Getting involved in CAMRA...

If you are a member, there are lots of ways you can get involved with your local branch of CAMRA. In Keighley and Craven we would love you to join in our many and varied activities and help us promote and maintain the real ale and pubs in the area. Read on for more details. (If you are a non-member, that does not exclude you! You should read on too...)
If you are interested, contact us via the contact page and tell us how you‘d like to get involved or simply come along to one of our events.

15 ways you can help

Volunteer to work at our local beer festival. For a snapshot of the sort of things we need to do to set the beer festivals up, check out our Beer Festival set-up comic strip. And we need even more volunteer staff once it is open!

Get involved in running the branch. We need a keen committee to ensure all the activities we take on as a branch are successful. While it may seem as if the committee positions are all spoken for, we would love to have some new blood and new ideas. If that is not your cup of tea and you feel you would not want to give that level of commitment, all our committee members would love some assistance to help them complete their roles. Any help however small will be gratefully received

Write articles for our newsletter and/or web-site. Informative, humerous, short, long or just plain wacky! No need to worry about the format, we can sort that out.

Help distribute and replenish our newsletter, Alesman, in the pubs you regularly visit.

Adopt a pub or a set of pubs. Your role then would be to feed news on those pubs to the Branch Pubs Officer, so that CAMRA‘s flagship pub web-site gets updated as soon as changes happen.

Notify our Pubs Officer if you see that the entry for one of our pubs on WhatPub is out-of-date. You can do this via the Submit Feedback option within WhatPub itself. It then comes to us automatically.

Become a beer scorer. Visit the National Beer Scoring System page on the CAMRA national web-site for more information. Scores can be entered via the CAMRA national on-line pub database, WhatPub, or, for local pubs, scores can be entered via this web-site - read more.

Add to our photo library of the pubs and clubs in the area. We are particularly short of good shots of the inside of pubs. Good-quality photographs may be used on WhatPub, on the branch web-site, social media, or in Alesman. If you supply us with photographs, we will assume you are granting CAMRA the right to use them.

Feed us information on the clubs in our area. Our pub and club database is rather short on information on our clubs.

Take action to support CAMRA national campaigns such as by writing to your local MP about the issues involved.

Get involved in our Pub of the Year surveys. Any branch member can submit a survey for pubs on our Pub of the Year short-list. We select our Pub of the Year in a two round process. Round one runs from mid-October to the end of December. Round two (the final six pubs) runs from our January branch meeting until the end of February. Details of the short list can be found in the Members Area of this web-site or by contacting the branch chair. The photo shows Branch Pubs Officer, Richard Candeland presenting the Clarke family at the Talbot Arms, Settle with our Pub of the Season, Summer 2018.

Become a CAMRA Brewery Liaison Officer. We have 10 breweries in the branch area, each of which has a Brewery Liaison Officer, whose job is to provide two-way communication between the brewery and CAMRA at both a local and national level.

Join our tasting panel. Keighley and Craven tasting panel is one of CAMRA‘s longest-running tasting panels, having been active since 1993! Members of the tasting panel search out and sample the beers from our local breweries, completing tasting cards, which are then used to compile the beer descriptions in the CAMRA Good Beer Guide and to nominate beers for judging in CAMRA‘s Champion Beer of Britain competition. Training can be arranged for new tasting panel members.

Attend the National Members’ Weekend. This is usually held in April each year, and through motions, debates and workshops formulates CAMRA policies, campaigns and strategy. This may sound a bit dry, but the Members’ Weekend is great fun and an opportunity to meet other CAMRA members from around the country to exchange ideas, experiences and laughs! Several Keighley and Craven members regularly attend and our Friday trips prior to the Members’ Weekend are legendary. Why not join us at the next Members’ Weekend.

..and if none of that appeals

Please come along to our socials - we are a friendly crowd and always keen to see new faces. If we can’t tempt you to volunteer to help out at our festivals, we will be pleased to see you as a customer. Last, but not least, carry on going to the pub and drinking real ale and cider. That is, after all, why we are here!