So long, and thanks for all the beer?

Is this the end of the Great British Beer Festival?

When I visited GBBF 2025 last month, I had a few concerns about its future. My beloved special place, dislocated and poorly attended. Something not quite right. 

Talking to staff there, it was felt to be 'quiet', but there was no sense of absolute disaster. We all had a pretty good time, even if it didn't feel the same.

Then came the murmerings of disquiet and doom-mongery. 

It wasn't encouraging when some of US casks went untapped and had to be sent to other events and pubs in the area. That's right - beer from the USA bar which always sells out early hadn't found enough customers at the NEC. Suboptimal.

No queues, plenty of seating available - maybe a good thing for a customer, but not a good sign for CAMRA really. 

Then the news emerged that they had made a loss. A big loss. £320k apparently. That's not just 'disappointing', it's an excuse to legitimately wheel out terms like 'existential' and 'catastrophic'.

It's really not good news. 

 

What next? 

The immediate response has been one of cancellation - which feels very knee-jerk but could easily have been pre-planned. GBBF 2026 isn't going to happen, and neither is its Winter counterpart.

And, reading speculatively between the lines, maybe that's it for good? Maybe large-scale cask-oriented beer festivals simply aren't sustainable any more?

My view is this: GBBF should carry on, in some form. I think CAMRA made a mistake not keeping the name alive in 2020, 2021 and 2024 when the event didn't take place. You need continuity with these things. 

Taken down for the last time?

I've been to every GBBF in the past 32 years. Some years are bigger and better than others, but it always carried on; it always bounced back.

The NEC venue was arguably a mistake because it's out-of-town location required a special journey to get there. Yes, hardcore fans were always going to attend, wherever it was held, but casual 'after work' crowds just didn't materialise. When GBBF is held in London, you'd get a large influx of people coming through the doors after 5 PM, generally drinking fairly quickly and spending freely.

This just didn't seem to happen this time - people working in Brum or Cov apparently failed to see sufficient benefit in getting on a train and having a few drinks in a vast hall, when they could go to a decent pub some way between office and home. And that's understandable.

COVID has probably had an impact in that more people are working from home more of the time, which has made the post-work pint with colleagues less of a thing than it once was. London is probably still big and bustling enough to sustain a beer festival, but the middle of nowhere, next door to Birmingham Airport.... Hmm... 

It might be controversial to point it out, but big events generally happen in London for a reason. 

A lack of advertising concentrated on the local area probably didn't help much either. Maybe CAMRA assumed, wrongly, that most of the people who travel from wherever they live into London to attend would still go. That those put off by the extra distance would be replaced by new attendees from the Midlands and North who found the NEC more convenient and accessible than London ever was?

Have they fundamentally failed to understand the GBBF customer base, I wonder?

I'm going to say something else that might be unpopular: it's still run too much for the benefit of the volunteers, and I'd be entirely unsurprised if this wasn't one of the points where cash is haemorrhaged, along with the cost of hiring the venue. 

Don't get me wrong. GBBF staffers are fantastic people doing a great job. And, having volunteered in 2023, I got to see the festival from the other side of the divide and enjoyed it immensely. But the truth is that the staff-to-customer ratio is probably way off what it should be from a purely business perspective, and while customers make money, volunteers cost money. Accomodation, free beer, sundry expenses - it all adds up. 

And I get that it used to be much more favourable for the volunteers and the perks aren't what they once were. I'm not having a go - just pointing out that the arrangements are almost certainly unsustainable unless a whole load more 'civilians' attend, sadly.

So, is that it for the GBBF? 

I hope not. I'd love for it to continue in some form - almost certainly 'leaner', to use cringey business-speak -  but I'm not confident.