BrewPoodle Melodrama
Tue 2011-07-19 15:10
I guess I'll file this under "yet more aggressive anti-CAMRA marketing."
Click here for BrewDog's blog entry (posted at 12:18 on 19/07/2011) about the GBBF cancellation: CAMRA Cancels Brewdog's GBBF Bar
Now here's what I've found by way of response from the GBBF organiser.
A comment on the blog post itself, made on the 19/07/2011 and the most recent comment as of 14:00 that day:
James,I don't want to let this develop into a spat, but to say I was "under a huge amount of internal pressure to try and cancel it" is just not true. I'm in charge of GBBF and everybody knows not to try and interfere with the way I run the festival.
As I said previously, come on down this year, have a look, I'll even give you a personal guided tour. And we'll work on getting it right for 2012.
Cheers,
Marc.
marc_holmes 19.07.2011
Another comment on FaceAche:
Marc Holmes James,The reason Brewdog are not coming is that you didn't pay the outstanding balance, as per the terms of the contract.
- The contract stated payment for the bar was due by May 27th. Giving you until July was very generous, nearly 7 weeks.
- The ultimatum was Thursday 12pm, you kept arguing and didn't agree until Friday 11am. Too late, we had programme deadlines to meet.
But to answer some of your other points:
- Right from the very start we said your beer must be supplied in large containers. We were happy with 50L kegs (as long as the beer contained live yeast) but you persisted in wanting to use 30L keykegs. Thornbridge did use 9G casks last year but it didn't work - they will be using 18G casks this year. We were looking at ordering in excess of 60 kils (equivalent) of beer, which is just not practical in 30L keykegs.
- You were the one that offered to supply cask beer in 18G casks.
Happy to start talking about GBBF 2012, and feel free to pop in this year to see how it works. I'll even send you some tickets.
Cheers,
Marc Holmes
GBBF Organiser.
Looks like Marc/CAMRA are being perfectly reasonable here, but form your own opinions…
Personally, there's going to be so much great beer at the GBBF (from British and foreign breweries) that I won't really miss BrewDog. And it is good to see that the GBBF aren't giving the whiney emo teenager of the UK brewing scene any special treatment.
I think it is sad that BrewDog have blown this chance for the sake of a bit more petty marketing, if they were there I'd certainly enjoy some of their beer. They've got their attention again, true – so I guess this is another wonderful BrewDog success! Ah well, I'm sure other excellent UK breweries and certainly the US beers will be enough keep the craft-beer-heads (myself included) quite happy.
2 Responses
Let this one lie. It's a just a little glitch. People argue.
CAMRA is the Campaign for Real "Ale" - I'm not sure I see a problem with them being "ale only" focused (where "ale" is taken to mean "cask ale".) Though in this case the argument doesn't seem to have been about "ale" but more about logistics - BrewDog have just spun it as something different, some kind of CAMRA vendetta.
Given BrewPooch's predilection for marketing stunts I don't think it is a large leap to read this is a marketing stunt. They did make a large bang with the news.
Anyway, the main point of this post was to assemble the BrewDog post and the GBBF organiser's responses in one place without all the other noise that is on the other pages.
I won't apologise for having my own opinion though.
Oh, and arguing is fun.