Brewdog v. Wychwood

Tandleman's post "Brew Dog to be Top Dog by 2015" has once again got me thinking about branding in the craft beer sector.  We see from the linked article that not all is doom and gloom - "We have expanded 900% in 12 months" say BrewDog. 

Melissa Cole pre-empted my thoughts on BrewDog: "... fearlessly dragging beer into the 21st century - for creating taste and flavour profiles that provoke thought, and occasionally shock, but termpering that by brewing very drinkable and accessible beers too. And for bringing humour to brewing that doesn't involve crass humour or innuendo."

Conspicuous by its absence from BrewDog presentation is tedious boring guff like "brewed by traditional technique only on from the choicest malt and hops" and "This beer commemorates the anniversary of the 900th Anniversary of the Battle of Milton Keynes when the famous warrior dwarf Aelred the Plucky singlehandedly slayed the Stevenage Hoards".

When I see that kind of stuff I despair. It's crap. It's complacent and unimaginative - and it's endemic.

Blogger Dave of the Woolpack Inn, up the road from me in Cumbria, a relative newcomer in Blogville, writes beautifully on the difficulties facing landlords: here, for instance. For a while he had me jealous of his insight and his eloquent ability to express it. But then he dropped a clanger - "I've always liked Wychwoods advertising." 

Agh! Wychwood branding! Stop I can't take it any more - oh no, they've released the Goblins - Arrrgghhhhhh Help! Stop, stop, I'll give you the top-secret invasion plans!

Wychwood branding is in my beer Room 101. It's awful, it's embarrassing. And all that mickey-taking of lager drinkers - what the hell do they think that's going to achieve other make die-hard lager drinkers think "bugger that ale stuff"? It lets the side down.

Brewdog v. Wychwood: No contest.

p.s. yes, I know it's cider.

Heck, doggone it!

We couldn't resist tasting this one - "Dog Beer" which is available from the pet stall on Barrow Market.

The ingredients did at least include barley malt extract. The others: water, beef extract, lactic acid, E270, E202, E218 and E216.

The label advises pouring half the beer before shaking the remainder to create some frothy head. Try as we might, even violent shaking couldn't produce any froth - I guess we won't be seeing Lewis Hamilton using Dog Beer for customary grand-prix ejaculatory celebrations.

The gentle aroma was something like soy sauce crossed with bovril; not unpleasant but not beery. Steve liked what he described as "Autumn toffeeness". Not unpleasant but not terribly engaging either. The colour was a definitely beery walnut-brown like a brown ale.

Unsurprisingly, the flavour was watery soy sauce and bovril with a note of toffeeness. The human members of the tasting panel felt reluctant to finish their samples - no doubt this was a psychological effect of the doggy branding.

Rita (mixed up terrier, a rescue dog, age unknown) rather liked dog beer. Only seconds after the lid was off she was sniffing attentively, obviously perceiving more to the aroma than we humans did. Our vigourous shaking of the bottle must have releases plenty of aromas - Rita became quite excited and was licking her lips. When the samples were poured she couldn't get her face in quick enough. Despite her initial enthusiasm she also declined to finish her sample. It was put in her bowl and it disappeared overnight.

Moreish Mordue

As I suspected , rumours of the demise of Mordue were unfounded. Indeed, founder Matt Fawson confirmed as much when I bumped into him at the GBBF.

A rare treat, I was delighted to find Mordue IPA on at the Bridge Hotel, Newcastle upon Tyne yesterday. I believe it's the best British beer to bear the designation "IPA" (no disrespect to Meantime and Brewdog whose IPAs are brilliant too). 

While we're on the subject of IPA, make sure you pre-order your copy of Pete Brown's forthcoming book about the IPA style and its history - and do look out for the walk-on role by me in Rio de Janeiro: it's my 15 minutes of fame!

This Week I have Mainly Been Drinking... and Eating...

Timothy Taylor's Havercake Ale, bottled, 4.7% from Booths.

I've always been a bit underwhelmed by the bottled version Landlord - and this stablemate induced the same feeling. It's a perfectly acceptable pale ale, very English and quite swiggable but not very memorable.

I'm not a believer in bottled-beer-must-be-BC-to-be-any-good nor its converse non-bc-beer-is-intrinsically-inferior. However, having said that, I suspect that bottle-conditioning is what TT's beers lack.

