Mine's a Pint - Autumn 2019

Festival Reflections
It felt like there was a bit of a sea change when
it came to the annual Reading Beer Festival this
year, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why
this was.
I volunteered through the Thursday trade and
evening session, followed by a jolly good knees
up with my friends on the Friday. I realised
that the sea change was a plethora of little
developments that had all come together at
once, and for the better. All of them were a step
in the right direction.
In 2018, the team that ran the Reading Beer
Festival Games really started to drive social
media. They were all over Instagram and
building engagement in a way I haven’t seen
CAMRA in Reading and Mid-Berks do before.
They utilised Instagram Stories, which love or
loathe, made it pretty clear what was happening
on site. They can be found on Instagram under
‘rbfgames’.
Crucially, they didn’t stop after the beer festival
of 2018. They continued to post content and
photos all year which acted as a small reminder
that the beer festival was coming. And, they are
still drip-feeding photos onto their Instagram
feed right now, using all the right hashtags to
be found by the local communities of the area
who like beer and using Instagram. In the long
term, CAMRA need to embrace this approach
to engagement of a younger audience.
As we got nearer to show time in May, the
output from ‘rbfgames’ crescendoed. The
presence on social
media from
Reading and Mid
Berks proper,
also stepped
up, particularly
on Facebook.
There is a big
opportunity with
Twitter. Culturevulture
Reading
folk are big on
the twitter side
of things. The
account is there but it isn’t used enough to
share what’s happening pub and beer wise in
the area in my opinion, which is an opportunity
for the year ahead.
Then there was card payment. Hurrah! One
of the bar managers told me that the festival
had acquired CAMRA’s entire collection of
Mine’s A Pint
18