Cy-Beer Fest – A Rotary Club of Roundhay First!

For the last nine years the Rotary Club of Roundhay has organised a spectacularly successful Charity Beer Festival. By providing visitors over two days with a diverse range of craft beers, cider, and more recently, gin with all the trimmings, accompanied by exciting live performances from local musicians, we have raised over £50,000 for charity.

With what we had on offer this year, we had expected to break all records, until on 23 March 2020 the government instituted the lockdown, and all our plans were put on hold. We’d hoped to postpone the Festival to September, but as lock down continued it became clear that would not be possible. Our Beer Barrel sponsors generously allowed us to roll over their donations to what we hope will be next year’s Festival at North Leeds Cricket Club. In the meantime, our friend and perennial Beer Festival supporter Sam, of the British Guild of Beer Writers, suggested we hold a ‘virtual’ beer festival to keep the flame alive with the public. With some trepidation, we agreed to give it a go, and the North Leeds Charity Beer Festival ‘Cy-Beer Fest’ was fixed for 16 October 2020.

 We didn’t have much time. We launched a social media advertising campaign on Facebook and Twitter, inviting people to pre-order Festival Boxes of beer, which would include eight beers from progressive Yorkshire brewers, tasting notes, a beer glass and Festival guide. The price of £32.00 was fixed at a level which would support our ongoing charity work. The boxes would be home delivered by Rotarians, or if necessary, by courier.

Past President Kathy Short catalogued the work we did: 83 boxes had to be packed with 672 bottles and cans of beer, 83 festival beer glasses, and 83 Cy-Beer Fest programmes, using 180 metres of parcel tape, 1008 sheets of bubble wrap, and 336 cardboard dividers.

The object of the Cy-Beer Festival was to raise the profile of our Rotary Club and our annual charity beer festival. We think we succeeded. Facebook statistics revealed that we reached 16,075 people, with a further 1,888 people after the event. There were 4,036 video views of 3 seconds or more recorded.

The feedback we have received has been excellent and a good number of drinkers have admitted to drinking all eight brews in the allotted two hours.

Although it had not been our main aim in staging the event, we managed to raise £1,346.00 for our charity account.  

We have been provided with a Video link to the whole evening’s programme.  The recording, complete with amazing live music, can be found here 

More details are on our website https://roundhayrotaryclub.co.uk/