Category: Festival

By Dave Hopkins

Not Long Now…Birmingham Beer Bazaar is almost here!

After all the delights and highlights of Birmingham Beer Week last month it’s time to look forward to the next event on the local beer calendar, the inaugural Beer Bazaar. Taking place from August 17th to 19th right in the city centre over 2 floors at the Studio in Cannon St it is going to be a celebration of cask and keg ales both local and from further afield. Chatting to Will, one of the organisers, recently he told me that the plan is a Wellington cask bar with plenty of one off specials which we’ll come to later, a Beer Bazaar keg bar featuring UK breweries, a Hook Norton cask bar, a Hogans cider bar, a keg bar from the guys at Tilt with a phenomenal range of beers over the 3 days, a bar from sponsors Purity, and brewery bars from Burning Soul, Fixed Wheel, Fownes, Green Duck, and Twisted Barrel. So something for everyone… And should you need something to take home, well Clink will have you covered with their bottle and can bar. And we can’t survive on just beer so food needs will be catered for by Andy Low’n’Slow, Chi gourmet sausage rolls and vegetarian and vegan options plus a variety of coffee bars featuring local roasters Quarter Horse Coffee. But we’re the Midlands Beer Blog so let’s talk beer…

First off the cask list has a great range of interesting and unique beers. Upon seeing the list I immediately broke into a smile at the first beer, Fresh Cream by Siren, an 11%Imperial Bourbon Barrel Aged Milk Stout with Coffee, Vanilla and Chocolate, normally only available in keg and bottle this has been casked exclusively for the Bazaar. Other exclusives in cask include :-

Cold Conscience, a collaboration between Abbeydale, Brewdog Sheffield & Rotherham band Alverez Kings, this is a mango and lychee infused, New Zealand hopped pale ale;

Strong Ale #1, another Abbeydale collaboration, this time with journalist and beer historian Ron Pattison and Jules Grey of Sheffield’s Hop Hideout bottle shop. They’ve dug into the archives for a William Younger recipe from 1868 to produce this 10.3% ale.

Also, Wolf’s Hood, a 9% Heather honey dipa from Ardent Brewery and Bazaar Dipa-the Wellington Cellar team got together with Chris and Rich at Burning Soul to create a 7.5% New England ipa. And then there’s Old Freddy Walker, the champion beer from Moor that has been aging for 8 months, plus Chimpagne from Blue Monkey which could win the prize for best beer name at the festival, a 10% pale crafted using…you’ve guessed it, champagne yeast.

There will also be 5 beers available in wood casks including another collaboration from the Wellington Cellar team, this time teaming up with Hook Norton to produce the 5% Tuxedo Stout

The keg lineup is stellar and features far too many great beers to mention, if you haven’t checked out the list it is pinned on Tilt’s twitter feed – @Tilt_Brum. However, from a personal standpoint I am looking forward to trying Dark Souls and Doughnuts from our friend Andy Parker at Elusive, the Life collab from Cloudwater and Other Half, the Kernal and Jester King Saison, and, to finish off one of the nights I’m sure, Sippin into Darkness from Lervig and Hoppin’ Frog.

I already know that on the local brewery bars Alex has been brewing up some special beers for Green Duck and I’m pretty sure Scott at Fixed Wheel, Chris and Rich at Burning Soul, Thomas and James at Fownes, and Richie and Carl at Twisted Barrel will not let us down with their selections either.

So there you have it…will one session be enough to sample all this beery goodness, well that dear reader is for you to decide. But we hope you support this endeavour put together by Nigel, Will, Andy, Dave, Kirk and Rich, and we hope to see many of you there.

 

By Bob Maxfield

Birmingham Beer Week – Opportunity for Adventure and New Discoveries

It starts!

Well, it actually started yesterday with the fine fellows at Brum Vegan Beer & Food Fest, but today marks the first day of the Birmingham Beer Week, an opportunity for the drinkers of Birmingham (and Beyond) to explore the fantastic beer scene we have in here in the countries 2nd City.

Many of the people who follow us and read our blogs are likely to already know about much of what is available in Birmingham but we would encourage our readers to be adventurous, if you haven’t had chance to check out what The Dark Horse Moseley has to offer, why not go along to the Moseley Craft Beer Festival

Check out our interview with the organiser here

Perhaps you haven’t explored the beers being made by our local brewers?  They check out the Collab Beer Launch with Twisted Barrel and Blackjack at The Wolf.

The adventure to had is not just yours alone, with so many great events across the 10 day, it’s the perfect opportunity to help friends and family, perhaps even work colleagues, to discover the beery goodness on offer in Birmingham.  (More people drinking local beer, more people drinking in local venues, the better it is for the scene.

