Will there or won't there be a Great British Beer Festival next year?

The other day I read a blog article, by Benjamin Nunn, in which he bemoans the fact that there will be no CAMRA Great British Beer Festival this year. Ben writes under the name of Ben Viveur, a title that gives more than a hints of what his blog is about, namely enjoying real food and drink in the real world. He also writes about cooking, and how to “Create recipes that taste awesome, but which can be created by mere mortals without the need for specialist equipment.” Needless to say, beer features quite highly on Ben Viveur, and whilst Ben isn’t a prolific blogger, he always has something interesting to say.

In his latest post on the Great British Beer Festival, Ben professes his deep love for the event, having first attended it 30 years ago, and never missed one since. In 2023, he took the plunge and spent the week working at the festival as a volunteer, so you can imagine his deep disappointment and indeed sorrow over the non-happening of the event in 2024. The main reason behind the cancellation is the extensive, and ongoing renovations taking place at Olympia, and I’m sure this is something we can all accept. However, Ben has his suspicions that GBBF might not be quite the same festival when it does come back.

This arises from what he describes as “rumours and tittle-tattle, from various sources,” citing that the festival is living beyond its means. The gossip suggests that the festival has gone beyond being cost-ineffective and become loss-making in a quite serious way, enough to make it unsustainable in its current form. Over the years staff perks have been cut back a bit in an attempt to offset this, but this strikes me as “biting the hand that feeds you,” as without the army of volunteers – all of whom are unpaid, there just wouldn’t be a festival.

I have heard similar reports, most recently from a long-standing CAMRA member who, at one time was chairman of my local CAMRA branch. I shan’t name him, but I bumped into him, a couple of weeks ago in the Nelson Arms, in Tonbridge. Despite not having much to do with West Kent CAMRA these days, this individual is quite heavily involved with annual, Spa Valley Railway Beer Festival in Tunbridge Wells. During our conversation, he was bemoaning the fact that whilst CAMRA adopts stringent financial controls when it comes to beer festivals run by local branches - quite rightly in my view, they are far more lax when it comes to their own, national flagship event. A view that certainly ties in with the haemorrhaging money story that's been doing the rounds.

If these rumours are true, I’ve little doubt that CAMRA will have to take a long, hard, and very necessary view of the event, but as Ben points out on his blog, a scaled-down half-hearted GBBF, full of compromises just wouldn't be the same. I’m sure it wouldn’t, but is the current, bloated, behemoth of an event what people want in this day and age? 

I’ve been an infrequent attendee over the years, and in fact was present at the very first national beer festival – the Covent Garden Exhibition,which took place in 1975. This event acted as the precursor to today’s Great British Beer Festival, and I’m pleased to say as well as the very first GBBF, held a couple of years later, at London’s Alexandra Palace, I’ve followed the festival to its other homes at Brighton, Earls Court and latterly, Olympia. The event moved around the country, for several years, with both Birmingham and Leeds welcoming the festival, during the 1980’s. For financial reasons, I wasn’t able to travel to those venues, but I did attend the disastrous, one-off event, at the Dockland’s Arena, in the Isle of Dogs, back in 1991.

Six years ago, I published a rather lengthy, look-back at four decades of the Great British Beer Festival, which you can read by clicking on the above link. I won’t repeat what I wrote then, but I will say that the following year – 2019, I attended what would be my final GBBF. COVID obviously put paid to the festival in 2020 and 2021, but it made a comeback in 2022. The following year was the one which Benjamin Nunn worked at as a volunteer, and you can read about his experiences here. 

They certainly provide a useful and valuable insight into what goes on at CAMRA’s flagship festival, even though it’s hard to get a grasp of the scale of what goes on behind the scenes plus the sheer logistics involved with hosting such an event. The amount of volunteers necessary to ensure the smooth running of GBBF, is a problem in itself, especially given the increasing age of these unsung heroes, and with less and less youngsters to fill their shoes, the lack of suitable manpower will become a major issue, if it hasn’t done so already.

This only fuels the speculation in my mind that if GBBF does return in 2025, it will be as a much scaled down event. After all, is it really necessary to have 900+ beers on sale? It’s true that the festival does pull in the punters, but my experience is the two main halls at Olympia, become unpleasantly crowded as each day draws on, and whilst CAMRA have done their best by providing a lot more, and much needed additional seating, the event can be very hard on the feet.

There is also the vexed question of admission charges, as even with a discounted rate for CAMRA members, visitors can spend quite a bit of money, even before they’ve had a drink! Munich’s world-famous Oktoberfest doesn’t charge for admission, and neither does it require a deposit on one’s glass. Prices for both beer and food, whilst higher than in central Munich, aren’t much higher, which is surprising given the large contingent of staff employed to take orders and bring beer and food to the customers’ table.

Even before the pandemic, I’d already decide that 2019's event was going to be my last, and I know quite a few of my friends also felt the same way. The fun had gone out of the festival, and with so many different beers on offer, deciding which to go for was like stabbing in the dark. It was far easier, back in the early days when my ambition was limited to ticking off every British brewery. That goal went out of the window with the dramatic increase in brewery numbers that occurred during the nineties and noughties!

We shall have to see what happens next year, but I think CAMRA is going have to be honest with itself, if it thinks it can pick up from where it left off in 2023.