Rising Stars: Craft Beer Rising Hits Glasgow

For a while, the food festival has been something of a poor relation to its cultural siblings. Film festivals bring a huge range of movies from around the world to your local cinema, building on what goes on throughout the year. Music festivals take over-sized bills of bands and DJs from far and wide and leave them in some field miles from anything, as if to say ‘we’ve booked so many bands, we have to leave civilisation behind.’ But a lot of food festivals take the bad parts of both, bringing a load of stuff you could probably get hold of any other day of the year to a place you would never really consider going.

Craft Beer Rising, on the other hand, seems to have the formula right. The weekend-long riot of food, music and, well, craft beer has been an annual fixture in London since 2012, and it makes its Scottish debut in Glasgow next month.

Drygate, the new craft brewery-meets-bar-meets-restaurant just outside the city centre, plays host to CBR, and the number of hyphens in this sentence should tell you just why that’s such good news. Drygate meets the film festival criterion of being a genuine home for the scene it serves, with the festival adding a whole load more variety and excitement to proceedings. That place that does nice beer? It has even more beer when this thing’s on! Yay!

With that out of the way, the CBR crew look set to match the music festival ‘book all the acts’ mantra, with around 200 brews set for the taps across the weekend. Expect beers from the best craft breweries in Edinburgh, Glasgow and beyond, as well as the top producers from across the UK and the wider world, as well as some special editions from the hosts. As Drygate’s own Alessandra Confessore puts it, it’s a chance to “create experimental beers and share ideas with some of the world’s most forward thinking breweries,” and a chance for you lot to drink those beers. Everyone wins!

So there’s plenty of good beer, and an ace venue to boot, but any great festival needs a few elements you won’t see elsewhere. Luckily Craft Beer Rising looks to have those covered too, again taking inspiration from the cultural world’s long tradition of holding a big festival and filling it with slightly unexpected stuff.

Of course, there are the usual things like Q&As with brewers, but there’s also some planned live brewing to gaze at in wonder and yeast-based excitement. There’s music, but rather than a limp Spotify playlist or some fellas with fiddles, it’s a line-up of hand-picked DJs and bands playing music that you might – gasp – actually want to listen to.

In short, it’s a beer festival with all the punch and excitement of an ‘actual’ festival. While there may be times this month when the thought of another ‘one-off’ event or pop-up venue makes you want to weep, just persevere – next month is the beer lovers’ time to shine.