Event: Love & Beer 2 | Date: Sep, 2024 | Location: Hackney Brewery, London
We’re huge fans of The Craft Beer Channel so we jumped at the chance to get tickets for their second Love & Beer Festival (co-hosted by The Malt Miller). We couldn’t make the first one, so we were delighted we could attend this year’s event. And we weren’t disappointed – it was totally worth the trip down to London and back (even with cancelled and delayed trains on the way home).
About
The first Love & Beer event was held to celebrate 10 years of The Craft Beer Channel. Fortuntely, the event was a success so they decided to bring it back for 2024 and we’re hoping they’ll bring it back for years to come as it was a fantastic event.
This year they partnered with The Malt Miller and the focus was on home brewing.
We’d love to give home brewing a go, but we don’t have the space so it was great to have a chance to learn more about it.
The event was held at Hackney Brewery in Walthamstow, on the vibrant Black Horse Beer Mile.
On arrival, you received a free glass, a goody bag and a token for a free pour of Budvar. All the collab beers were available on tap and there was a merch stand, plus hop rubbings, malt tastings and other supplier stands. The Hackney Brewery taproom was open serving up a whole host of their beers.
Over in the homebrew tent, homebrewers were serving up all kinds of wonderful styles of home-brewed beer. These were included in the price of the ticket and there were plenty to choose from. Plus there were bottle shares throughout the day.
As well as all the beer, there was food and entertainment on offer (including Morris dancing).
What we drank
Homebrews
We tried to keep track of all the beers we tried, but last count was over twenty and we might have missed a few. So rather than try and list all of them, here are some of the standouts of the day:
Holy Smokes: 5.7% Smoked Lager from Oyster Boys Brewing Co.
Copenhagen Suborbital: 7.5% Baltic Porter from Homebrew Collab.
BAGS: 6.5% Barrel Aged Golden Sour from Norwich Amateur Brewers
Bottle Shares
Every hour, Jonny and Brad did a bottle share and we got to try some pretty epic beers.
First up was Orval – a trappist beer. This beer is so well thought of that it’s the only commercial beer produced by Orval Brewery. We’ve tried Orval in the past and, although we really wanted to love it, we just weren’t that excited by it. However, we were up for trying it again and were intrigued by Jonny’s suggestion of pairing it with pickled onion Monster Munch (he claims he discovered this perfect pairing by accident). While we still didn’t love Orval, it did work surprisingly well with the Monster Munch.
The next bottle share was actually a can share of Heady Topper – an American Double IPA from Alchemist. This beer is one of the original New England IPAs and is renowned as one of the world’s best double IPAs.
According to the Alchemist’s website, heady Topper is “meant to saturate your senses with the flavours and aromas of dank cannabis.”
Not sure about the cannabis element, but it was an excellent beer.
The third bottle share of the day was an Oude Kriek Intens Rood from 3 Fonteinen.
3 Fonteinen brews traditional lambics and geuzes which we love, but we’ve never tried their beers before so we were keen to give this one a go.
It was delicious, dry and funky – just what you’d want from this style of beer.
Early on in the day, Jonny announced what the bottle shares were going to be and this was probably the one we were most excited about. We’ve been buying Fuller’s Vintage Ale for the past few years – a couple to age and one to try over Christmas. We were also fortunate enough to attend a Vintage Ale tasting session with the ex-head brewer and current head brewer a few years ago.
We’d seen earlier in the week that the 2024 vintage was a available for pre-order (but not yet on general sale) so we were excited that we’d be some of the first people to try this year’s blend.
It did not disappoint and we’re looking forward to enjoying a whole bottle later this year and adding a couple of 2024s to our collection.
On Tap
We couldn’t try every beer available at the event – between the homebrews, collabs and taproom beers, there were just too many to do in one session.
So we decided to try one of the lower ABV CBC collab beers and one from Hackney Brewery itself.
We opted for Love & Lemons – a 4% pink lemonade sour made in collaboration with Pastore. This is one of the best sours we’ve ever had. It retained its tartness throughout and was a joy to drink.
For our Hackney brew, we opted for another sour – Millions of Peaches. This 4% peach and basil sour was the inspiration behind one of the collabs from last year’s Love & Beer and was recommended to us by Jonny earlier in the day.
Not as tart as the Love & Lemonade, but still an excellent sour.
To Take Home
We had originally planned on trying as many of the specially brewed festival beers as we could at the event. But once we saw how many homebrews there were on offer (and how good the quality was), we decided it made more sense to focus on the beers we might never get a chance to try again and buy the collabs to take home so that’s what we did.
We’re particularly looking forward to trying Trees of Endor – an 11% coffee, coconut and maple syrup imperial stout from Emperor’s Brewery.
And of course, we will be reporting back on our favourite from the selection once we’ve tried them all.
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