Are they chronic liars or are they just shit at their jobs? 48 days after insisting that their decision to close one of their breweries will not impact the range of cask beers it brews, Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Co (CMBC) are forced to admit that the are axing eleven – ELEVEN – beers, eight of them cask.
On 7th October, CMBC announced that they would be closing the Banks’s brewery in Wolverhampton. It was a tough decision. It wasn’t their fault; it was San Miguel’s fault. It was the market’s fault. Actually it was YOUR fault, because you don’t drink their beers as much as you should. You bastard.
Every time CMBC commits an act of corporate vandalism on Britain’s cask ale market – and that’s become a regular occurrence over the last year or so – they plead that they had to do it. The cask ale market is in such bad shape, so frail and weak, they had no choice but to kick it in the face. Really hard.
As the biggest player in the cask ale market, there was absolutely nothing they could do to prevent the decline of the cask ale market. You know how it is. It’s not as if they could – ooh, I dunno – put any marketing support behind their cask brands, or join any of the industry campaigns trying to promote cask, or even put one single fucking picture of a cask ale on their corporate website or anything. Nope. As the UK’s, and therefore the world’s, biggest brewer of cask ale, there were utterly powerless to prevent its decline.
But don’t worry, they said. Just because we’re closing a massive cask ale brewery doesn’t mean the brands we brewed there are under any kind of threat. What would make you think that, you great big paranoid lummox? As reported in the Morning Advertiser, the closure of a massive cask ale brewery was actually going to allow them to brew more cask ale! Better cask ale! That’s how business works. You just don’t understand. The headline couldn’t be clearer. CMBC: ‘Banks’s brewery closure won’t affect cask brands.’
You’ll never guess what happened next.
The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) recently heard rumours that, actually, some beers were going to be affected, and pressed CMBC for a response. According to a press release from CAMRA today, CMBC confirmed to them directly that the following beers are all for the chop:
Banks’s Mild
Banks’s Sunbeam
Bombardier (keg)
Eagle IPA
Jennings Cumberland Ale
Mansfield Dark Smooth (keg)
Mansfield Original Bitter (keg)
Marston’s Old Empire
Marston’s 61 Deep
Ringwood Boondoggle
Ringwood Old Thumper
To go from “the brewery closure won’t affect our cask brands” to axing ELEVEN beers in one fell swoop suggests to me one of only two possibilities. One, they’ll just say any old shit they feel like saying to get people off their backs at the time. Or two, someone is really rubbish at their job and has absolutely no idea what’s going on. Or maybe even the whole company is just making it up as they go. Back in October, they could have said, “Obviously things are tricky but we’re going to do the best we can.” They could have sought buyers for these brands, or people to brew them under licence. But no.
When real ale fans wrung their hands over the closure of the brewery last month, I’m sure none of them imagined the scale of the slaughter would be this bad. To be told that everything was fine just 48 days ago makes it seem even more brutal.
The impact is of course uneven. I’m not sure there’ll be too many people missing Eagle IPA, but I used to bloody love Old Empire on the increasingly rare occasions when I could find it. I was never a fan of Bombardier, but it used to be one of the biggest ale brands in the country till this lot got their murderous hands around its neck. In their respective geographical heartlands, Banks’s Mild, Jennings Cumberland Ale and Ringwood Boondoggle were beloved icons.
CMBC have still not issued a public statement on this. But most of the above listed beers aren’t currently shown on their website as available brands anyway. It’s not as if they’ve actually been trying to sell them to drinkers. Why the hell would they want to try doing that?
Are CMBC honestly trying to deliberately destroy the UK’s cask ale market? Of course they’d say no, if they could ever be arsed to comment on the situation. But if they really were trying to murder cask ale, what would they be doing differently to what they’ve done so far this year?
Drinkers can’t tell craft from macro and feel deceived when they find out. They think that Spanish beer is great and that Britain can’t brew beer, and they drink brands they believe are Spanish which are really brewed in Britain. Is there any product more confusing than beer?
