Opportunities: Beer festivals

To mark Cask Beer Week, Your Business takes a look at beer festivals in pubs.

Beer festivals are a controversial subject these days, what with the allegations that they are somehow giving beer a bad name. But a beer festival held over a weekend in the right kind of pub can be a profitable way of attracting new customers and improving your reputation for cask ale.

They are a chance for people to experiment with a rich variety of brews in comfort, too, so everyone should be happy with the idea.

Until recently organising a festival has appeared to be a daunting challenge for most licensees and remained the preserve of specialist operators in the freetrade and managed chains such as JD Wetherspoon, Hogs Head and Wizard. Now, however, wholesaler The Beer Seller is aiming to open up the opportunity for a wider number of pubs.

It has launched a series of off-the-shelf themed beer festivals to encourage smaller houses to get involved and prove that you don't have to have dozens of brews on tap to make the idea work.

"Customers are looking for places to go for a bit of fun," said Beer Seller brand manager Liz Guilmant. "What better than a pub with quality cask beer and a sense of adventure? "Licensees are looking for ways of increasing footfall into their pub and off-the-shelf beer festivals provide an easy option for an event."

"We wouldn't advise licensees who are new to festivals to stock too much beer though," she added. "Our packages are for six to eight beers with a minimum order of one firkin of each, so the festival can be held over a weekend or even on one night.

"It's the organisation that tends to put licensees off. We have helped to organise festivals of 120 beers in pub grounds, but what we have in mind here is a quick turnover, hassle-free event."

Pricing of the beers is crucial to making a festival profitable, she says. "If you set a margin of 50 per cent, which is still quite low, you can make £450 out of it in a single evening."

By theming the festival you can also introduce a food element and some fun and games, giving the event an appeal that is broader than cask ale drinkers alone.

Beer Seller themes include Christmas Party, Black and White, Sizzling Summer and, curiously, Vicars and Tarts as well as festivals featuring CAMRA award winners or Society of Independent Brewers' beers.

Each package includes up to eight brews, pump-clips for each, leaflets with tasting notes, posters and merchandise for use as competition prizes.

There is also advice on setting up the beer, especially useful if you have to serve from casks on the back-bar, and a pricing matrix to make sure you make money from the event.

Pictured top: A beer festival can attract new customers to your pub - licensee Graham Yates welcomed ale luminary Roger Protz to the Brunswick Inn at last year's event.​

Brunswick keeps it real for the 'tickers'​

If you host a beer festival in your pub, look out for the likes of Johnny Red-Nose, One-Hat Billy and Mick the Tick. They are legendary "tickers", trainspotters of beer, who travel to festivals all over the country "collecting" rare brews.

According to Graham Yates, licensee of the Brunswick Inn brew pub in Derby, you can often spot a ticker by the trolley they trail behind them. This is used to carry samples of any unusual beers they may find back to tickers' meetings where their discoveries are pooled.

This may sound like odd behaviour, but if your beer festival is going to be truly successful you need to attract the tickers - at least that was a lesson Graham's took from his first event in 2002.

"I made the mistake of telling people what beers I was going to serve," he said. "But tickers won't turn up if they know you've only got beers they've already had. So we only sold three-quarters of the beer last year."

Graham is confident that his four-day 2003 festival, to be staged next week, will be a sell-out, however, "or I'll drink what's left myself".

"This time I'm keeping the beers a secret - I'll only say that we'll have some beers that the tickers have certainly never seen before - because I'm brewing them."

He has cordoned off part of the bar in which to store 36 beers in addition to his usual 17 on handpump, which will include six from the Brunswick's own microbrewery. The casks will be stillaged on scaffolding and kept cool by a remote chiller.

All the beers will be sold at £2 a pint so staff won't have to handle too much change.

The Brunswick - unusually for a beer festival pub a tenancy on the Everards estate - is already a well-known destination for cask ale aficianados, but Graham is not pulling any punches on the marketing and has produced banners and posters and flyers for local distribution.

Staff will wear T-shirts specially printed for the event and this time there will be plenty of them in stock for customers to buy. "That's another thing I learned last year," said Graham. "People always like to take away a souvenir."

Case study: the Willoughby Arms, Kingston, West London​

It sounds simple enough. Lay in a few casks of oddly-named beers, put up a poster, spread the word among local Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) members and bingo! - you've got a beer festival.

Inevitably, though, life is rarely that simple. Rick Robinson, lessee of the Willoughby Arms in Kingston, West London, has run two successful beer festivals a year for the past five years.

"It's hard work if you're going to do it properly," he says, "and you have to take a long-term view of the benefits. But it can be very good for business."

The Willoughby Arms runs a St George's Day festival in April and a Halloween festival around the end of October.

"We run two very different festivals," explained Rick. "For St George's Day we include some patriotic beers, while the focus for Halloween is on dark beers and winter warmers."

The festivals have both become landmarks on the London cask ale calendar, attracting visitors from as far afield as Reading and Southend, with the 2003 St George's Day festival running for five days and featuring more than 60 ales and ciders.

"The first time we held the festival it coincided with St George's Day by accident and we decided it was a good theme," said Rick.

Not all the beers are available across the whole festival. "We take a once-it's-gone-it's-gone approach. That enables us to sell a wider range of beers and encourages people to come back and try something different."

Rick advertises the festivals in the London Drinker, CAMRA's regional newsletter, and adds value with food, live music, quizzes and festival T-shirts. "With all that, I might look at the spreadsheet at the end of the festival and only have made 50 quid - that's why you have to look at the longer term benefits."

Rick estimates that the Willoughby's reputation for cask ales increases the pub's weekly turnover by between 30 and 50 per cent. "Without the festivals and our entry in the Good Beer Guide there's no way we'd be able to have three cask ales on the bar all year round. It raises your profile with local drinkers and cask ale enthusiasts will travel to a pub where they know they'll get a good pint."

A temptation for licenses wanting to test the water might be to invite a local CAMRA group to stage a festival at the pub. Rick advises caution, however. "Work with CAMRA, but my advice would be to retain control. If there are any quality issues it will reflect on your pub - and remember, you'll be losing trade as the organisers will be selling their own beer, not yours."

Pictured: Marketing is a vital element in the Willoughby's festivals​