Dutch Beer Tasting Festival 2015 — Let's do it again next year

Dutch Beer Tasting Festival: adventure for the taste buds

By Travel Geek 2 February 2018 craft beer

A church filled with at least 35 breweries, each bringing several of their best or most interesting brews, is something we wouldn't want to miss. Since we heard about this Dutch Beer Tasting Festival we were counting the days till it was time to head over to The Hague (Holland). See the craft beers we tasted (in 2015) and be inspired for the upcoming edition of this awesome Dutch craft beer festival.

The Dutch Beer Tasting Festival will take on 24, 25 and 26 May 2018 at the 'Grote Kerk' (Big Church) in The Hague. If you are coming from other parts of The Netherlands, the venue is easy to reach from The Hague Central station by trams 2, 3, or 6. Just go by train to The Hague. It's easier and the responsible thing to do when going to a beer tasting festival. Or if you want to stay in this amazing city, choose from the many affordable hotels the city has to offer.

Purchase your 2018 festival tickets from the official event site (in English yet the ticket buying part is still in Dutch so use Google Translate).

Memories of the 2015 festival

We attended the 2015 edition of this Dutch craft beer festival. Back then, we opted for the afternoon session on Saturday (1 pm till 5 pm), as we like drinking in the afternoon... It's always beer o'clock somewhere in the world. :)

As soon as we entered (no queue, hallelujah) the first thing we noticed that IPA is hot in Holland. It's not just the microbreweries that are going for the IPA variety, also the major breweries (like Brand and Grolsch) have launched an IPA onto the Dutch market. But as we already tasted these “commercial” IPAs beforehand, we didn't touch them during the Dutch Beer Tasting Festival.

The Beer Festival for us was all about tasting the stuff that lesser known brands and the microbreweries put out. Our taste buds had a great time. We tasted some sensational beers, but also some beers that we wouldn't order again.

Our favourite beers at the festival

As we're mad about IPA, most of the time we tasted IPA or other high hop beers. Our favourites of the day were the following brews.

Hiphopper (brewery: Bax Bier)
RSI – Rye Smoked IPA (brewery: Kwartje - which closed its doors in 2022)
Gouverneur Speciale 140 (brewery: Lindeboom)
Uber IPA (brewery: Nordmann Beers)
Tenhop White (brewery: Maximus)

And for those of you who are expecting to see tasting notes like “a fruity flavour, with a hint of peach”... Forget it! Tasting beer is a personal experience. We love to blog about events like this and inspire you guys to travel and taste beers worldwide.

Great Dutch Beer Tasting Festival

Would we recommend the Dutch Beer Tasting Festival? Hell yeah. If you're into Dutch craft beer, then this is the perfect event for you. We haven't even talked about the food... Delicious Dutch cheese (from regular to flavours like lavender), organic beef burgers, and chickpea burgers. A festival packed with yummy food and delicious beers, what's not to like. We loved it and would definitely go back to this festival. Life's too short to drink bad beer.