I took this picture in Tesco. Tesco sell more beer than pretty much any other UK retailer. And yet they advertise “beer and lager” as if they are two different things. Like many people I know, they don’t understand that lager is beer.
Last week, as part of the launch of their new “indie beer” seal, SIBA, the Society of Independent Brewers and Associates, revealed that more people believe that Beavertown (owned by Heineken) and Camden Town (AB-InBev) are independently owned than believe that genuine indies such as Five Points, Vocation and Fyne Ales are independent. When told the truth, 75% said they felt they had been misled.
And now, research carried out on behalf of Scottish Brewer Innis & Gunn reveals that only 8% of respondents know that Madri, owned by Molson Coors, is brewed in the UK. That wouldn’t be so bad, except 38% of them believe Spain is the country that makes the best beer, the same number are prepared to pay more for “continental” beer than British beer (rising to 56% among 25-34 year-olds) and only 27% think Britain is any good at making beer.
Why do we think Spain brews better beer than Britain, even though almost all the “Span-ish” beer we drink in Britain is brewed here anyway? Apparently, because continental beer has unique or exotic flavours (34%), better ingredients (32%), traditional brewing methods (28%), stronger heritage (27%), and more care is taken in the brewing process (20%).
I have absolutely nothing against Spanish beer. I’d rather drink Cruzcampo, Mahou or Estrella Galicia than Carling or John Smith’s. But it’s simply not true that Spain has a better brewing tradition, better ingredients or a stronger brewing heritage than Britain.
There are several things going on here. One is that we’re simply weird in the UK about supporting our own makers. 46% of Innis & Gunn’s respondents said we made good cheese; 42% say we’re good at whisky; and 41% say we’re good at making film and TV. There’s nothing that over 50% of respondents think we’re good at, and 15% said Britain wasn’t good at making anything at all. When I wrote Pie Fidelity: In Defence of British Food in 2018, I was given a very cool reception by the food writing world. Word later reached me that people were surprised I had “gone Brexity.” If they’d bothered to read even a few pages of the book before arriving at this conclusion, they’d have realised it was the opposite of Brexity. But defend anything British, and suddenly you’re Nigel Farage.
Following on from this, and linked to the fact that none of the biggest brewers in Britain are now British-owned and therefore don’t give a damn about British brewing heritage, most beer drinkers are completely unaware that Britain actually has one of the greatest brewing traditions in the world. If you think the Canadian brand Carling is the best that “British” brewing has to offer, of course you’re going to think Spanish beer is better.
Then there’s the fact that we simply don’t know very much about beer at all, and don’t seem interested in learning more. I wrote Miracle Brew after another survey showed that only 22% of beer drinkers can correctly name the four main ingredients of beer. Campaign groups and industry bodies seeking to turn around the fortunes of cask ale constantly talk about the need to “educate the consumer.” But the last thing someone wants in the pub at 5.30pm is a lecture on secondary fermentation. When I worked in beer advertising, even my clients working for breweries could not have told you the difference between ale and lager or how hops contribute to the character of beer.
And finally or course, there’s the marketing from those brewers. It’s a curious truth in beer that whatever country you’re in, imports from another country are considered more premium. You don’t just buy the beer from that country, you buy a bit of its attitude or character as well, and foreign destinations are always more glamorous than our familiar, mundane surroundings.
The endless cycle of “premiumisation” means we must always be offered something new and exotic. The entire economy depends on us being less content with what we already have, so we need to buy something newer and preferably more expensive. Any lager used to be more premium than any ale. Then Australian lager (brewed in Reading) was superior to European lager. Stella Artois put “continental” lager (that had been rewed in Salmesbury and Magor) back on top, and then Peroni solved the problem that Italy had no brewing heritage at all by selling itself as a fashion brand instead of a beer, and suddenly Italy had a brewing heritage that has now moved to Spain (via Burton on Trent).
