A new festival for the calendar?

Twitter is great for finding out about these sorts of things. There's a new German beer festival to add to the calendar. Well, to be more accurate, it is billed as an International Beer Festival, inspired by the Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival and the Great American Beer Festival. Braukunst Live! 2012 will be held from April 20th to 22nd in the MVG Museum, Munich.

The website is clearly still a work in progress, which is worrying considering it's only two months away, although to be fair, they could well have been very busy with their main event, the Finest Spirits whisky festival in February. However, there is a preliminary list of the breweries attending so far (though maybe by the time you click on that it could be a proper, sorted list with links to the breweries and stuff *hint hint*).

Although based in Munich, the organisers state they don't just want just Bavarian beers, but want national and preferably international breweries to show their wares, for four reasons (and here's my bad translation from their website):

• First, to you, the consumer, to discover an international diversity, as good as any wine, whiskey or brandy festival.
• Second, because we want to offer the specialty brewers a place to exchange and meet in a relaxed festival atmosphere - and to bring their own beers (which is rare).
• Third, because we have a distinct speciality culture - but hardly anyone knows! Other countries have us there - some are decades ahead. Therefore we must learn from others, which is why we need the others here and why we need, right in the heart of the beer capital of Munich, an international festival.
• Fourth, because we are convinced that this openness will lead to to a specialty market that ALL can use: the consumers, because they can learn of beers of an unexpected (and hitherto unknown!) variety of flavors; breweries, because consumers are paying you more for a product, its diversity and speciality they come to know and learn to love.

I have to admit, I'm not so enamoured of that very last concept, about paying more, but that does seem to be the way many German breweries are marketing their new wares, making them "special through price". But that's another story.


At the time of writing, I think there's only five international breweries listed (well, outside of the German-speaking countries): Brewdog, Fuller`s, Samuel Smith, Robinson and St. Austell, but there's plenty of interesting German breweries listed that I , for one, would love to sample beer from. Having a lot of them under one roof would make that job a lot easier, even if 100ml at a time.