Preview: Leeds International Beer Festival

If you want to grab a last piece of the city’s summer, before the students come back and the leaves begin to turn, now is the time to do it.

For me, Leeds International Beer Festival has become the summer’s last hurrah, a wonderful cosmopolitan celebration of food and drink from right across the world, staged beneath the barrel vaulted ceiling of Cuthbert Brodrick’s spectacular civic space. A ‘Goodbye Sunshine’ party for all the people.

In panels high above the room are a series of Latin mottoes: inspirational and moral messages set down by the city’s Victorian fathers to guide the life and business of those below. One translates as “Industry Overcomes All Things”, a message which will resonate with the brewers trading briskly on the auditorium floor. In the teeth of global financial meltdown, theirs is an industry which has thrived, diversified and expanded. The thirsty and knowledgeable crowd which will be shoehorned into here for four hectic days provides the clearest evidence that world brewing is in great shape.

Now in its fifth year, Leeds International Beer Festival is already an established feature of the local calendar. While the CAMRA beer festival, held every spring, may have some 20 years head start, its September rival scores far more highly in several boxes, not least the venue. Say what you like about Pudsey Civic Hall, it’s not a patch on the marbled, colonnaded, organ piped splendour of Leeds Town Hall – which boasts the architecture, history and central location to make this event really stand out.

It has something of a rock festival feel, with live music on the main stage and a cosmopolitan spread of food stalls and market tents sprawled across the broad apron beneath Brodrick’s brooding lions. Over the four days of the festival, something like 9,000 punters will make their way up these steps and into the cavernous hall, lined with bars dedicated to brewers from around the UK and overseas. Breweries which have been in thevanguard of the craft revolution, such as Magic Rock from Huddersfield, Beavertown from London, Derbyshire’s Thornbridge and Manchester’s Cloudwater are among the myriad great brands in this most spectacular of shop windows.

The festival is also a celebration of beer’s cross-cultural nature, with products from right across the globe. The obvious countries are well represented: Odell and Founders from the US, Jopen from Holland, Veltins from Germany, But Lervig from Norway, Mikkeller from Denmark, Three Boys from New Zealand – and a host of wonderful Italian craft breweries – demonstrate how the simple combination of water, yeast, hops and malt has such universal appeal.