And what of craft beer? Small independent craft brewers upset the cycle by creating something new and interesting (and premium) without the permission of the global corporations that control the market. So those global corporations deliberately set out to render the term “craft” meaningless.
If this upsets or depresses you, what can you do about it?
Well, the funny thing is that in all the market research those big brewers do, when they ask people what source of information they trust most, the top answer is always “word of mouth.” They spend millions trying to replicate the kinds of conversations that happen in pubs up and down the country every day. Not all these conversations go the right way. I’ve yet to see an opening gambit along the lines of “You shouldn’t be drinking that beer, that beer’s shit,” lead to a response of “Hey, you have a point! Tell me more!” But everyone has a mate who knows a bit more about beer than they do, and defers to them on occasion. I have friends who aren’t really that into beer who say “I’ll have whatever Pete’s having.” None of them want to know about decoction or terpenes, but they engage when I tell them that lager can taste amazing and why don’t you try this one, or that IPA was originally British, not American, or that Madri is an invented brand that’s brewed in Burton-on-Trent and Tadcaster.
People don’t like feeling deceived or ripped off. They do like having little tidbits of trivia that are worth repeating to the people who know slightly less about beer than them.
Word-of-mouth works. That’s why large corporations, who spend millions deceiving and misleading drinkers, are so scared of it. I hear rumours that certain brewers have advised that “now is not the time” for the indie beer seal and “we should all be sticking together.” That’s the best evidence I’ve heard that it is a good thing to be doing.
It’s Cask Ale Week. Yay! Let’s all drink cask ale. But it’s also a good time to dig into some of the detail about why we don’t.
It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
Is it dying or reviving? Craft or not? Suffering from image problems or quality issues? Too warm or too cold? Over-priced or under-priced? Every year, the same arguments go round and round, and cask continues its inexorable decline despite being so on-trend it should be flying off the bar if we looked at it objectively.
A few weeks ago, one transaction at the bar brought things into focus for me – but didn’t provide much in the way of answers.
Liz and I were in a pub in Norwich. It was a good pub with a good reputation for beer. One of those pubs where, when you walk in, the first thing you see is a row of four or five cask handpumps. To the left of these, there was a T-Bar with some decent lagers on it. To the right, a row of achingly hip craft ales. It was the kind of pub that had a TV screen above the bar giving rolling coverage of what was on, and what the Untappd ratings were for everything.
Liz likes her beer, but is quite specific about what she wants. A young, friendly, female member of bar staff came along to serve us, and because we knew the pub, but not many of the beers, Liz felt quite happy saying, “I’d like a pale ale… hoppy, but not hazy, and not too strong?”
The bartender frowned. Looked along the taps. It was not the kind of frown that says, “I just work here, I don’t know what the beer is like.” It was the kid of frown that says, “I know my shit. I specialise in matching people with the beer they need, whether they know they need it or not. But now you have me flummoxed, with your unusual and strangely specific request.”
She looked again across the taps. Reached a decision. I could see from her face that it wasn’t the perfect solution. But it was the best one she had and she felt happy enough with it. She pointed to one of the craft taps to the right of the bar. “This is really good! It’s a bit strong – 4.8 per cent. It’s definitely hoppy. It is hazy, but it’s not toooo hazy.”
Impressed by the knowledge, Liz went with the recommendation.
Meanwhile, I’d been scanning the cask taps. I went for a 4% pale from a local brewery. It arrived, bright and sparkling, cellar cool.
We took our beers to a table. Liz tasted her beer and winced. I tasted it too. It was all grapefruit and chalk, thick on the palate. Then Liz tasted mine. “That’s the beer I asked for!” she said. And it was: a pale ale, hoppy in a lemony, resiny, grassy sort of way, gentle bitterness at the end, and not at all hazy. “I specifically asked for that beer,” said Liz. “Why didn’t she recommend it to me?”
