GBBF preview: Upmarket move

Ben McFarland looks forward to a momentous change for the Great British Beer Festival.While many people head off for the sun in the first week of...

Ben McFarland looks forward to a momentous change for the Great British Beer Festival.

While many people head off for the sun in the first week of August, any beer lover worth his malt makes a beeline for Olympia in London and the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF). This year's event, running from August 2 to 6, will be the last to be held within the semi-salubrious, often sodden, surroundings of Olympia's National Hall.

This follows the Campaign for Real Ale's (CAMRA) announcement that it is to move the nation's biggest beer festival a few stops down the District Line to Earls Court, in the hope of making it more accessible to the general public. Making the GBBF more accessible is something the folk at CAMRA have been doing for some time now. The event has not been immune to criticism in the past and the view of the GBBF as the definitive showcase for our national drink is not always universally held.

Accusations of club cliques and parochialism, a failure to attract new drinkers and a lack of pomp and ceremony have been just some of the thorns in its side. But while CAMRA hasn't entirely blown the froth off its fusty image, the general consensus among industry folk is that the GBBF will arrive at its new abode in pretty good shape.

Plenty to cheer about real beer

Certainly, the cask ale market, which the GBBF endeavours to promote and celebrate, is doing really rather well, thank you very much. Anyone who delves behind the doom and gloom surrounding the national brewers' declining ale sales - down four per cent at the last count - will discover that there's plenty to cheer about as far as real beer is concerned.

Nick Stafford, director of the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA), believes those dancing on the grave of cask ale a few years back were boogying to the wrong tune. "The big national players are struggling but for the smaller regional, local and microbrewers things are looking extremely healthy," he says. "We're finding booming sales, renewed interest, entrepreneurial verve and genuine optimism among our members. We've been saying as much for the past four to five years now - but what has been an undercurrent of confidence has now built into a tide."

With the big nationals seemingly disinterested, the slack has been willingly picked up by both large regional brewers and smaller, industrious and imaginative independent concerns - the latter aided hugely by the sliding duty scale introduced by Gordon Brown a few years ago. While consolidation remains a hot topic, with Greene King's acquisition of Ridley's simply the latest in a long series of takeovers - and closures still not unheard of - the news that more than 70 new breweries have opened in the last 12 months bodes well for the future.

However, if this new-found optimism is going to help form genuine roots of recovery, then much depends on what happens in the wider market. Consumer access to authentic beer remains in the hands of the big supermarkets and pub companies, says Nick.

"Market access continues to be a problem and we're waiting to see whether schemes designed to open up on-trade routes to the consumer, such as SIBA's delivery scheme, will tempt the big pub companies," he says. "There's a lot of churn going on in the retail sector and we're hoping that once the dust settles market access will be improved and that there will, at long last, be choice at the bar - something some of the UK's most exciting brewers and beer drinkers nationwide have so far been denied."

Pub company chiefs only have to saunter down a supermarket beer aisle to realise that genuine consumer demand for real beer is out there.

"Beer is becoming enveloped in the whole slow food movement and the growing interest in local produce, local farmers markets and genuine, high-quality products that are real," comments Paul Nunny, director of Cask Marque - the body charged with the task of improving the quality of real beer in the on-trade. "It's a really buoyant sector at the moment and the challenge for retailers is to decide whether cask ale has a role to play in their pubs and if it does then to do it properly - or not at all.

"The quality issue is a never-ending one and every dodgy pint is a potential nail in the coffin, but there's growing awareness of quality as an issue and a greater focus by retailers," he says.