More things about the GBBF

[shermarama]

I went and worked again on Saturday afternoon / evening, and went to the staff party afterwards. They put me on the foreign beer bar, which apparently there's normally massive competition to work on, but I'm not sure why. We were serving insanely foamy Czech lager from a set of six very slow fonts that would make sense in a bar with one or two barmen but was a nightmare with eight people trying to use them at once. One beer, Bernard Special OX, was so foamy we refused to sell pints of it, since it was impossible to physically fit one in a glass; it was quite hard to get a non-foam half of it in a pint glass, even. There were several German and Polish bottled beers whose identities were difficult to identify, and there were several people who watched me open the bottle and then asked for a third or half of it. By later afternoon it was one of the few bars left with most of its beer - Wales had shut up shop by 4pm having sold everything - which meant all the people just looking for a beer to get drunk on were coming to us, and between that sort of punter and me there was so little knowledge of the beers I was selling that it felt more like normal random bar work than a beer festival. Still, good to have a bit of a challenge and not just the usual beer festival stuff, which is perhaps the point of going and working at the biggest beer festival there is.

The GBBF provides accommodation for volunteers, provided they work enough shifts, in university halls, so the people staffing it are from all over the place and it really doesn't feel like a London festival. Huge numbers of northerners, and suprising numbers of people from overseas - I spent half of the staff party afterwards chatting with four Americans, from Washington, Texas and New Mexico - quite a lot of kilts on show at the staff party too. In that national and international context, I found myself certainly not to be from London although I'm living here, and not from Brighton even though I'm an advocate of Dark Star beers and I lived there for 11 years, but from Wigan again. The staff party afterwards was quite a laugh, although I suspect cultured Londoner types would think it less so. I think part of the reversion to the Wigan mindset was to be able to take a more straightforwardly cheerful view of proceedings. There's a lot of long-standing silly traditions at the staff party. Would all the bar managers doing a sort of fake Morris dance with their mallets to the Floral Dance be entertaining with a cynical modern London hat on? I mean, it was objectively terrible, but that doesn't matter because it's not serious. The bit where a bloke with a broad Bolton accent acts as a caller and we all join in with this pseudo-dance involving lifting tables around, would a hipster be able to laugh at it? Would there be insufficient irony? The volunteers dancing to Slade behind the bar, Slade being on the sound system indeed, too hick? It was much easier to be a Wiganer there.

What there certainly was at the staff party was cheese. I saw them setting up the buffet, and there was a large central table that contained, you know, quite a lot of food but not enough for a few hundred peckish volunteers, I thought. Some very long trestle tables on either side then got loaded up with bread rolls and pork pies and various other snack things so I thought, okay, that looks more like. When the buffet was opened, though, with an unashamed stampede for the queue, the central table turned out to contain only cheese. A host of varieties, stilton and brie and Wensleydale with cranberries and Y Fenni and Applewood and all sorts. Almost all of it went, too, which was impressive given the amount.

The thing as a whole has a remarkable community spirit. I'd work there again next year without hesitation, apart from quite possibly not being in the country, although if I was in a nearby one I might come back specially for it. I'd work more shifts next year too - the more days and areas you work, the more friends you make, which can't be knocked. There were one or two real (ale) bores there, but even in such a concentration of beer enthusiasts, a very small number compared to the number of sociable and cheerful people - those that don't join in don't think it's fun and don't come back, I suppose. Mainly, I got to try a very large number of beers this week for a total cost of about twenty quid including paying for some transport and food. S'good.

Comments

[chained-girl.livejournal.com]

The clash between London and 'the North' is something I've quietly been noticing. I'm a lot more chilled and less uptight since I moved up here, more up for a laugh, better at having the piss ripped out of me on a daily basis and generally, I think, a nicer person.
London, while I was there, made me so self conscious I wince now when I think about it. I haven't thought about how my hair looks in the wind in quite some time and the hairspray is untouched :O)