Dutch Craft Beer Conference 2024

Last week, the 2024 edition of the Dutch Craft Beer Conference took place in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Contrary to this collection of random blurbs from the day, the conference was well organized and structured: a great example of how such educational events in which networking is a crucial component can be executed!

Let’s start with the boundary conditions: great coffee and tea options, a clear program overview, maps of the different rooms and the free-format market, clear audio announcements before the start of plenary and parallel sessions, good and plenty of food throughout the day and plenty of support personnel for catering, registration and general assistance during the day. These are kind of necessities and when you don’t notice their presence too much, they probably did their jobs very well!

Back to basic. That was the theme of the day (without the plural s at the end, indeed; thanks for noticing and rubbing it in, Rick Kempen!). With 550 participants on this full day professional networking event, you can say that the Dutch craft beer scene is alive and kicking. Going back to your basics can mean a lot of different things, and in many aspects of the varied program it came back, in some form or other. Talks and workshops were about the evolution of beer culture in the Netherlands, to sustainable packaging, to new hops and yeast, to tracking data on markets and fermentation.

Obviously, there were some awards as well. Brewer of the Year is Etienne Vermeulen (De Bebaarde Brouwer, Kaapse Brouwers and StiBON teacher). Brewery of the Year is De Kromme Haring from Utrecht and Beer Personality of the Year was won by Bert Kuperus, aka the Dutch Beer Ambassador. Congrats to all, very well deserved! Then again, if any of the other nominees would have been awarded, it would have been equally well deserved, so a heartfelt congrats to the other nominees, too!

So what was I doing there? As I am both a beer sommelier (trained to taste beer) and a data scientist (read: data and statistics nerd), I am on the lookout for opportunities where these skills can be combined. Sensory panels help breweries in their quality management (QM), but this is typically only done by large breweries. Throughout the day I have been trying to find out if a program in which trained tasters and statistics help smaller breweries with some sort of sensory panel, is something that would be worth pursuing. In the breaks I have been looking up other companies (read: sponsors) that are into QM, mostly through chemical measurements. I also attended some, fairly sales oriented, talks about such technologies.

The conference beer, brewed for the occasion by Brouwerij Dockum, tastes great while browsing the conference gallery!

During the drinks I met up with some fellow sommeliers to share experiences, which was also very worthwhile. All in all: a great day, and I’m pretty sure I’ll attend again next year! For now, we’re glad we still have the pictures…