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Beavertown Extravaganza 2018

Started by Ceedee, January 10, 2018, 04:32:10 PM

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Ceedee

I'm thinking of going to this - http://www.beavertownbrewery.co.uk/event/beavertown-extravaganza-2018/

Anyone go last year? Any feedback? Is it worth going to ?


Chymist

Never been myself but have listened to a few podcasts recorded there if you wanted to listen to them to see if there is anything of interest to you in them! http://goodbeerhunting.com/search?q=beavertown

Hingo

it was a bit meh last year - great beers but it was over sold, beer ran out early, queuing so long for anything decent. I think I probably had the equivalent of ~ 3-4 pints (15ish 100ml tasters) throughout the entire day.. for £60 and the time spent there, I don't know if I'm in a rush to go back.

If that's the norm for those types of festivals then fair enough but I thought that Indyman & the likes was more enjoyable. Would see how BeaverEx goes this year before going back,.

Ceedee

Quote from: Hingo on January 10, 2018, 04:41:44 PM
it was a bit meh last year - great beers but it was over sold, beer ran out early, queuing so long for anything decent. I think I probably had the equivalent of ~ 3-4 pints (15ish 100ml tasters) throughout the entire day.. for £60 and the time spent there, I don't know if I'm in a rush to go back.

Thanks for the feedback, this is probably the norm for these type of events unfortunately. Also, the price has gone up this year, and adding in flights and other costs, I'm thinking maybe not. I have friends over that way and a weekend with them in a nice pub or two is probably a better use of the time and money.

Hingo

the Whitehag Hagstravaganza might be a good alternative.

Boycott

4/5 for me.

Tickets: not cheap but its entry, a glass and unlimited beer! No tokens was excellent.

Breweries: Lots of rare breweries that you don't see here and every brewery had two beers constantly pouring and they would change throughout the day.

Beer quality: Pretty good to excellent, the best thing was you could try anything and if you didn't like it you could pour it out and try another. 100ml was a great serving size

Queues: On the main these were incredibly short as the volunteers weren't the brewers so no chit chat, people weren't "trying out" beers as it was unlimited glasses and no one was messing with
tokens. Only a few breweries had significant beers but you could drink a beer whilst in a Q.

Venue: Pretty good, not as cool as indyman but it was less packed and sweaty. Good atmosphere and not many knobheads around.

Food: you had to pay for this and it was grand.

The bad was that they ran out of beers a few hours before closing with mainly gammaray being poured everywhere.
They could have made it clearer what beers were pouring where.
The talks room/art gallery were a bit poor.
Flights and accomodation obviously add up.

It was their first year and they did a good job at it. I would say they will increase the beer allocation this year and probably why the price has gone up.


The Whitehag Hagstravaganza was no where near as good (I think it will improve though this year)
-not enough toilets (waiting 15min to piss!)
-sold out food in a few hours
-tokens where the Q was insane
-festival actually had NO BEER serving for the first hour!!!!
-beer quality was not great
-terrible queuing times and no system for serving people
-nowhere to sit
-spending the night in sligo over london.............

Its only a real alternative because its closer but there is no comparison really. I don't think I'll go to another beer festival that does tokens. I've been to Beavertown and the Bristol beer festival with all in unlimited beers now and its a completely different better experience. So much freedom to try beers you might not have if you had to use a token. Don't like a beer, drain pour and move on.




kegging

I loved it so much I got a spot volunteering this year. Get a free ticket for doing so.

I'd say within the first 20mins me and two friends and drank 6 samples so decided to calm ourselves down a bit.

We didn't bother queuing bar for Trillium and as we did one of us would go over to a different stand with 3 glasses and grab something. So many amazing beers with 0 queues. Even Trillium only took 15mins.

It's the best beer festival I've been too and the perfect way to drink beer imo(100ml) just don't waste your time queuing.

Jonnycheech

Great selection of beer, good venue and nice food. Queues for the popular breweries were long but you can send a friend off to another stand to fill your glasses while you wait in the queue to get around the waiting.

The big issue i had with this festival was the session/standard strength beer running out too early on the Friday. It was gone 3hrs into a 6 hour session if i remember correctly and all that remained was big RIS style beers. This isn't acceptable but i would allow them off this glitch as it was the first time the event happened and can put it down to teething issues. You would hope that it wouldn't happen again.
Tapped: FES, NEIPA, CocoIMS, Flanders 2018, Passion Fruit/Peach BW
Fermentors: Raspberry Wheat, Session IPA
Bottled: Cherry Lambic 2019

Ceedee

Thanks all for the replies, more positive than negative and as last year was the first year, lets hope they were teething problems that will have been sorted for this year. I think I'll take a chance and go.




DoubleG

Thought it was excellent last year, loads of beer you might not get the chance to sample at Irish beer festivals. I had no issue with the queuing, I just got a beer from a stand with no queue and spent my time sampling it while waiting in the queue for one of the bigger names. 15 mins max was the time I spent in one of the longer queues which gave me plenty of time to taste a 100ml beer. Already have my ticket for next years.

Yes the beer ran out early but given it was their first year and this was the biggest issue that might be one of the areas they try to fix next year.

irish_goat

Bought a ticket for the Friday night there. Going to be in Cardiff the night before so the only real transport cost is the train from Cardiff to London. Have a friend living nearby so free accomodation too. £65 is a lot but it's 6 hours of drinking so £11 an hour. Not too bad all things considered.