Maybe your Uncle is Vegan, Brum Vegan fest offer a great chance to introduce them to the wonders of Vegan beer.  Or you could head over to Cherry Reds for the ‘When is Beer Not Vegan?’ a Vegan dinner and beer pairing.  (At John Bright Street & Kings Heath).

Perhaps your sister is a big gig goer and particularly likes Fuzzrock then why not take them along to Burning Soul Brewery for the Goskino V Burning Soul gig, giving them the chance to enjoy great local beers while tapping their feet. (or what ever the Fuzzrock alternative is)

And if you just want to party with your friends, the bars on John Bright Street have got your back with a Street Party.

There are lots to explore and many beer adventures to be had over the next 10 days,  we hope to see Birmingham Beer Week be a great success, bring new customers to venues and breweries across the city and showcase how great the beer scene is…And perhaps next year it will be even bigger, with even more events and amazing beers on offer for the beer drinking public of the city.

We have given just a small taste of the events over the Beer Week, to see the full program check out www.birminghambeerweek.uk

By Bob Maxfield

Moseley Beer Festival – Birmingham Beer Week Events

With Birmingham Beer Week quickly approaching one of the events we are looking forward to the most is The Dark Horse’s Moseley Craft Beer Festival.  We have been excited by the beers they have announced and particularly impressed with the balance of beers from nationally recognised breweries like Cloudwater and Siren,  and local Midlands breweries, such as Moseley Beer Company & Burning Soul

We wanted to know more about the event that will close Beer Week on 28th to the 30th July so posed some questions to one of the organisers Andy.

How long have you been planning the festival?  Was the Beer Week happy coincidence or inspiration?

I had the idea for the beer festival back in January, as The Dark Horse has got a live music space upstairs and unused space out back which I thought would allow us to do something on a decent scale. The general feeling was that we should wait until the end of the year to give us plenty of time to plan it, but when the guys at Birmingham Beer Week asked us if we wanted to do something it seemed like the perfect time to take a punt and see if we could do it. The downside is we were left with about two and a half months to plan a beer festival, without a clue where to start. I wouldn’t recommend trying this.

What format will the festival take? – individual bars by brewery/style etc?

It’s Birmingham Beer Week and first an foremost we want to promote beer in Birmingham and try to help show that our beer scene is something to be proud of. We’ve got loads of fantastic brewers from across the country getting involved, but we hope that the Birmingham Beer Week bar will take centre stage for the event. There’s some fantastic beers being brewed in the city at the moment. I’d tried the beers that Josh was making at Glasshouse and was blown away, so asked him if he could brew an exclusive for us. He came up with the brilliantly named ‘0121 Brew One’, and everyone who buys a ticket will get one of these for free on arrival. There will also be an MCBF bar pouring some great brews from breweries who sadly weren’t able to make it along.

 

The rest of the bars will be stalls from the different breweries who were kind enough to come along and join us to make this a great event.

This is where the Drinks will be flowing.

How have you chosen the breweries and beer to include in the festival?

As I said earlier, I didn’t really have any idea where to start with the festival, but thankfully the guys at Birmingham Beer Week HQ were good enough to offer me advice. I came up with a list of my favourite breweries, looking for both big names as well as breweries I think are under represented. Probably the breweries I was most excited to get on board were Odyssey and Elusive. They’re both pretty small and don’t always get the most hype, but these guys make seriously great beers.

Are their any beers you or your members of staff are looking forward to trying?

For me the beer I can’t wait to try is Fresh Cream from Siren. They’ve held back some of the Bourbon Milkshake to make up special one off kegs for special events and festivals by adding different ingredients. I’m really excited that we’ll have a Siren beer that you won’t be able to try anywhere else except at our festival.

 

 

The staff at the Dark Horse love sour beers so no doubt the Kettle Sour from Cloudwater will be a hit with them.

 

We’re making batches of craft beer ice cream too for the festival – I’ve just tried the sensational Grievous Angel from Odyssey with Chocolate, Coffee and Orange which we’re all looking forward to trying in ice cream form!

Would they see this becoming an annual event?

We hope to see this become an annual event that grows year on year, but I guess that depends on how it’s received by the people who come along. We’re really passionate about great beer and want to share that with the people of Birmingham by putting on the best event we can.

The guys at The Dark Horse have made a strong start and we are sure the event will be a massive success, how could it not with Craft Beer Ice Cream on offer!

It is fantastic to have another event on the calendar for the beer drinkers of Birmingham, and another place for local brewers to sell their beers.

Tickets are still available, pop along to www.skiddle.com

Check out some of the beers on offer below.