I went to the Great Welsh Beer and Cider Festival with a couple of friends this weekend, which proved to be a bust, sadly. CAMRA had changed venues to the Millenium Stadium, and no-one advertised little wrinkles like:
- no food or drink can be brought into the stadium, so people were losing their soft drinks, bottles of water and packed lunches on the way in, with no option of storing it anywhere for collection on the way out... everything went in a skip
- all stadium-provided food averaged a 150% markup over typical vending-machine prices (£2.50/about $4 for a 500ml bottle of Pepsi)
- the £10 entry fee was just an entry fee; rather than getting your glass, brochure and some tokens included in the price, you had to buy the glass and programme seperately
- the glasses were actually polycarbonate crap and had sponsorship detail on them
- the stadium had only provided CAMRA with a certain amount of space, filling the rest of the space with their own vendors - including a large and very prominant Fosters stall, because that's just what you want at a real ale festival
Combined with increased costs for the beers because of the denominations of vouchers that the stadium had produced and the stadium's insistence that vendors had to take vouchers as well as cash (and that the stadium would claim back 10% of anything paid to the vendors with vouchers) and it left everyone there feeling annoyed and ill-used, putting a damper on it that I've never seen at a beerfest before, and I've attended a lot of them over the years. The three of us tried about half of what we would usually have sampled and left early to go and buy dinner in a pub, although one poor soul from CAMRA spent twenty minutes apologising to us on the way out about how the festival had turned out and how much of it was outside CAMRA's control.
The rest of the weekend involved movies, video encoding and Mass Effect 2...