8 beers everyone needs to try from our favourite London beer festival, Liquid Dreams

Do you have things you end up going to mostly just because your friends want to? Beer festivals have often felt like one of those to me.

Thoroughly undeserving of a CAMRA member's card, flat pints that taste of pissy nettles are not really my bag. I have memories of finding a cider that basically tasted of fruity petrol a relief one year at London’s Great British Beer festival.

Liquid Dreams is nothing like one of those traditional ale festivals, though. It’s held in a pub in Notting Hill, and rather than dealing in tokens or payments per pint, a ticket gets you a wristband that lets you try as many beers as you want. And there are a lot of them.

Despite only taking place in a "normal" pub, Liquid Dreams is laid out like a theme park, or one of those open-world video games where you turn a corner and suddenly find yourself in an entirely different kind of exotic biome.

In the place of the usual taps, where you might typically expect to find your Madris and Stellas, is a generous line-up of sour beers. Around the other side of the bar is a lethal run of some of the most intimidatingly high-ABV drinks of the entire fest.

This may not sound like the friendliest face for a beer festival, but there’s a genius to it. By putting some of the more audience-dividing stuff up front in the main bar area, you’re encouraged not just to camp out there, but to explore.

Down in the bowels of the pub is where you’ll find the main IPA, DIPA, TIPA, NEIPA — and so on — selection, set up beside seating that makes this underground area feel a bit like a miniature Bavarian beer hall.

Up the stairs is a hole-in-the-wall through which you can take part in a triple tipple tasting menu of barley wine, an 11% chocolate stout and 15% rye wine. Before washing it down with a far more approachable glass of Toppling Goliath IPA from Pseudo Sue. It's the rare sub-5%ABV beer at Liquid Dreams.

On top of it is a —new for this year — Czech area home to some excellent and relatively easygoing pilsners as well as more unusual fare.

And out in a garden patio area is a miscellany that covers everything from a table beer and a 3.4% Ginger Beer to tangy Saisons and Lambics.

Liquid Dreams shows what a rainbow of flavour beer can actually be. And far from an event for craft-heads who consider boring on about their plans to create their own small batch hobby beer, there’s a totally unpretentious and welcoming feel to the whole thing.

Oh, and no big queues, no groups of drunken idiots, despite being awash in double-digit-strength beers.

A lot of the drinks at Liquid Dreams are the sort of higher-end bottle shop fare many — myself included — would be too apprehensive to order for fear of spending a small fortune on a can or bottle that is borderline undrinkable.

There was very little of that at Liquid Dreams, although I sure was glad we took the barman’s advice and only tried a little of the Pohjala Roggenwholf 13% Rye Wine. It sells for £13 a 330ml bottle online, but that might well take you a whole evening to finish.

Liquid Dreams only lasts two days, and three five-hour sessions, each year — and it's now over for 2026. Keep an eye out for 2027 plans, as the festival was, if anything, even better this year than last. But for now, here are some of the beers we recommend checking out that we tried at the festival:

1. Vault City You Won’t Believe It’s not Crumble

6%

Apparently, this is a sour, but you could well mistake it for a fruit smoothie. It takes a short eternity to pour thanks to its sheer thickness, but is well worth experiencing. It's is far more welcoming than most sours despite its solid 6% ABV. Sweet but not cloying, and lacking much of that distinct twang of a standard sour, this is just a delight. Tasting notes talk of cherries, strawberries, plum, pear, apple and cinnamon, with a pastry crust. But it’s the rounded-off berries that run things here.

2. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barley Wine 

9.6%

Dangerous, this one. Its high strength means this beer is classed as a barley wine, but it is ridiculously drinkable given its alcohol content. The main flavour hit is, like the classic Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, a super hoppy profile, while the malty body of the beer just trucks along under all that spotlight-stealing hoppiness, using Chinook, Centennial and Cascade hops.

3. Arpus x Outer Range Watermelon Smoothie

4.5%

This watermelon sour would be a great entry point for those somewhat unfamiliar with this beery subgenre. Up front, there’s that unmistakable hit of watermelon, with an undertone of lime to bring a complexity and citrus body to the flavour. But as it slopes off the palate, there’s a minty echo, like finishing off a meal with a refreshing mint as the bill arrives at a restaurant. Except this time it’s with each mouthful.

4. WarPigs Elite Human 

6.5%

Like your IPAs absolutely packed with flavour? Check out WarPigs’s Elite Human, which can be picked up for around a fiver a can. There’s multi-layered fruitiness here, loads of hoppy punch and a creaminess to the backend that made it a contender for the most memorable IPA of the festival, at least among those we tried. It’s a New England IPA-style beer.

5. Kees X Omnipollo Stroopwaffel

10%

OK, so a stroopfwaffel is a snack where two wafer-y biscuit layers are held together with a shallow pond of syrupy caramel. But we concluded Kees X Omnipollo Stroopwaffel, an Imperial Stout, was as much like a beer take on the espresso martini. Initially provocative to some palates, it’s a lovely sipper, apparently brewed with actual stroopwaffel and cinnamon. The tap had this one at 10%, but online listings suggest it’s actually a 14.8% beer. Yikes.

6. Pressure Drop Vienna Lager

5.2%

A lager with a bit more, this one. More flavour, more body and — well — a bit more alcohol content than some too. And yet there’s also nothing so specific to the flavour it’s likely to turn off the kind of person who mostly just enjoys a fairly straightforward lager. There’s a “subtle toasty note” mentioned in the tasting notes that might be what helps this Vienna Lager subtly stand out.

7. Baron Sea Legs

8.2%

Liquid Dreams is an absolute dream for lovers of IPAs of all types. Stacks of great ones. But we finished the evening off, with the last orders bell ringing, with Baron’s Sea Legs. It’s a west coast double IPA with a flavour profile that matches complexity with quaffability. Citrus, hops and a pleasant edge of tropical fruits. You’d never guess it was 8.2% — not until you felt the alcohol kicking in anyway.

8. Bohemia Regent pilsner

4.7%

This is the kind of beer you might not expect to see a) at a beer festival or b) on the list of recommendations from one. It’s a 4.7% pilsner, what would have been a normal stat profile for cans you might buy for home before the big brewers started chipping away at ABVs so aggressively. But it’s something special, a Czech pilsner you perhaps should hunt down a 6-pack of for the fridge. It has that pilsner clean sharpness and slight floral notes.

• Kino, London review: Spectacular sushi at South Kensington’s newest must-dine restaurant

Skip the search — follow Shortlist on Google News to get our best lists, news, features and reviews at the top of your feeds!