It may be a bit lacklustre but it did partner liver/bacon/onion with mashed potato exceptionally well. I also had a Young's Special London Ale but it was too much for the food, it hogged the limelight.

I was so impressed by the L/B/O with a pale bitter I'm going to try it again with some more interesting ones. If you've any suggestions, please comment. I think I'll try a Barngates Tag Lag next.

My recipe for Liver&Bacon with Onion:

Put the partnering beer in the fridge.

Chop equal amounts of liver and bacon into mouthful size chunks. (If, like me, you're sqeamish about chopping liver, wait till it's cooked a while in the pan.)

Thickly slice a  big onion. 

Chuck (bosh?) everything in a big wide pan with a dash each of Worcestershire Sauce and Tabasco.

Put on the lid and put it on a very low heat for ages, maybe an hour. Prepare your mashed potato. 

If, after an hour, there's still obvious liquid rather than gravy remove the lid and turn up the heat until it's reduced.

Serve beer.

Serve food.

Interesting Paragraphs

I have a habit of scanning the indexes of non-fiction books just in case beer gets a look-in. My obsession has produced another 'hit'. The book is "Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945" by Tony Judt, page 486 of the hardback edition.

"But in the Seventies, policies moved to the forefront. 'Single issue' parties and movements emerged, their constituencies shaped by a variable geometry of common concerns: often narrowly focused, occasionally whimsical. Britain's remarkably successful Campaign for Real Ale is a representative instance: founded in 1971 to reverse the trend to gaseous, homogenized 'lager' beer (and the similarly homogenized, 'modernized' pubs in which it was sold), this middle-class pressure group rested its case upon a neo-Marxist account of the take-over of artisanal beer manufacture by mass-producing monopolists who manipulated beer-drinkers for corporate profit - alienating consumers from their own taste buds by meretricious substitution.

In its rather effective mix of economic analysis, environmental concern, aesthetic discrimination and plain nostalgia, CAMRA foreshadowed many of the single-issue activist networks of years to come, as well as the coming fashion among well-heeled bourgeois-bohemians for the expensively 'authentic'. But its slightly archaic charm, not to mention the disproportion between the intensity of its activists' engagement and the tepid object of their passion, made this single-issue movement necessarily somewhat quaint.

But there was nothing whimsical or quaint about other single-issue political networks, most of them - like CAMRA - organized by and for the middle class. [...goes on to various Scandanavian single issue, tax-reduction protest parties.]"

Tony Judt is evidently a non-beer specialist - he would have known not to be so specific as to describe "the trend to gaseous, homogenized 'lager' beer" when in fact gaseous, homogonised ale was the main object of ire, with lager as a side-show of little, but growing, consequence. Nonetheless, this Pulitzer Prize runner-up does seem to supporting my recent theme about CAMRA's non-explicit Marxist perspective. 

The author's suggestion that CAMRA has been "remarkably successful" needs some attention. After all, cask ale's market share hasn't changed much in 35 years. CAMRA's frequent pre-emptive defence is to claim that cask ale would have died out (the Marxist big-business-always-swallows-small tenet) without them. This is difficult to prove or disprove, but its worth remembering the American beer market: from 10 to 1600 craft breweries since 1980, all without the benefit of a self-appointed campaigning organisation but with the benefit of not being encumbered by the tie system.

The author needs some serious educating on "the tepid object of their passion". Hmm.

[If you haven't read them already, I strongly urge you to get hold of

"Beer: The Story of the Pint" by Martyn Cornell (alias "Zythphile") and "Beer and Britannia" by Peter Haydon. ]

Boo hoo - what a shame, Magners in decline

This needs no comment from me:

"Magners' maker warns as cider sales slump"

Why I'm Not a Member of CAMRA

As I've pointed out before, the real ale rhetoric and mythology emanating from CAMRA and its members invokes the image of the "working man" (a namby-pambyism for the "working class") in its efforts to tug at the heart-strings and gain sentimental special-case treatment.

If real ale is "traditionally the drink of the working man" then surely my hometown of Barrow-in-Furness is swimming in it. The town has been declared "the most working-class place in the UK" by the website locallife.co.uk.

I hate to be the one to shatter the working man/real ale myth: I can report the most working-class town in the UK is a swamp of alcopops, smoothflow, megalager and megacider.

