flavours. Next year will be even better.