Campaigning
Whilst the main focus of the Keighley and Craven Branch of CAMRA is to promote and support real ale, we campaign on other related issues. These include:
Promoting locally brewed beers
In October 2008 we launched our own version of the national LocALE campaign. This is slowly gathering momentum as more and more pubs agree to take part. More details...
Promoting local real ale pubs
Cask real ale is a unique product, which by its very nature, needs to be drunk in pubs. Consequently, we feel it is very important to promote all the pubs in our area which sell cask beer. We do this in a number of ways. We award a quarterly 'Pub of the Season', based on our members votes, to a pub we think worthy of the accolade. Starting in 2008, we award a 'Pub of the Year'. This is based on members' surveys of a shortlist of 25 or so of our best pubs, with a second round of judging to decide the overall winner. We publish a guide to all the real ale pubs in Craven district called 'Dales Ale - Craven District'. We publish occasional free leaflet guides to smaller areas and hope to have some of these available for the West Yorkshire part of our area in the very near future. And of course, we try to promote our pubs via this web-site and our quarterly newsletter 'Alesman'.
Supporting community pubs
As a branch we support those pubs which have a true community focus. These may not necessarily be havens for real ale, although some of them obviously are. Cask Ale Week (usually the first week in April) is a nationally organised week, where we encourage licensees to organise their own events for which we can provide publicity material and help promote the events via this web-site and other channels. If you are licensee and wish to take part in Cask Ale Week or indeed would like our support in promoting a pub-based event at any time of year, contact us and we will try to help. Have a look to see what we did in Community Pubs Week 2008 and Community Pubs Week 2007
Beer festivals
We run two beer festivals per year, one in Skipton and one in Keighley. The Keighley event, at the end of September, is well-established and in 2009 we celebrated our 21st anniversary. The Skipton event, which takes place in April, is a lot younger, with the 2010 festival being only our fourth.
Promoting real cider and perry
Whilst Yorkshire has never had a strong culture of cider drinking, CAMRA nationally promotes cider and perry brewed in the traditional manner from real ingredients. A small amount of traditional cider is available locally and we always have a range of traditional cider and perry available at our beer festivals. Click here for a list of local cider outlets.
Promoting 'endangered' traditional beer styles
Over the centuries, beer drinkers in the United Kingdom have enjoyed a wide variety of different beer styles. At some times certain beer styles e.g. stouts and porters and later mild dominated our drinking culture and these have since diminished in popularity to be replaced by other styles, more recently bitters and then golden ales. These changes in taste are often led by fashion, and more recently mass advertising, rather than the quality of the beers and many classic products in styles which are less trendy today are still available. Indeed, over recent years many of the new breed of smaller brewers have been quite innovative in recreating some lost styles and have, in particular, increased the availability of traditional stouts and porters. In Keighley and Craven, mild was, as recently as 25 years ago, available in a substantial proportion of the pubs in the branch area but. Milds are great beers to drink, and there are a good number of cask mild outlets in the area still selling it today. Find out about mild and where you can drink it in Keighley and Craven and go out and try some today! More details