Casual perusal of town centre pubs (see picture) on a Friday or Saturday night reveals the "working man" drinking smoothflow, megalager, megacider and alcopops. Sometimes, on special occasions, in the same glass with a shot of Blue Bols for added luminosity under the UV.

The Duke of Edinburgh Hotel, The Cross Keys and the Ambrose deserve honourable mentions for stubbornly persisting in attempting to sell a variety of cask ales despite indifference from the population of 70,000.

The Duke of Edinburgh opened its bar in November 2006 with eight handpumped lines. Their market research had shown that Barrow had far fewer real ale outlets than would be expected in a town of its size. As outsiders, from Lancaster, their conclusion was "lots of uncatered-for demand, we'll do lots of real ale, we'll be on a winner." It was not to be. Although, after a slow start, the bar is now popular as it brings a much-needed touch of city-bar atmosphere to the town, sales of real-ale are disappointing. Sales of the house lager and bottles of Pinot Grigio drive the business. Admirably, there is a no-alcopops rule despite rampant demand.

What's going on?

It's not metaphysical. It's not beyond understanding. As a habitual chatter-with-anybody beer-loving pub-goer I've been working out who drinks what and why for twenty years.

Here's my explanation: Poor people – let’s avoid euphemisms – don't like to be choosy. In the culture of places like Barrow, being choosy is frowned upon. Being discriminating is being a snob – and being a snob is a very bad thing. To be choosy necessitates rejecting something on offer. In a culture defined by hard graft and low pay, rejecting something (particularly food, and including drinks) for the subjective reason of taste is very bad form. Children are brought up with the mealtime fillip "you make sure you finish that: your dad's been hard at work all week to pay for that.” Swirling and sniffing your beer is met with “get it down your neck, you ponce.” I know.

My late grandmother always defended her use of cheap margarine rather than butter with the stern declaration "it tastes just the same". She always bought the cheapest, instant coffee because "it all comes from the same factory anyway". Having been born the youngest of twelve in what can only be described as a slum, she devoted her life to convincing herself that expenditure for flavour was wasteful – because there are no different flavours. My mother is not quite as bad, but almost.

Although the paradox persists that tastier beer is frequently cheaper than bland beer, it is bland predictable beer that most prefer. Seeking out beer for the sole reason of flavour is wrong, even immoral.

Messages such as those about craftsmanship, food miles, sustainability, wholesomeness, tradition and locality are largely lost on this demographic. Cajoling the “working man” into a reverence for heritage and tradition is to force him to look to the past, but the past is a bleak place. The criteria for choosing beer are, as they have always been, the four Ps – peers, palatability, predictability and price.

Part of the CAMRA romanticised belief system is that in a golden age of cask ale, the “working man” was savouring his pint of cask ale and caring deeply and knowledgeably about it. In CAMRA’s Marxist perspective, this simple affordable pleasure has been rudely stolen by exploitative mega-brewer fat-cat capitalists using brainwashing by marketing and advertising to sell over-priced industrialised swill to the lumpen masses. Swashbuckling CAMRA will overthrow this mendacious ruling class and reunite the grateful working man with his real ale! The phrase “real ale revolution” isn’t used in ignorance of the political connotation of the expression.

Suggested evidence for this alleged golden era is that the older working class generation often tells us – “we were choosy about our beer, we went to the pubs where it was good, and we were always on the lookout for a bad pint”. A presumption is made that seeking out a good pint demonstrates connoisseurship: it doesn’t. When more consistent keg beer arrived it lifted the burden of an irksome chore. Members of my extended family are still baffled by my preference for “poncey” cask ale while supping their vapid Boddingtons and Tetleys Smooth.

I bought my first pint at the age of fourteen in the Peacock Inn, Cavendish Street, Barrow-in-Furness. It was a Saturday lunchtime and the morning overtime shift workers from the shipyard filled the pub. I just asked for “a pint of bitter”; I think it was Tetley’s; I was just emulating my dad while trying not to be noticed. “I tried selling cask ale but gave up a year ago. The lads round here didn’t like the taste. They just stick with Carling and John Smiths,” the landlord told me recently. Nearby, the Blue Lamp, a Thwaites pub, sells no cask ale. It tried. It gave up.

