This weekend sees the annual gathering of Merseyside inebriants. I say Merseyside, when I could be more specific and say CAMRA members and a handful of people who got lucky*.
Allow me to elucidate. The Liverpool Beer Festival is held to celebrate real ale. Fair enough. If I was to stop there, I would punch the air in celebration and toast the success of the world’s longest living, living beverage.
But that’s where the corks stop popping.
The Liverpool Beer Festival is held in The Crypt of the RC Cathedral (yippee! coolness! yo, Dave, you are way too harsh, etc!). In many ways this means you’re drinking with the Devil, while the Lord is looking after you. I’m torn on the whole anti-religious rebellion undercurrent, being agnostic. But that’s not where the problem is.
The Crypt only holds so many people, including my mum and dad who will be dancing traditional jigs there. An audience decimated by two-thirds since this holy subterranean alcohole started serving up festival delights some years past.
Real ale is on the up. There’s a bit of a resurgence, praise be, because the lager drinkers – or more specifically, a splinter faction within the piss drinking segment of the nation – have defected from the tasteless to the foaming. And they want to party in The Crypt, too.
CAMRA is the Campaign For Real Ale. It exists to champion beer pulled by hard labour from casks, as opposed to the Smoothflow stuff that is kept fresh, and driven from the metal barrels, by gas. Cask is ‘live’, like your Greek yoghurt, whereas the die-hard real ale boozer cocks a snook at the keg, possibly because they have tiny cocks.
CAMRA also gives its members first dibs to this festival. And even then, it’s a total lottery. Postal applications are the order of the day, and I’ve heard of many an application ‘going missing’. When was the last time a letter went missing for you?
When you put together all these facts, you get a cheeky equation. Beer = popular; venue = small (health and safety decided it would be too much fun to have a busy beer festival); CAMRA = ignoring its roots and making it a virtual member-only event.
So what happens is those people who CAMRA want to reach out to, have no chance of getting in. All these boutique beers are served up to cheery, fat-bellied CAMRA punters, and everyone pats each other on the back for a job well done.
But the job is anything but well done.
Now aside from getting a bigger venue; hosting it during the Summer Pops and using the King’s Dock marquees; or simply employing common sense, there’s one obvious solution:
eventbrite. Open for everyone, at exactly the same time. Egalitarian. Sweet. Simple.
My dad said CAMRA members should have priority. So give them a two-hour priority booking window.
My dad said not everyone has the interwebs. He may be right. So what’s to stop them using an 0844 number with the ‘operator’ sat by a computer, using eventbrite, for when King Kong calls up because his fingers are too podgy to operate a keyboard?
It occurs to me that too many people are too blind or too stuck in their ways to want to find answers to problems. That will, in actual fact, make their lives far easier.
God would approve…
* Not me. Does it show?
