Beer on Broadway XVII

Given my vague pub-owning thoughts, working at a beer festival is good training, and can be good fun too. For the last 3 years I've been involved in the Ealing Beer Festival, known as Beer On Broadway due to its traditional location on Ealing Broadway. The festival is organised by the West Middlesex branch of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. This year I was more involved than ever (some would say too involved) as I took on the role of Wet Stock Controller (there were actually 2 of us acting in a joint capacity, but it was still hard work).

The job of the Wet Stock Controller is, as the name suggests, to look after the beer. A fairly important role in a beer festival, I think you'll agree. The Wet Stock Controller has several jobs:

• ordering the beer. This involves working with breweries and wholesalers to come up with a list of suitable beers. Suggestions from past visitors to the festival (via the questionnaires in the programme) and local CAMRA members are taken into account, as well as the intention of coming up with a balanced and varied list to appeal to different palates. Given that the festival was in May, we decided to order plenty of Mild ales as CAMRA focuses on this particular beer style in May.
  
• accepting the deliveries. All the beer arrives on the Monday of the festival week. We devised a system of labelling the casks as they arrived to make sure they ended up in the correct bar, and in roughly the right place so they could be lifted into place easily. This year we had around 150 casks delivered!
• caring for the beer. Real Ale requires careful handling including venting the casks (to allow the carbon dioxide gas generated during secondary fermentation to escape), and tapping the casks (so we can get the beer out!). My attendance on the cellarman's training course at Fuller's is vital at this stage.
• checking the beer quality. Real Ale takes some time to mature and is a fairly fragile product. It's therefore important to check that it's in a fit state for sale. There's only one way to do this - to pour a bit into a glass, observe it, sniff it and taste it! Sounds like a great job, doesn't it? Well, after you've worked your way through about 70 beers it becomes a bit of a chore! Beers that aren't up to standard are held back and may be the subject of various procedures to try and get them ready.
• dipping the casks to see how much has been sold. We go round with a flexible dipstick (ooerr missus!) and check the amount f beer left in each cask. This lets the festival organiser know how much has been sold and lets us know which beers are selling fast and whether we need to make more available.

So, it's a pretty full-on job. Good fun, but hard to fit in with a "real life". This year I think we did pretty well from a beer perspective - we presented a good range of beers in good condition and sold most of it. If anyone readers did visit the festival I'd be really interested in your comments.

Below are a few photos from this year's festival.


This is a photo showing the back of the stillage (rack of barrels) in the main hall. You can see the fleecy jackets over the barrels as part of the cooling system we use. This circulates chilled water (from the coolers you can see to the left of the picture) through saddles which sit on the casks. The fleecy jackets trap a layer of cold air around the cask which keeps the beer at the optimum serving temperature.


Here you can see some of the hard-working volunteers acting as bar staff in the main hall. The cards on the front of the casks indicate the beer, its strength and the price. That stack of barrels always looks impressive!


And finally, my favourite shot of the festival - closing time on the last day! It was fun, but hard work.

After doing some limited clearing up on the Saturday night we carefully moved the remaining beer down to another room where we were planning a party on the Sunday afternoon. After packing everything away and loading 4 vans with stuff, we sat down to a well-earned curry and few beers on the Sunday (see photos below). All over for another year (although I may take a year off next year).




Finally, my congratulations to Graham Harrison, the Festival Organiser, for somehow pulling everything together, and my immense thanks to Tom Madeiros (talented Head Brewer at Twickenham Fine Ales) - my partner-in-crime as joint Wet Stock Controller - who made the job just about do-able.