CAMINHA ARTBEER FESTIVAL
A weekend in Portugal pouring at the ‘Best Non Music Festival’ as voted for at the Iberian Festival awards 2023.
Thank you to Octavio and Miguel, pioneers of craft beer in Portugal, for the invite over to Caminha Artbeer Festival this year. It was an honour to be pouring alongside some fantastic Portuguese and international breweries!
Starting before most Portuguese breweries were even founded, the festival was the first of its kind in Portugal and is still the most prestigious. Held in a small town in the North, along the border with Spain, the site itself is set in the town square with breweries lining all sides.
Running from 1pm until 4am, the festival started very slow with a few enthusiasts and expats during the early hours but from around 9pm at night the square came alive with locals and you almost couldn’t move for the amount of people there to enjoy the evening. The atmosphere was amazing and the firework display on the Saturday evening lit up the square like it was New Years Eve!
Most of the well known Portuguese breweries where there with a smattering of breweries from other countries. As a festival with a cult following it was amazing to hear how far some breweries had travelled to this small unassuming town and we were honoured to be the only UK brewery attending.
During the weekend we met some great new friends including Hoppy people from Switzerland who had a great new England IPA, Crak from Italy who were serving a really good WC IPA, and Ophiussa, a great Portuguese IPA brewery!
Big shout to all the friends that I reconnected with, it was great to catch up and have some beers together, and also a big thank you to Catraio who own the best bottle shop in Portugal, and to Hoptimal, who both came by the stand and have since stocked our beers!
And of course a massive thanks to Richard and Carla for volunteering and manning the stand for us so we could take some breaks/drink heavily during the long sessions.
If anyone has the pleasure of visiting Caminha we highly recommend coming for Artbeer Festival. And if you’re in need of a great restaurant recommendation whilst you’re there, we loved “Armandio Restaurante”, the patron loves to host the visiting brewers and is notorious for feeding you bottle after bottle of local wines!
Thank you to Octavio and Miguel from Artbeerfest for inviting us. We hope to be back soon.
Seb X