I don’t know why. I mean, I did: the bartender didn’t recommend it because it was on cask. But why, specifically? What was the issue with an issue with the format of cask ale and the baggage it carries? Was it because:
– The bartender was well-trained in what was on the keg taps, because that’s what the pub is mainly know for. But the pub is not as bothered about cask and doesn’t educate their staff on it. So she didn’t know the beer Liz had asked for was on cask?
– The bartender was personally passionate about “craft beer” because that’s what she and her friends drink, but was not interested in learning about cask. So she was unaware that the beer Liz had asked for was on cask?
– The bartender took one look at a middle-aged woman asking about beer and thought “Cool, she knows her beer. But she’s a woman, so she won’t be interested in our cask offering.”
– Every time the bartender has recommended a beer from the cask pumps to someone who doesn’t fit the cask drinker stereotype, they’ve turned their noses up at it and gone, “Ugh no, I’m not drinking that,” so she just doesn’t bother any more?
– Cask is so dominant in our minds as “cask”, that when you talk about beer styles and beer character, we just don’t apply that thinking to cask, because more than anything else, cask is, well, just “cask”, which overrides considerations of style, and Liz didn’t ask about cask?
I have no way of knowing. But whichever one it is, it shows that cask has a saliency and image problem even in pubs where a good range is kept well and the staff know their beers. It suggests to me that there’s a barrier between cask and keg that is bigger than the actual beer style, and I think this is a real problem. Ideally, if someone asks for a hoppy 4% pale ale, shouldn’t a good, knowledgable member of staff be able to say, “We’ve got this one on cask, a bit old school, and this one on keg that’s a bit colder, a bit hazy and more modern?” Or words to that effect?
What do you think?
For what it’s worth, Liz ordered the cask pale ale in the second round, and stuck to it for the rest of the evening.
Hope you enjoyed reading that! If so, check out my events page. I’m doing quite a few around the country this autumn, with more to be added. Come and say hello!
In 1946, George Orwell described the perfect (urban) pub in terms that still resonate today. He argued that the country pub was different, but never elaborated on how. 78 years later, here’s my attempt at evoking the bucolic twin of the legendary Moon Under Water.
The Old Stone House doesn’t appear in tourist guides. You chance upon it by accident when Google Maps loses its signal and you miss a turning. If you’re looking for it specifically, for the first time, that can only be because you mentioned to someone that you were going to be in this part of the world, and they said in a hushed voice, “If you’re going there, you must find the Old Stone House. You’ll love it.”
There are tourists here – it’s a beautiful part of the country after all. Many are walkers. There are a couple of short, circular walks that pass the pub. Of course they do. But it’s also near a long trail that backpackers tackle over the course of a week or so. The Old Stone House would never be so twee as to hang a sign saying “Muddy Boots and Paws Welcome,” but you can instantly tell that this is the case. There are also locals, who remain here long after the weather has turned.
The Old Stone House isn’t picturesque. Despite the instinct to do so, there’s not much point photographing the building. It doesn’t have a thatched roof or flowers around the door. It’s not listed. It’s just solid and functional.
Inside, there’s no evidence that the last fifty years happened. No music, no WiFi, and definitely no television. When you look closely, you can see that the lights sport modern LED lightbulbs, but they’re so well-hidden it looks like gaslight.
There’s a big open fire at one end of the room. In winter, you have to be here at opening time to claim the table next to it. There’s also a large, shiny-seated wooden chair opposite. It’s the kind of chair you just know you don’t sit in unless you’ve been drinking here since the pub was built.
The walls and ceilings are decorated with random stuff – nothing as obvious as horse brasses or old black-and-white photos of the pub. A lot of the décor relates to the name of the pub (which isn’t really the Old Stone House.) But on top of that (sometimes literally) there’s a collection of old scythes. A bowsaw. A 1930s policeman’s helmet. A case full of arrows.
The Old Stone House is run by a family. They all work here. Some of them don’t look older than their teens, but present as lifelong publicans in their sixties who know every detail about cellarmanship, nearby breweries, farming, local and national politics, and every aspect of running a pub.