I went to my first CAMRA beer festival when I was nineteen-year-old shipyard apprentice. I enjoyed some of the beer but I wasn’t inspired to join the organisation. I didn’t give it much thought at the time. But CAMRA hasn’t gone away and twenty-two years later I’ve finally worked out the big reason (there are others) why I haven’t felt motivated to join despite being a keen cask ale drinker:

CAMRA patronises the working class by implying they can’t make an informed decision.

I know that many CAMRA members will vocally proclaim their working-classness as if that counters my argument and demonstrates the working classness of cask ale but it must be remembered they are a small minority. If all CAMRA members accounted for all real ale consumed, they would be getting through 19.5 pints each, every day (figures from The Intelligent Choice: The Definitive guide to the Cask Ale Market 2008-9 and CAMRA’s current membership of 94,585). If anything, CAMRA's Marxist rhetoric has only proved useful as recruitment tool for the organisation. I don't believe it has been remotely useful in boosting the interests of craft brewers at the expense of macro-brewers. All it does is fuel the dedication of the most vocal and active of CAMRA's membership.

I look forward to your comments (but I’m ducking for cover.)

This Week I have Mainly Been Drinking...

Blonde Ale by Morrisey Fox, bottled, from Tesco.

....oops sorry, I nodded off thinking about it.

If you're the kind of person who has the full set of Men Behaving Badly DVDs (in order) on your shelf you'll like it. Some nice melon-like sweeteness but otherwise not worth wasting liver cells on.

Not Proper Beer?

Don't misunderstand this post. Please be reassured that I am not a "prison's just a holiday camp" Daily Mail reader, although where I live I'm surrounded by them.

I spotted this story while googling the influence of wahabist values in the UK (I should get a life, I know).

"Devout Muslim sues Tesco for making him carry alcohol"

For me, as a beer-snob, this paragraph stood out:

"The tribunal was told Mr Ahmed also gave out 'mixed messages', at one stage suggesting he was allowed to handle Budweiser beer."

I can only conclude that, as it's not proper beer, devout Muslims maybe allowed to handle Budweiser. Maybe not.

Weird world.

Punch Taverns Hilarity

Have a look at Punch's attempt to get you to fork out for a tenancy.

"Pull yourself one of the best business opportunities you may ever see."

And 

"Do you have capital to invest?"

I think it also says "Are you a fool easily parted from your money? Click here," but I might have imagined that.

The Customer is Always Wrong - Even When He is Right

I stopped off at the Duke of York in Clerkenwell (around the corner from beer blogger Stonch's pub, the Gunmakers.) I was with two other committee members of the British Guild of Beer Writers. I mention this to suggest "we know what we're effing talking about." Allegedly.

I ordered three pints of Brakspear Bitter. The beer was distinctly warm (about 17C by my estimate) and noticably sour (I like gueuze/lambic but there's a time and a place.) I returned to the bar and made a polite and factual complaint. Body language told me I was probably talking to the boss. The same body language issued the message "I'll bite your arm off." Her response was the classic "it's room temperature: it's supposed to be like that."

Resisting the temptation to do a "I'll have you know..." act I maintained eye contact and restated my complaint. A long pause ensued and a sneering "I suppose you want something else" followed.

So the pub trade is in suffering? Well, in therapy-speak "change comes from within" – this would be a good place to start.

B.T.W thanks for the pic to Ewan-M on Flickr

Key words for positive knee-jerk purchasing decisions for the middle classes

The Sunday Times to day gave a little review to a new beer:

"Stinger Organic Ale. £1.89-£1.99, 500ml. Developed with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and brewed with organic nettles. Fresh, soft, delicious (selected Budgens, Threshers, badgerdirect.com)"

Bloody Nora! Organic nettles! For Christ's sake you dopes, they grow in hedges, they're weeds, they're always going to be organic. And they're free! (OK, I know it should probably be "organic beer with nettles")

A conversation overheard at Borough Market yesterday:

"Ooh, look Cressida, a new stall - 'Lenny's Hand-Caught, Free-To-Roam, Locally-Sourced Rodents'. The new-season Sewer Rats are in stock ... so much more, you know ... ambrosial ... than the river rats we had round at Yolande and Giles's last week. Mmm, and only £267 per kg. They'll be wonderful after the biodynamic Kobe cockroach muse bouches."

