I’ve volunteered at Norwich Beer Festival for over a decade (and on a separate note, I’m delighted that that’s going ahead this year albeit in a slightly different form because of the delays to the Halls repairs) so I decided this year to come and volunteer at the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) for a week. I arrived early on the Sunday morning and was given the H&S briefing given that the NEC hall was a construction site at that point. Hi-vis jacket and steel toe shoes later, I was ready for action, hoping that they didn’t want me to do anything construction related.
I was tasked with helping set up the Breweriana stall, a word (Breweriana, not stall, that I had to think about how to spell and pronounce). I discovered that this meant old books, old glasses and brewery memorabilia so I merrily decided to ask to stay all week, meaning that they were stuck with me for the whole event. I was pleased that the managers and staffing agreed to this, but it was definitely an excellent decision.
It looked chaotic at this point, but the two stand managers knew what they wanted to achieve.
Starting to put the old glasses on the shelving units. I’m pleased to say I didn’t break any glasses all week.
Woooo, glasses from Norwich Beer Festival, and it was possibly me that sold them in the first place.
The stand coming together.
We had a lot of bottles of unopened beer which sold well and here’s an early bottle of Adnams Broadside.
Volunteer food options were a little limited due to NEC restrictions, but, fortunately, a quick walk to the monorail to get to Birmingham Airport meant I could get to Greggs and M&S. I was located near to the hotel, as CAMRA had paid for some rooms at the Hilton located at the NEC and that meant I didn’t have to trek back into the city centre every day.
Funky Fluid! Europe’s best brewer.
Twas ever thus.
There was live music during the event and I think it’s fair to say that this did not surprise and delight me. Not because of the quality of the bands and singers themselves, but just because the noise was a bit loud and the building acoustics are terrible as it wasn’t really designed to be a concert hall. I’m not sure that even the Wurzels would have sounded good in here.
Thanks to Roy and Jen for bringing me four Greggs chicken bakes from the company’s outlet store.
The hot dog at the staff party at the end of the event. The actual hot dog isn’t visible, but was rather lovely. Note the healthy salad.
There were seconds available later on, so I accidentally had another one and the staff forced a sausage roll on me as well.
The staff party taking place after the festival closed to the public. I’ve tried to avoid taking photos of people here, but as a sense of scale, this was the size of the volunteer area during the entire festival. We had a lot of space everywhere.
Inside the American beers storage area where I had numerous beers that did surprise and delight me. The Volunteer Arms had free beer and cider all week and it was rather lovely to try so many different beers during the week. For anyone wondering about whether they should volunteer, I’d very much recommend it.
The take-down of the stand took us around three hours and that was the end of that. This was the first time in a long while that GBBF didn’t take place in London and it was obviously risky moving it elsewhere, I hope it’s worked out well enough in Birmingham to have another event like this next year. It was great to meet new friends and I was fortunate to be included in a great team at my stall. It was lovely to see Mark, Simon, Susie, Bob and many others who I knew from the Star, not to forget the marvellous Julian, Roy and Jen from Norwich.