Podcasts about beavertown extravaganza

On this week’s episode, we catch up with award winning beer writer, photographer and consultant Matthew Curtis to chat about beer trends and social media, exploring everything from packaging types, whether breweries should chase the hype of Hazy and Brut IPAs, and what kind of legacy beer business are leaving behind - if any. Matthew appears regularly in publications such as Original Gravity Magazine and Ferment, writes reviews for Hop Burns & Black, and was the UK editor for Good Beer Hunting for a season, helping to host the Beavertown Extravaganza. For more articles and info, check out www.totalales.co.uk Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and follow us on social media @hopforwardbeers

Opening Statement & Keynote Michael Kiser, Founder and Director of Good Beer Hunting The Future of the Relationship Between the UK and US Beer Industries This year we were invited to return to the Beavertown Extravaganza to run the now annual symposium, bringing together brewers and leaders from all over the world to discuss the topics of the day — some of which inspire the industry and some that keep it up at night. Last year’s fist ever symposium for the Extravaganza covered the spread from terroir in beer to hazy IPA, and this year was no less ambitious. But the context for this year’s symposium naturally shifted as beaver towns own ambitions came to light in the months leading up to their minority partnership with Heineken. Some brewers took offense and pulled out, others soldiered on, and still others rallied to their side and joined the festival, sending a clear message that as the beer industry continues to evolve and grow more complex, the simple notions that once seemed to spur it on are perhaps not as simple as many thought after all. The topics for this year’s extravaganza followed nationally on that signal - covering topics such as how beer and wine are sold differently, the value of independence and investment, and of course, what’s going to happen to hazy IPA after all this. Congrats to Beavertown and their crew for forging ahead and throwing a spectacular event in the midst of a challenging time of change. Thanks for inviting us to come and co-host the symposium with you all. After all, the purpose of the symposium is to dig into these issues, not shy away from them, and that’s exactly what we did. You’ll hear from a number of GBH team members hosting these talks, and I’m quite proud of that. Our U.K. team is growing, and our bench is deep. So for some of you, it’ll be the first time you’ve heard form folks like Chris Hall, Johnny Garret, and Claire Bullen, all lead by our U.K. Editor, Matthew Curtis. But it surely won’t be the last.

Männerabend Special – Beavertown Extravaganza 2018! Dennis, Reinhold, Hendrik, Steffi, Candy, Ben und Hannah haben sich auf den Weg nach London gemacht um bei der 2. Beavertown Extravaganza dabei zu sein. Wie man sich fast denken kann, haben wir uns vor Ort durch zahlreiche Biere probiert und haben am nächsten Tag als kleine „Aftershow“ noch einen fantastischen „Bottle Shop“ besucht. […]

Before we get started today I want to tell you about a couple of upcoming GBH events happening right here in London this September. First up, we’re incredibly excited to be bringing New Belgium’s wonderful sours to British shores for the first ever time, in an event called Into the Wild. They’ll be pouring their 2018 iterations of Le Terroir, Transatlantique Kriek and, of course, La Folie, alongside some incredible cheeses selected by Cheesemonger Ned Palmer, meats from The Charcuterie Board and sourdough from Bread by Bike. We’ve also hand picked a small selection of brewers, cider makers and winemakers to pour alongside them, in an effort to showcase all things delicious and fermentation driven—and crucially—what they all have in common. Along with New Belgium themselves we’ll be joined by, Burning Sky, Cloudwater, Beavertown’s Tempus Project, Boundary, Oliver’s Cider and Perry and New Zealand’s Garage Project, who’ll be bringing natural wines from their Crushed series. It’s happening on September 5th at the Beer Merchants Tap in Hackney, and I hope to see some of you there. 
We’re also busy prepping for this year’s Beavertown Extravaganza. We’ll be there again this year with two days worth of panel talks happening over the course of both sessions on the 7th and 8th of September. A few tickets are still available, but they’re selling fast, so head over to beavertownbrewery.co.uk to grab yours now, and we’ll see you there. Now onto this week’s episode—an experiment of sorts that ended up being a lot of fun to record. A couple weeks back I travelled to Sligo, on the West Coast of Ireland to visit The White Hag brewery, which happened to be celebrating its fourth birthday with its annual Hagstravaganza Festival. I can’t tell you how many emails and tweets I’ve had over the years from Irish beer lovers asking me when I was going to visit and experience the Emerald Isle’s thriving beer culture for myself. So, while at the festival, I tried to capture as much of that culture as possible in a series of shorter interviews. I hope you’ll agree that the passion, and enthusiasm for Irish beer is infectiously evident in each one of them. Over the next couple of hours you’ll hear from The White Hag’s head brewer, Joe Kearns. Tom Delaney, head brewer at Galway Bay Brewery, and his own mixed-fermentation project Land and Labour. Cormac Wall, an Irishman working for Honest Brew in London, who also recently started contributing to GBH’s b-Roll blog. Wayne and Janice Dunne, who collectively as The Irish Beer Snobs author a blog, and host a podcast of their own. Mark Twig and Maurice Deasy of Canvas Brewery, and Francesca Slattery, of London’s Five Points Brewing Company, who lives in Dublin and works as the brewery’s rep out in Ireland. The Irish beer market is a fascinating one, and also one not without its struggles. It’s an industry dominated by the giants of Heineken and Diageo via its Guinness Brand—the latter going as far as to serve as a core part of this nation’s identity for so many. However, what I found, was that if you scratch below the surface—even just a little—you’ll soon find a thriving set of young, entrepreneurial brewers, each one desperate to prove that the beer scene here is composed of far more than merely “the Black Stuff.” A quick note—this episode was recorded at a working beer festival, so there is some noise. But hopefully that’ll convey how fantastic the atmosphere was at this event.

This past fall when GBH experience director Hillary Schuster and I were in London for the Beavertown Extravaganza and Uppers & Downers, we were thrilled to get outside the city for a couple of days to visit one of my favorite cider makers in the world, Tom Oliver.  He was pouring at the Extravaganza, of course, right next to Other Half, which made me laugh a bit as I entered. There were dozens of people rightly waiting in line for Other Half’s beers and almost no one in line for Oliver’s ciders, which I would put up against any Wild Ale, Lambic, or Geueze in the world in terms of its fermentation complexity, natural, rustic condition, and agricultural qualities. It’s really one of the most fantastic fermented beverages you can buy. And at the fest, you could just walk right up to his booth and get a pour because we still have a strange relationship with cider. In the U.S., we have a strange tension between these artisanal orchard-based producers and “craft” cider makers selling quick fermentations in a six pack of cans. Some are even produced by breweries as an alternative offering.  That also exists in the UK, but the biggest tension there is among the sort of country cider, known as scrumpy, which is maybe more akin to moonshine, and the mass market ciders, called white ciders, which people drink for their functional effects, not so much their flavors. Cider makers like Oliver have a hard time cutting through. But it’s getting easier.  Oliver's ciders were re-branded beautifully this year, which is getting some notice. And as more and more beer drinkers follow their palates into the more complex side of fermentation, they’re finding something resonate in mixed-fermentation beers, natural wines, and maybe, finally, orchardist ciders.  We went out to Oliver's multi-generational family farm in Herefordshire near the Welsh border and stayed for a couple days to get a lay of the land. We ate meat pies and drank some beautiful things, and eventually GBH UK editor Matthew Curtis and I sat down in the dining room of Oliver's cottage to talk about the future.

Cock and Croc visit Beavertown Extravaganza 2017. Beerz, dancing and shenanigans ensue.