The food in the Old Stone House is basic but brilliant, hearty and homemade. The portions are huge – the kind of meals an exhausted backpacker might inhale before nodding off in their chair. The price of the fish and chips raised an eyebrow the first time you ordered it, but you’ve never been able to finish it. There’s a Ploughman’s that, as expected, comes with either cheese or ham. But because this is the perfect fantasy pub, you can pay a bit extra and have both. The only problem is that, with the Ploughman’s, the ham egg and chips, and the ham sandwiches, they always run out of ham if it’s busy. It’s gorgeous ham. And they’re always busy.
The Old Stone House is good for cider. It’s won the regional CAMRA branch Cider Pub of the Year more than once. The range of drinks on the bar is basic, but there are chalkboards for cider and cask ale. Ask about these, and after being quizzed about “What kind of thing do you normally like?” and making your choice, the member of staff will disappear for a couple of minutes – to the cellar, I’m guessing – and return with cool pints. The regular cask ales on the bar are old-school and boring, the kind of beers that are always slagged off by aficionados. But have them here, where they’re local and they sell fast, and they’re better than you ever thought they could be.
There is of course a beer garden outside the Old Stone House. Well, a field, really, across the track, with a few tables at the end closest to the pub, and cows grazing in the distance. There are also a couple of tables just outside the pub door, but these are always taken by the time you arrive. If you do get one, sitting there by the old red phone box (now a defibrillator station), listening to birdsong and the shushing breeze in the trees, you can imagine the odd spitfire flying overhead. (You always use this as a figure of speech to emphasise how timeless the pub is. But back in June, one actually did.)
In “The Moon Under Water,” this is the point where Orwell confesses that it’s “time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.” The clue was in the name: the “moon under water” is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. Orwell was telling us this from the start.
And that’s why the Old Stone House is different. I gave it that name precisely because it stands opposite to Orwell’s conceit. It’s real and solid, open for business as I write this, and it has every one of the qualities I just described. I checked when I had lunch there yesterday. (Jacket potato like they used to taste on bonfire night when you were a kid, with five-bean chilli, properly spicy.)
Promise to buy me a pint there, and one day I might tell you its real name.
“What’s your favourite beer?” It’s the question I get asked more than any other, and I’ve never felt able to give a proper answer. Until now. So, to celebrate International Beer Day, for the first time ever, here are my five favourite beers of all time.
5. The first beer after Dry January.
You haven’t tasted beer for a month. Desire has been building for weeks. But more importantly than that, your palate is reset.
You know how chewing gum loses its taste, then, if you take it out for a bit and put it back in your mouth later, there’s a brief flare of minty flavour? Or how you get used to the smell in a room and it fades from your consciousness, then if you leave and come back in, it’s there again?
This is the same. That beer you used to love, but you’ve started to suspect they’ve dumbed it down because it’s not as hoppy as it used to be? That was you. Not the beer. Taste it again after not drinking for a month, and it’s just like the first time all over again.
4. The best beer in a day’s judging the World Beer Awards
People laugh when I say judging beer is hard work. Until they try it themselves.
As Chair of Judges of the World Beer Awards this year, not only did I judge 70 beers a day for three days running like all our other brilliant judges; I also had to go back again, and again, to finish off the late entrants and the stragglers. We must have done 450 beers in total. Maybe one in ten were awful – not a bad strike rate at all. Most were OK. Maybe one in five was very good. Out of 450, there were about five or six to which I gave top marks.
Your senses are heightened. You’re focusing with all your concentration on analysing what’s going on with this beer. And in that state, when these five or six beers hit you, they flood your whole being with flavour. You get a rush of sheer euphoria and everything just fits. Relief. Delight. Giddiness. Gratitude at being able to taste and appreciate perfection.
3. The first beer after flying to Spain for a week’s holiday.
You had to get up at 3am. You didn’t really sleep because you never do when you have an insanely early alarm. You drag yourself to the airport and endure the queuing, the rudeness, the clueless people in front of you holding everything up. Then two or three hours aloft in a cramped metal tube full of viruses and germs and frustration, your mouth dry, your head aching. After passport control, baggage collection and car hire, you’ve been up for eight hours, and you’ve endured all this for the promise of what comes next.
