The trouble with English beer festival is that they are full of English beers. Now, I’ve got nothing against English beer (I love it!), but it does get a bit samey. For example at the Charlbury Beer Festival we went to at the weekend, they had 80 different beers of which a couple were stouts, I noticed one porter, and all the rest were cask-style English pale ales. On the whole they were very nice, but you would have thought there would have been room for a bit more variety. You wouldn’t get this at an American beer festival (Fendog is sick of me banging on about my appreciation of the craft beer scene across the pond) . You’d not only have your American beer styles, but you’d have German, French, Belgian… as well as English styles. Ok, so you’d be hard pressed to find a English cask ale that CAMRA would approve of, but I’d rather that than a festival with nothing but cask ales that CAMRA would approve of (don’t get me started on CAMRA!).
I think this illustrates the difference between what is thought of as good/real beer on the two sides of the Atlantic. In the face of megabreweries producing tasteless fizzy piss, beer lovers have sought to show people that there is so much more to beer than what they get with a can of Carling or a bottle of Bud. In the UK this about getting back to how things used to be. We have a great heritage of fine beermaking and groups like CAMRA (to be fair) have done a great job in keeping the art (and the appreciation of it) alive. So on the whole, in the UK, good beer is seen as something traditional, something old skool. So you get the stereotype of the CAMRA member being somewhat old and crusty, and dismissive of anything that doesn’t fit in with his definition of real ale. Real beer is for old farts. In the US, however, due to prohibition (and limited history) there isn’t the same kind of heritage and tradition. So instead, good beer is seen as something new and trendy. The craft beer scene is full of young hipster-types (and hipster wannabes like Spiceballs). It’s all about experimentation and pushing the boundaries. Real beer is cool.
Things are changing over here, but we’ve still got a ways to go. There are some great new breweries doing some really interesting stuff and the scene is evolving. Its an interesting time. Who knows, one day you might even see a kegged beer at Charlbury beer festival….