"Oh yes Sebastian; and that foraged spatchcock badger she picked up outside the village was rather, erm ... proletarian ... don't you think? Let's not forget the Organic Nettle Beer. One wouldn't want to buy intensively-reared, factory-farmed, battery, chemically-sprayed, air-freighted, genetically-modified nettle beer, would one, even if it is Fair Trade? Mind you, Giles will never tell the difference."

"Oh, don't be too beastly about Giles, darling, he's having such a demanding time shafting those gauche banks that ordinary people put their piffling money in."

"Mmm, I never really understood why they bother with mortgages; don't they realise it's much cheaper to simply buy a house?"

etc. ad nauseum.

[b.t.w. the final line about mortgages is was genuinely and sincerely uttered by a real person, the rest is made up]

CAMRA's War on ... whatever.

Have a look here at Class War's list of links.

"We do not necessarily endorse all of the content on the sites below, but generally speaking they are all in some way related to our worldview."

Any beery organisation there you recognise?

This week I have been mainly drinking...

Eiken Artois.

Well, not exactly "mainly drinking": I picked up a heavily discounted three quarters of a four-pack from paupers' corner in Tesco.

I'm not one of these real ale drinkers (I don't even use the expression "real ale" if I can possibly avoid it) who bangs on about "the war against lager". I love lager!

I should clarify, I can't stand the dismal stuff like Fosters and its mass-market rivals that clog our pubs. I like the fancy proper imported stuff that hides modestly on the lower supermarket shelves. The stuff I get to drink on too-infrequent trips across the channel.

Here's the Eiken Artois blurb – "Named from the Flemish word for Oak, Eiken Artois is a deliciously refreshing yet full flavoured oak aged lager brewed in Belgium to 4.6% ABV. Brewed with carefully selected aroma hops, this unique beer is then oak aged to create a fruity, hoppy lager with subtle floral notes and hints of vanilla."

That sounds quite interesting. It seems InBev wants to capture a bit of the kudos the craft sector gets for flavour enhancing techniques. But hang on, Artois is firmly mass-market, and mass-market means bland. 

The mouthfeel was thin and good-but-remote aroma (like looking the wrong way through binoculars), coupled with the merest hint of oxidisation, my first-impressions weren't good. Not horrible enough to make me put it down though.

Further lingering sips revealed some interesting mid-palate flavours: caramel, vanilla, and the flavour of the inside of Crunchie Bars that I can't remember the name of. These flavours I often find particularly in reputable Czech lagers (Gambrinus springs to mind) so that 's a very good sign.

Unfortunately it suffered badly from the binoculars-backwards effect. I can imagine good brewers thinking "finally, we can do something tasty" but their bosses countering "don't you dare doing something too tasty, we don't want to alienate core brand-loyal customers."

The launch of this Artois sub-brand is a classic example of parent-brand-on-the-decline-syndrome. Stella Artois (the Manchester United of beer) sales are past their peak (good!) and InBev are desperately trying to retain customers, in this instance the ones who may be ditching Stella in favour of tastier craft beers.

So, does Eiken Artois offer anything for the connoisseur? Well, put it this way: if your non-beer-savvy mate gets some in for the footy, don't write it off, it's not unlpeasant.

Evangelise!

Sometimes it alarms how something totally unrelated can get my mind drifting back to beer. So it was yesterday when this story was in the news. It was a slow news day so theatrical talking heads were lined up to fill slots on broadcast news across the networks.

What have well-spoken middle-class spongers scrounging money off the government (i.e. the tax payer) got to do with beer?

Use of the language of the evangelist. 

Repeatedly the theatricals droned on about "getting more people interested in theatre". Noticably, none of them ventured to explain what the intrinsic worth of this exercise is. Declaring the truth that "it has the dual benefit of flattering our egos and subsidising our hobbies" would destroy the venture. But I digress.

This "we need to get more people into" rhetoric is what interests me. It's all over the place.

All over the country new students will be assailed by people experiencing this urge. Freshers' Fairs exist only for people to indulge this impulse: not the freshers themselves but society members evangelising for Dungeon&Dragons, Bridge, Cave-Diving, hockey, parachuting, tiddly-winks and so on. Religions, of course, have the evangelising urge explicitly built into their belief systems.

The recent Olympics was a festival of sports talking-heads banging on about "getting more people involved in [insert name of obscure sport]."

