Birraire - Beer Blog

Article by  Mikel Rius  - Director of the Barcelona Beer Festival Translation from Spanish  by Joan Villar-i-Martí For the second consecutive year, I am glad to return to this blog to share a few thoughts on the publication of the Socioeconomic Report of Cerveceros de España for 2016. If you feel like it, you can review the notes published last year in this same blog , or even an article written in the distant 2012 and published in Cerveriana blog . It has been a good year for industrial brewers : a 4.3% increase in production - up to 3,650 million litres - is undoubtedly an excellent figure. The main reason reported is the growth of tourism , together with a really curious fact: 99.5% of foreign visitors over the age of 18, almost the entirety, consume beer during their holidays in Spain. Worthy of a Trivial Pursuit question. "The study falls short, it lacks data in many areas. This is a job that we have to do from within the craft sector"

Article by Mikel Rius - Director of the Barcelona Beer Festival Translation from Spanish by Joan Villar-i-Martí Three out of three. We have had the privilege of living the three editions of the Leuven Innovation Beer Festival , the last of which just a few days ago. Again, it has been a success in terms of attendees, participants and, above all, dissemination of beer culture. The festival is organised by local brewery Hof ten Dormaal, the Janssens family , which brings the concept of hospitality to an extraordinary level, making all the participating brewers feel literally at home. Every year, the Janssens select fifteen breweries under an Innovation criterion, gathering an impressive constellation of brewers in the old factory of Stella Artois - De Hoorn -.

Today's post is from my friend and colleague Mikel Rius, to whom I hand over the blog for a day to enable him to post a reflection on his visit to the mythical Zythos Bierfestival of Belgium. The translation from Spanish is mine. Salut i birra! On 23 and 24 April Belgians celebrated the twelfth edition of a beer event that many regard as unmissable: Zythos Bierfestival , in Leuven. The meeting gathered 88 breweries, who had more than 500 beers to choose from, making it a true paradise for enthusiasts. “The casualness in coexistence is reflected in the stands: all identical, for very different sized breweries”