The UK & Ireland's largest beer festival directory
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About Beer Fest Buddy
One year at the Great British Beer Festival, Matt Oakley found a beer he loved, drank it by the pint all afternoon, and never learnt its name. Beer Fest Buddy is what eventually came of it. He runs it with co-founder Claire Runniff, who isn’t even a beer drinker, and it lists over a thousand UK festivals, free to browse and free to list.
Matt Oakley and Claire Runniff
The two people behind it, since 2024
£0
spent on advertising. Not a typo.
The story
Four short chapters, from an evening at Olympia to a directory of over a thousand festivals. The details are what make it true.
Chapter 1
GBBF, at Olympia, was an annual trip for Matt and an old school friend who worked in hospitality. Every year it was the same: a glass, a programme listing what felt like thousands of beers, and no good way to choose. They tried picking bars at random. One year they tried an A to Z of thirds. Afterwards Matt would read the programme at home and find the beers he wished he’d tried, beers he might never see again.
Back then Matt was a software engineer running his own agency, Creative Intent, from a rent-free office at the back of a family pharmacy in Southwold, on the same street as Adnams. He drank in Adnams’ pubs, toured the brewery, and ended up building an iPad app for its sales team: his first app, in the early days of smartphones.
One year, a few pints in, he said what everyone was thinking. The organisers should publish the beer list in advance, so you could make a shortlist and work through it instead of playing whack-a-mole with the programme. And it should be an app on your phone. His friends added the next bit over the following three pints.
Everyone scribbles ratings in their programme, and the programme ends up in the bin.
An app could keep those ratings, and even share them with the brewery.
Chapter 2
He didn’t, not for years. Every GBBF after that, someone would ask, and the answer was always no. It became a running joke. He started it more times than he likes to admit, and watched other people launch ideas he’d started and never finished.
2016
Registers beerfestivalbuddy.co.uk a few weeks before GBBF, puts up a holding page and gathers a list of interested drinkers. Still no app.
2022
Moves from Suffolk to York and keeps missing festivals advertised on two pub posters and a Facebook event.
2024
Starts a directory of beer festivals. It turns out to be the first half of the app he sketched at GBBF.
Agency work meant short projects, handed over and forgotten. He hadn’t yet learnt to build a product; that came later, at a startup, along with tools that made apps far easier to build. In between, as chairman of a grassroots sports club, he and Claire set out to take its membership fees, fines and consent forms off paper. Sports Payment Solutions never went ahead. He still regrets it, though with a young family it wasn’t the right time, and without letting it go there would be no Beer Fest Buddy.
The York problem turns out to be terribly common. Friends would ask whether he’d been to a festival a few weeks earlier, and he’d never heard of it.
Chapter 3
A directory has a chicken and egg problem. Organisers won’t list on a site nobody visits, and nobody visits a site with no festivals. So Beer Fest Buddy set out to earn the visitors first: no charges, no paywalls, and every listing sourced and loaded by the founders themselves. That’s why Matt asked Claire Runniff to join him as co-founder. She took on the data; he built the platform.
Co-founder. Builds everything.
“I’m a software engineer, and I build every part of Beer Fest Buddy, in the evenings and at weekends, around a day job and a young family.
I’ve chaired a grassroots sports club, chasing membership fees, fines and consent forms on paper every year, so I know what volunteers are up against.”
Co-founder. Operations and the data.
“I source, check and load the festival data, and every new feature is sent to me to try to break. If I can’t break it, it’s likely indestructible.
Matt never makes me feel like I don’t belong in a tech team.”
Claire first heard the idea in 2016, when she and Matt worked together at Infabode. Her reply was something like “that sounds amazing”, and she always thought it could grow well beyond what he’d imagined. During the pandemic they built Secure Check-In together, replacing the pen-and-paper sign-in sheets (and the shared pen) that venues used for track and trace. It was a success, and they were both proud of it. When Matt asked her to join Beer Fest Buddy she was working 4am to 10pm as a medicolegal audio typist, and saying yes was, in her words, a no-brainer.
Claire has struggled with imposter syndrome, and she is open about it because there aren’t many women in tech or in the beer industry. If knowing that helps someone else, she’s glad.
She has been going to beer festivals for years, for the music, the food, the company and the friendly, community feel. These days she goes as much for her son, Max. Max is autistic and loves live music. His autism is part of who he is without defining him, and he enjoys things in his own way. A family-friendly beer festival gives him live music and other children to play with, and gives Claire a glass of wine and a chance to support local businesses. The last one they went to was at Grain Brewery.
You don’t have to be a beer drinker to get joy out of the beer festivals.
Chapter 4
Claire asks “what’s that?” and “how does this work?”, on the basis that if she can’t follow it, most people won’t either. They talk a point through for hours, sometimes weeks, until they find the middle ground.
That last one took the longest, and it shaped Beer Fest Buddy as it is today. It launched without a penny spent on advertising.
If you run a festival
Since 2024 Matt has made a point of sitting down with organisers and brewers to understand what they actually face. The picture is remarkably consistent, and attendance is falling almost everywhere.
If I am struggling to find this information and I basically do it as a job, how hard must it be for other people?
Claire, who has phoned a venue just to check that a festival on a pub poster was really happening.
What has stayed with her most is the welcome. Organisers and brewers have been warm, especially once they hear Beer Fest Buddy is asking what they need rather than telling them. Stuart from Bungay Beer Festival sat down with her over a coffee to talk through what his festivals would need.
Many festivals are run by volunteer committees, often raising money for charity. They’re the local mechanic, the butcher, the librarian, and the person in charge can change every year.
Festivals used to reach their audience on Twitter and Facebook, sometimes paying to promote. The algorithms have since buried them.
One festival can be announced across Facebook, Instagram, CAMRA’s listings, a website and a village hall bulletin, often with the bare minimum of detail. Start times are the most commonly missing of all.
Small breweries often sell to festivals at a loss to reach new drinkers. When someone writes five stars next to their beer in a programme, that programme goes home and is never opened again.
The basic listings and all the data, that is free and will always remain free. No one should ever have to pay to use Beer Fest Buddy.Claire Runniff, co-founder
Promoted listings are an optional extra for festivals that want more reach, and they help pay for running the site. Nobody will be trapped by prices that suddenly appear.
All of this is live now.
One place for a thousand festivals
Over a thousand UK beer festivals, free to browse and free to list.
Organisers manage their own listing
Add your line-up of breweries and beers, and see how many people view the page and click through to buy tickets.
A page for every brewery
Showing the festivals they’re pouring at.
Optional promoted listings
For festivals that want more reach. They help pay for the site. Listing is, and always will be, free.
The aim is still the app Matt described at GBBF, and a platform that helps the whole festival day work. None of it exists yet.
Drinkerswould hear about festivals they’ll like, shortlist beers before they go, and rate them on the day. A rating could become a way to keep in touch with a brewery they enjoyed.
Organiserswould sell tickets and see who’s coming, publish one line-up everywhere, and run their bars without paper tokens.
Brewerieswould reach the drinkers who loved their beer, long after the festival is over.
Beer Fest Buddy doesn’t pay its founders a salary yet. Matt builds it in the evenings and at weekends, around a day job and two young children. It exists because the people who run festivals deserve better tools,
and because somewhere out there is a blueberry beer Matt would very much like to drink again.
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