CAMRA is a big source of the rhetoric associated with this urge. Think about it – how many times have you heard words about "getting more people interested in real ale"? Often it is manifested as "we've got persuade more people to join CAMRA" (to which the subtext is "CAMRA is an intrinsically good thing")

Here's an example from a CAMRA press release: "CAMRA’s new Cyclops leaflet, and more breweries supporting the scheme, will help to increase the consumer awareness of this initiative and lead to more people understanding and drinking real ale.”

I do it myself. I will bend anyone's ear on the things that  give me pleasure – good beer, Miles Davis's electric period '68-'75, exposing of the vacuity of religion, Brazilian music, proper peanuts in their shells, vinyl records, Macintosh computers ... and many more. In 2000 I put my money where my mouth was (and still is) by opening a specialist beer bar.

This urge to evangelise about what gives us pleasure seems universal. We've all got it. But what could it be? Human behavioural instinct is defined by evolution. This urge to promote what gives us pleasure, I believe, is exactly the same as the urge the caveman has to share the location of the bison herd or the bush bearing berries. The same urge the bee has to get back to the hive and waggle its bum. At its core is the urge to survive – to feed yourself and those who share some of your genes. In a tribal society everyone is likely to share your genes, your chance of survival and the "life" of your genes is enhanced. In our modern society we aren't necessarily genetically related to those around us, and food is no longer a rarity that needs to be grabbed at every opportunity. Our genes don't know that: they're still telling us "shout from the roof-top about what satisfies you, share it with your tribe".

Remember that. You'll be spotting "we've got to get more people involved" rhetoric all over the place from now on. Welcome to my world!

[p.s. Apologies to creationists .... Oh No! what am I saying? What I meant was: Get your hands off our schools and stay out of the White House you bunch of medievalist  nutjobs.]

Pickled Bloody Partridge

My heart sinks a little further every time a brewer gives a beer a painfully twee and parochial name – especially an alliterative one.

I really don't care if it's "a traditional farmer's wife's recipe for partridge braised in ale".

Thank you, Hall & Woodhouse, you've really made my day with that name. That'll really get the kids talking.

Pickled bloody Partridge ... I ask you.

This week I have mainly been drinking...

... Harviestoun Belgian White at the Black Dog Inn at Dalton-in-Furness, my favourite pub in my South Cumbria homelands.

Belgian white (wheat) beers tend to be flavoured with orange zest and coriander seed. In HBW there was the merest hint of orangeyness, and quite noticeable (to me anyway; those whose ears I bent about it were nonplussed) corianderness hanging on a backbone of wheaty English bitterness.

Genuine Belgies may have not recognised the beer as an attempted recreation of their own style but that would be missing the point. The point is to extend the ambit of typical cask conditioned ale flavours in a very British-pub context. That it achieved with aplomb.

This weekend the pub has had a special fish and seafood menu and I pointed out to boss James that he'd chosen to stock a great beer to go with the special menu. He responded with a baffled "ugh?". The Black Dog does tremendous food and beer but poncey metropolitan notions of sniffing, swirling and matching beer and food are, as yet, alien. Indeed engaging in such endeavours would have much of the clientele questioning one's manliness and qualifications for drinking beer in the first place.

Unfortunately I hadn't booked to dine and had to make do with tantalising sights and smells. Fortunately I had the beer.

(B.t.w. I've invented a name for a shade of paint – "Langoustine Serendipity". Do you think Dulux will buy it off me?)

They've got my blood boiling again!

My brother has just brought my attention to this piece in the Publican - "CAMRA calls for minimum pricing"

OK,  we've established that cheap mass-produced beer in the supermarkets is playing a role in  deterring people from going to the pub. So far, so good.

To get people back in the pubs how about getting the government to create minimum prices for supermarket beer? Hmm.

Isn't that a bit bloody rich coming from a self-proclaimed "consumer organisation" which encourages people to join with rabble-rousing rhetoric like "join us if you're concerned about the ever-rising price of beer"? (I haven't got a specific example to hand a.t.m but we've all seen it).

Now let me think about it for a nano-second ... ah, now I see: CAMRA wants prices increases for the beer it doesn't like (consumed by the majority); It wants lower prices for the beer it likes (a minority interest).

A consumer organisation my arse! A self-interest group looking for special case treatment by pretending to have everyone's best interest at heart. 

