I had a half dozen attendees of the European Beer Bloggers Conference come up to me this morning to say how much they had enjoyed the first day of the conference.
You can find the agenda on this website so instead I’ll just point out a few highlights. First off, the conference facility is amazing. We are based in the old Whitbread Brewery now converted to a conference center and we used a total of four separate rooms with a support staff to meet our every need. It was fantastic.
We had a number of great speakers including Peter Hayden who spoke on the History of Brewing in London; David Sheen on the Past, Present, and Future of Beer in Europe; and an interesting presentation on how to do a technical tasting of beer. The highlight, however, was probably the panel of three top beer bloggers: Pete Brown from Pete Brown’s Beer Blog, Mark Fletcher from Real Ale Reviews, and Melissa Cole from Taking the Beard Out of Beer. This was a lively, engaging panel that covered topics including ethics, SEO, writing styles and grammer, and a lot more, all in one hour.
We had a mass of good food and beer yesterday. MolsonCoors brought in an amazing variety of beers to go with dinner (see the menu from two posts ago on this site). We were honored to be chosen as his audience and touched with his words when head brewer Steve Wellington announced his retirement in an emotional speech.
In the evening, Pilsner Urquell threw a fantastic party, complete with a classy jazz band, a setting that recreated the city of Pilsen, and fresh unfiltered beer shipped directly from the brewery in the Czech Republic two days before. The highlight of the evening party party, however, was meeting head brewer Vaclav Berka who flew in from Prague expressly to tap the keg and meet the bloggers.
It was a late night but a great day.