Half an hour later, you’re in a market that smells of ripe oranges and oregano and cheese and sweet ham, and there’s a tapas stall with a handful of stools at the counter of which two are free. There’s a single beer font on the counter for a brand you’ve never heard of, and as the aroma of your recently ordered cuttlefish frying in garlic, butter and lemon juice hits your nose, so the crisp bite of the ice-cold lager hits the back of your parched throat. And, finally, you are on holiday, and it never tasted so good.
2. The first beer with a best mate you haven’t seen for six months.
You’ve known each the since you were nine. But you’ve lived in different cities for most of your adult lives. You always say you’re going to make more of an effort to keep in touch, but work gets in the way, and shit, how is it August already?
But they’re coming to stay for a few days and you’ve got the spare room ready and a nice meal planned, but the pub seems like a more appropriate space to meet, a level playing field where you can settle in for a couple of hours without the guest/host dynamic getting in the way. You get there first. Check the selection. You know the cask is good here. You get them in, just as your mate arrives. All you have to do is clink glasses, take a deep swig each, and grin at each other like you did when you were kids. And the time since you last saw each other dissolves into the foamy head.
1. The beer you earn through physical labour.
I drink too much beer. I drink it almost every day. Almost every beer is accompanied by a quiet pang of guilt. Again? Starting early? That’s going down a bit quickly. Another one? But you were going to… Oh sod it.
Since moving house, we have a big garden. There’s a lawn that needs mowing every couple of weeks. The last occupants left behind a thirty-year-old mower. It’s heavy and loud and bad-tempered. Mowing the lawn is a battle between us. There’s more preparation and clearing and emptying and cleaning and manoeuvring than there is actual lawn-mowing. And of course, it needs to be done on the hottest day of the year so far. I’m slaked with sweat, my hair plastered to my forehead. Liz offers me a beer when I’m half way through. No, I say, not until I’m finished. And I carry on, until the cuttings are raked and cleared and the cables are coiled and the machine is back in its cage.
And then, and only then, I sit at the garden table, and that first beer, half a pint in couple of gulps, entirely guilt-free because I have earned this, is my new favourite beer in the world.
It may look like the golden years of the craft beer boom are over. But this is not the time to give up. It’s the time to remember why we’re here in the first place.
The bad news just keeps on coming. For as long as we can remember now, every day seems to bring more news of UK breweries that are closing or in trouble. Sometimes it’s someone you’ve never heard of. Other times, it’s someone you thought was too big, too popular to fail.
Among those who are still here, it’s very much survival mode. When I wrote the first Sheffield Beer Report in 2016, the city’s brewers were tiny, but two-thirds said they were planning expansion and investment in the near future. When we asked the same question this year, the response was “Are you fucking kidding?” Whatever cash reserves brewers once had are gone. For many, it’s a question of just hanging on until some unspecified scenario causes things to improve.
The problems facing small brewers are many. But they can be simplified to a sickening Catch-22: costs of production are soaring, so brewers need to either put up their prices or sell a lot more beer to remain profitable. But they can’t sell more beer because their routes to market are increasingly tied up by big corporations. And this means they can’t put their prices up because they have to discount their beer to compete for limited available spaces on the bar. The bar in turn has to buy on price because drinkers are themselves facing a cost of living crisis, which means they’re spending less in pubs and bars.
One by-product of all this is that the sheer energy and joy that once characterised craft beer is no longer the spirit that defines it. It is still there, in tap rooms and at festivals, but it’s slightly jaded. The naïve sense of adventure seems to have gone.
As a humble writer, I can’t do much about routes to market and raw material costs. But maybe I can offer some context and commentary that might prove useful.
