Festival beer: watered-down swill or the real deal?

Pinkpop is coming up, LowLands is on the agenda, and maybe you’re also going to Down The Rabbit Hole or another festival? Strikingly, the beers you knock back at festivals don’t seem to have any effect at all. There’s less alcohol in them, you hear people say, because they’re supposedly event beer or festival beer. Whut, is that true?

Fifteen years ago, it was tried once: serving beer with a lower alcohol percentage at an event. But that experiment was not a success, says Martine Bosch of MOJO Concerts. ‘The reactions were, to put it mildly, not positive.’ Never again, because a football stadium or concert hall full of grumbling visitors is not the intention.

Adding water?

Is water also mixed into the beer, for example at the tap? No, that would be unhygienic, and technically it would not be feasible. You would surely notice if your glass were first filled halfway with lager and then topped up with water from another tap, wouldn’t you? It would probably taste very different—like… beer with water, for example. To be sure, a few years ago Eindhovens Dagblad investigated the quality of beer at festivals, and the conclusion was: nothing wrong with it.

From the tap

Festivals supposedly serve ‘cellar beer’. That is the same beer as the one that flows from the tap at the pub . It is delivered in large refrigerated trucks, because at a festival like Parkpop, more than 70,000 litres of beer are consumed. It is served in those plastic cups—the special PLA cups used in recent years—which look like beer glasses but are much more durable and therefore kinder to the environment.

Eating something helps

So where did that myth come from—that at large events and festivals you are served a special, lighter beer? Probably because people do not quickly feel the effects of the beers they let slide down while singing and dancing. ‘At the pub, you knock back quite a lot of alcohol in a short time and therefore get drunk faster,’ says Martine from MOJO. ‘At festivals, you walk around, have a cola from time to time, and regularly eat something.’

Also read:

• When a trip to the supermarket is just as much of a party as a festival or weekend away
• Heineken launches a new, refreshing beer: Heineken Silver
• Bacon backstage: what do artists eat on the road?

Source: Nu.nl