Sheer bloody hypocracy. 

Excuse me while I wipe up the beer I've just spluttered on my keyboard.

[CAMRA press release here]

Supermarket Prices

In a daze, traipsing round Tesco I was thinking about supermarkets' role in Britain's drunken hooliganity. I couldn't crack that problem and my thoughts moved onto the brands "craft" versus "mass" in the supermarkets.

Certainly, it's alarming that price competition has led mass-produced booze to be sold cheaper than water and had the knock-on effect of persuading people to drink anywhere but the controlled environment of the pub, and the pub trade is suffering as a consequence. But there may be another more positive effect.

The beers most affected by this rampant price cutting are the mass-produced ones – the common enemy of craft brewers. Look further in the supermarkets and you find rows of craft beers (remember, I choose not to use the term "real ale"), their prices unaffected by mass-market price competition. Ask around and you hear from SIBA, CAMRA and the brewers themselves that bottle sales are on the up – despite being the expensive option.

Here we have a dichotomy: 

In the off-trade craft beers are priced higher than mass-produced beers.

In the on-trade craft beers are priced lower than mass-produced beers.

It might be a febrile fantasy, but I believe the price-crash of mass produced beers could be a blessing in disguise for craft brewers. "How?" I hear you asking, "isn't it just going to encourage people away from craft beer on to cheap stuff?"

No. As I've already mentioned, bottled craft beers are performing well despite being the pricey beer option.

I believe the phenomenon is this – on the whole, people sensibly understand "poor quality things tend to be cheap – good quality things tend to be expensive". For many years people have taken on face value clever advertising such as "Stella Artois: reassuringly expensive", thinking "it's pricier, obviously it's very good, and I like to consume good things, that's what I'll buy". (I don't mean to single out Stella; I'm just using "Stella" as short-hand for mass-produced-not-very-interesting-beer.)

Now though, things have changed. Everyone uses supermarkets and sees the price of Stella considerably lower than the craft beers. What's the message? – "Stella is inferior to the bottles in the obscure aisle at the back of the supermarket" and a bit of "Stella is the beer favoured by price-conscious al-fresco drinkers".

OK, every single beer drinker isn't going to ditch their fave big brand because it's gone cheap, plenty will clap their hands in glee at the rock-bottom prices. Some won't. Some will be thinking "I like good stuff, and a higher price is a signifier of quality, I'll have to investigate the intruiging bottled stuff I usually ignore while the wife's looking at wine". How many is anyone's guess. I reckon enough people will ditch "mass" and move to "craft" for the sector to experience a good long-term boost. This maybe is what is already happening. This could be a bigger effect than thirty-something years of "campaigning" by you-know-who.

In the pub trade business is very tight with closures rampant. That straightforward message is evident from, for instance, the British Beer and Pub Association, a body which wishes the world to think is the ONLY voice of brewers and pub owners. In fact, if you check its membership list, it largely represents the big players – and in doing so seeks to downplay the efforts of small independents. Travel around the highroads and by-roads of the country and what do you see? - "Pub Lease For Sale" signs. It's the big dull McDonaldsised chains who are in most obvious decline and what do they sell most of? - McDonaldsised mass-produced beer. Freehouses aren't finding current economics such a bed of roses at the moment but they do seem, out of all pubs, the ones most capable of weathering the storm. What do most of them sell most of? - Craft beer.

(B.T.W. Here's an interesting piece on the Stella brand which is currently riddling its own feet with bullets)

Innovation at Beer Festival!

Here you see last week's Ulverston Beer Festival with its featured entertainment "Live Spreadsheet Updating".

Yes folks, Microsoft Excel made a guest appearance at a humble Beer Festival!

Beautifully British amateur inventiveness at its best. 

"The venue's got a big screen and a video projector – click! – I know; if I spend the festival sitting upstairs in the techie room away from the action I can plug in my laptop and display a constantly updated list of available beers! And as a bonus people may admire my Excel technique (including formulas)!"

Peculiarly, punters seemed to be ignoring the ever-updating spreadsheet and using the old-fashioned luddite techniques of looking in the programme, and looking and asking at the bar.

B.T.W. Ulverston Brewer's new beer "Flying Elephants", a 3.8% pale hoppy thirst-quencher, was rather good and could well be the beer that puts them on a wider map.