LIQUID GOLD arrives to GEELONG RACECOURSE

For the seventh year running, the Great Australian Beer Festival (GABF) returns to Geelong this weekend (Saturday, February 16) with both craft beer lovers and non-beer drinkers rejoicing.

“This festival is for absolutely everyone, it’s not an exclusive club and it’s not just for a certain type of person,” GABF founder Kieran Blood said.

“It’s really celebrating a concept, which is the craft concept – quality, passion, ability and skill; there’s some really great beers and ciders out there.”

Geelong’s GABF is a social day of street food, live music, DJs, and over 200 different beers from more than 40 national breweries.

“It’s also the only festival in the world that has all Geelong and regional brewers attending the one single event – spend a part of your day getting around to these local beauties and the other tasting beers from across the nation,” fellow co-founder Mike Ward said.

Mr Ward said this year after listening to the feedback from patrons of previous events, they’ve added larger tasting cups and beers by the can.

“We also do extensive surveys after and the overwhelming feedback we got was the tasting cups were too small.

People had to keep getting back up, so this years we’ve made them bigger to ensure people can relax and socialise on the lawn for longer,” he said.

Other changes include the introduction of cans for breweries that have them, once again addressing customer’s desire to be able to sit, drink and talk for longer periods.

“We will also have live brewing, Andy’s piano bar, the whacky races again and various games we’ve added to the program,” Michael said.

“We’re leading the pack and continue to evolve and be more innovative every year. We’re the only beer festival that has a keg rolling competition and, we’ll be serving up beer cocktails with Gorge Camorra – once again the first beer festival offering that.”

For tickets and more information go to gabfgeelong.com.au.