BrauBeviale 2016
BrauBeviale is the largest trade show for drinks production in Europe. This year almost 38,000 trade visitors and over 1,110 exhibitors attended the event.
Of the trade visitors over 16,000 travelled from outside Germany. The show’s trending theme this year was “Creative Beverage Culture.” This trend meant that you could find everything connected with the drinks process chain, from high-quality raw materials and innovative technologies, to efficient logistics and fresh marketing ideas across the eight halls of the exhibition.
The Simpsons Malt Stand
As a maltster, I wanted to create a platform which emphasised that Simpsons Malt is all about taste and flavour and what better way than to give visitors the chance to chew through our malts? So, to put our malts at the heart of the show, we designed and built an interactive stand encompassing a malt counter that encouraged visitors to come in and say hello and ‘chew the malt’ with us.
As anyone who’s met us before will know, we regularly chew our malts to appreciate their sensory flavours: the taste, the flavour, the sweetness, the ‘roastiness,’ the crunch, the cut, the consistency and the quality.
And our interactive approach seemed to work.
Richard and Peter Simpson on Simpsons Malt stand at Brau
Time to chew the malt
The buzz among all the exhibitors just before people flooded into the hall on day one was amazing. I took the opportunity to give a quick motivational talk, reminding everyone that this was no time to be hiding in the toilets and there would be no siestas in the afternoon! It turns out that my timing was serendipitous – as the closing statement from the organiser shows – we were about to meet a record number of visitors.
From the moment the first people arrived at the stand, we were off. The activity and the atmosphere in the booth were fantastic. All our guests enjoyed tasting and chewing our malts, and we were thrilled that the Crystal T50, Premium English Cara and DRC, in particular, stole the show.
Meet the Distributors
A particular highlight of the BrauBeviale event for us was that it allowed so many people to meet each other. My brother Richard and I managed to spend some quality time with our distributors from all over the world and catch up with our friends from Brewers Supply Group (BSG) across The Pond in North America and Bintani who joined us all the way from Australia.
It was a great platform for our distributors to also meet and bring their local customers onto our stand to meet us, to taste and chew our malts.
Logan Plant of Beavertown and our Distributor Ninkasi on the Simpsons Malt Stand
Meet the Brewers
During the 3-day event, we were honoured to showcase some of our customers’ beers from the UK. These included Beavertown’s magnificent Lupuloid, their first straight up IPA, through to the classic pale ale that is Timothy Taylor’s Landlord.
We are so grateful to Beavertown, Fuller’s, Magic Rock, Timothy Taylor, Adnams, 40ft, St Austell, Tempest and BrewDog for allowing us to showcase their fantastic beers, brewed using our malt. It made the event very special and certainly made the Simpsons Malt booth a popular port of call.
Richard and I were on hand to introduce and chew through all our malts, and the feedback was amazing. In fact, the biggest and most fantastic part of BrauBeviale was the chance to create a platform to meet all our customers, new and old. That, combined with being able to showcase beer with our malt in – and host brewer customers tasting their own beer made with Simpsons Malt. That was just brilliant. Thank you, everyone, for making it possible.
From 9 am on day one until the doors closed at 6:30 pm on day three, we had a brilliant time, opening up some of our whiskies on day two to give everyone a welcome boost.
Our customers around the world really do produce some amazing beer and to be honest I would have liked all our customers’ beers to be there – but that would have meant we needed a much bigger exhibition stand.
We’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who came to see us on the stand, to everyone who chewed the malt with us and who stayed to enjoy a beer too.
All in all, BrauBeviale was a great event. We have the best customers in the world, and it is an absolute honour to be supplying you all and big thanks to all our distributors – you guys are the best.
And as always, it’s all about better beer!
Roll on Drinktec 2017**.
See you all there.
Peter Simpson
(** DrinkTec 2017 is September 11 – 15, 2017)