When I visited last year's
Great British Beer festival I gave it eight stars out of nine, which is about as high a rating as I ever give anything (on the basis that a maximum score signifies absolute perfection and there's always room for improvement).
Having enjoyed a couple of sessions at GBBF 2012 this past week, I've started to wonder if this is a little unfair of me.
Back at Olympia after several years at Earls Court (which was full of Olympic handballers or something), the GBBF layout felt a bit alien to me, and it seemed noticably smaller. What's more, none of the 15 beers I sampled were truly great - the relative highlights being
Chiltern 'Wheelpower', a good session bitter, and
Fuller's 'Brewers Reserve No. 4' - 8.5% Barley Wine aged in Armangnac casks.
Oh, and
Des Geants 'Ducassis' - an eminantly quaffable Belgian blackcurrent beer, in my view all the better for not being pumped full of co2. The ever-increasing number of foreign beers available in cask form at the GBBF is hugely, hugely encouraging, even if, ironically, the people who live in the country of origin often don't get to try them.
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| GBBF 2012 |
So, it wasn't quite as good as last year, but I'd still probably have to give it eight stars, and if this is worth eight, why wasn't last years worth nine? (Which of course, it wasn't, because it could always have been improved by being even bigger, having a lower entry fee, cheaper beer, more seating and so on...)
But what if I surrender this idea that
9=perfection to the gods of Fallible Logic and apply some other criteria?
What if the GBBF were a pub, open all year round? How would it fare in
my search to find the best pub in London?
