Well this is exciting!  It’s less than a week now until the annual beery shindig at London Olympia that is CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival.  It’s the largest festival in Britain with over 50,000 beer-lovers expected to rock up and sample some of the 800 beers on offer. 

What makes this year even more special for me is that Beer Hawk is one of the event sponsors and have even been asked to be a judge in this year’s Champion Beer of Britain awards.  We’ll be there all week and will stand out nicely in our BeerHawk merchandise, so if you plan to come along too and spot one of the team then do come and say hello!

When we get back and have duly recovered from the intensity of 5 days beer sampling, we’re going to turn our attention to putting together what will be the finest collection of beer assembled under one box-lid in the whole of 2013.  It’s a very special case indeed as it will contain the beers that fought all the way through to become finalists in the Champion bottled beer category.  This will be exclusively available from Beer Hawk and after such stringent taste testing will surely be magic.  Meh, who are we kidding we’ve seen the shortlist.  IT IS MAGIC!  Watch this space…

Sponsoring an event devoted to real ale may seem like an odd thing for us to do given that Beer Hawk is a home for great beer from across the world and not just British Real Ale, but GBBF is so much than a celebration of beer of a certain type.  It’s a meeting of minds, a spiritual Mecca, a cultural homage to that most worthy deity that is a bloody good pint. 

I go knowing that all the beer I try will be good, most will be great and a fine few will be outstanding.  I know i’ll find some new ones that mean I can spend some time haranguing head brewers to pipe into bottles for us, but more than that I know I will come away knowing more about beer than I knew before.  I’ll have had countless conversations with other beer lovers who’ve made me think harder about beer itself and also as no one is ever short of an opinion after a few days at GBBF, I’ll have had a ton of advice on how to make Beer Hawk even better.

If you are one of those conversations, I’m already looking forward to it so like I said do come and say hi and I’ll buy you a pint!