A familiar festival of colour for ale lovers

Evolution not revolution is the best way to avoid trauma and bloodshed, and it's a slogan that the organisers of the Campaign for Real Ale's (Camra's) Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) have obviously taken to heart.

I was sipping a half of Shakespeare's Noble Fool last Tuesday afternoon with an old friend, a sharp-eyed veteran of many GBBFs. We looked around us. The floor was still concrete; it was scaffolding that still grabbed the eye.

Those round wooden tables had seen a lot of prior service. The noise was the same: a dull roar of voices, lifted from time to time by jubilant shouts.

Wondrous humanity was as vividly on display as ever, sporting braided facial hair, the badge-encrusted hat, the

shorts and boots, the battered tankard strapped to the belt, the flame-nibbled pipe, the humorous T-shirt, the enduring mullet.

My question to him hung in the air, as he thought. Eventually came the sage answer. "I can't see a great deal of difference, really," he said.

A great leap forward

To be fair, we had both walked smoothly off a train at Earl's Court, up the steps to the Warwick Road exit, and straight across into the Festival. That in itself is a great leap forward: no more peering at the antique destination indicator at Earl's Court for the magic word "Olympia"; no more frustrated waiting as it fails to appear while a dozen Ealing, Richmond and Wimbledon trains rattle by.

The entrance arrangements were efficient enough, though I was glad to be alongside What's Brewing's Ted Bruning as we went inside, since his recognition factor as a key pressman is many multiples greater than mine and the stewards are very efficient at weeding out fourth-estate imposters.

I even got my bag checked. Was the GBBF now on a terrorist target list? If so, it must be closer to the heart of the British Establishment than any of us had ever thought.

I was surprised not to see David Cameron there, attempting to win over yet another unlikely set of voters.

Camra's Georgia Rudman and Louise Ash-worth helpfully pointed out some of the subtle differences to me. The move to Olympia had helped swell advance and corporate sales, and they were hopeful of breaking the 50,000 visitor record. (Corporate sales? Apparently it's a very popular jolly for accountancy partnerships, city firms and - less surprisingly - building construction companies.) The number of brewery bars was bigger than ever this year (17), and they lent welcome colour, style and extra seating. The Bombardier bus was hard not to love; Badger's plastic cow will have received many affectionate strokes. For once this summer, it wasn't swelteringly hot, but Earl's Court is fully air-conditioned whereas the giant greenhouse of Olympia was famously only air-cooled (and not much good in a cloudburst, either).

For those keen to move up the ladder of knowledge, the Cyclops scheme - a simple tasting-note ticket in standard format adopted by a number of breweries - seemed an excellent idea. The food offering gets better each year, with roast rare-breed pork and Romney and Norfolk Horn lamb burgers available from the Splendid Meat Company, or pitta bread filled with feta and sun-dried tomatoes from Olives and Things.

If I had to pick out a single innovation as being the most welcome of all, though, it would be the one-third-of-a-pint glasses, even though some of the bar staff seemed to find handling anything with a stem an eerie experience. The whole point of GBBF is getting the chance to try dozens of beers, and even a half-pint is too much if you realise with your first sip that the beer you've just bought is as dull as algebra. A third of a pint is a much more sensible trial size. A sensible innovation for the future would be spittoons, or at least bins where you could pour away any beer you don't want in order to move on swiftly to the next new name.

Rougher round the edges

Comparing GBBF to some of the wine fairs I attend, it is certainly rougher around the edges - but it's hard to imagine it any other way. As Ashworth explained, carpeting the whole place would cost £30,000 - and you'd probably have to change the carpet every night. Beer is not wine. It involves three times the amount of liquid being delivered, being served, being drunk, and then emerging at the other end of the human digestive tract.

No beer festival anywhere in the world can have quite the same feel as a wine or whisky festival, just as Glastonbury or Reading music festivals will never feel quite like the Proms. You just have to love them for what they are. Which, in the case of the GBBF, means a big, sprawling, messy, noisy, laid-back, free-wheeling ale enthusiasts' playground.

l GBBF picture parade - p38-39