There’s a new generation in craft brewing now – drinkers, brewery workers, commentators – who don’t remember what it was like before all this happened. I’m conscious that, being older, I can develop a tendency to dismiss new things (I’m just not that keen on hazy, juicy pales, OK? Or brioche buns being used for bacon rolls. And I accept that some of that is my problem.) But at the same time, some younger people can reflexively dismiss anything that came before their time, and that’s at least as problematic. (Last year I was talking with a talented brewer who not only said that all IPAs are hazy, and that a clear beer cannot be an IPA, but that it had always been thus. He simply denied the existence of the clear IPAs we were all drinking until about twelve years ago.)
These people don’t remember what it was like before the craft beer boom – they were too young. So let’s look at the current situation with a bit of longer-term context.
For decades, beer and brewing weren’t interesting to anyone beyond people who worked in the industry (and not always then) and a handful of hobbyists. I began working in the industry as a strategist helping to create ad campaigns for Stella Artois and Heineken. Back then, many of my clients couldn’t tell you what beer was made of, what hops were, what the difference between ale and lager was, or the history of their beers. They said no one wanted beer to have flavour or character. They said people “drank the advertising.” They said beer was “fuel” for 18-34-year-old men on a big night out. And that was it. Oh, there was the Campaign for Real Ale, but they were all really old (i.e. over 40), set in their ways and fuddy-duddy, so there was no point talking to them. They said.
Every few years there’d be a pink beer aimed at women, with pictures of stilettos or jewellery on the label, and it would fail just as spectacularly as the last one.
The situation for good, flavourful, interesting beer back then was a lot worse then than it is now.
I started writing about beer instead of making ads because I thought my Big Beer clients were wrong. People were becoming more interested in flavourful food and drink, more curious about where it came from and who made it. I simply didn’t believe that this could apply across every single aspect of food and drink except beer.
And I was right. The introduction of progressive beer duty in 2002 created an explosion of small brewers. Then a few of us discovered American craft beer. Eventually, brewers such as Thornbridge, Dark Star and Roosters began experimenting with American hops, and reinterpreting American takes on traditional British beer styles, such as IPA, stout and brown ale, in a friendly game of transatlantic craft-brewing tennis.
This all came with a culture of openness, idealism and joyful optimism. We were a small community, and most people knew each other. People who met online would meet up IRL for “Twiss-ups.” We’d travel miles for the opening of a new craft beer bar. Beer blogging side-stepped the (still current) near-total blackout of beer reporting in mainstream media, to document the scene in real time as it evolved.
This spirit, this energy and optimism, helped make craft beer attractive to a previously non-beery audience. Mainstream beer had become something you bought on price, by the slab, from the supermarket. But within a few years, beer was cool again. It was new and exciting. It captured the public imagination. Its cultural value – which had always been there – was finally recognised.
Maybe I’m just out of touch these days, but it feels like this spirit has been lost. We seem to talk so much about the issues and problems in the industry, the gossip and scandal, the bad practice and culture, who’s gone under and who’s been bought out, that there isn’t much time for talking about the joy of beer and brewing and drinking.
Things are still way better now then they were back in the day. I still believe that craft beer has the potential to grow further if it remains interesting and fun. So if you are feeling jaded and wondering where to go, I’d like to offer some prompts to rediscovering creativity and joy.
Remember why you got into this in the first place. What was the beer that made you go crazy about beer? What made you give up your old job or hobby for this one? Is that beer still around? Have you had it recently? How did it make you feel? What ideas did it inspire? Who did you share it with? If you had forgotten about this until now, write it down now and capture it. Because if you see someone drinking Madri and they seem to be having more fun than you, maybe you’ve lost your way.
Look to home brewers for inspiration. Ever since the first days of the North American craft-brewing revolution, home brewers have brewed the styles they yearn for but can’t get hold of commercially. This is how modern craft beer started. Today, it’s fascinating to judge home brews in competition, because if the beer isn’t everything the brewer wants it to be, they don’t send it in, so the standard of beers that do make it to the competition is very high. I’ve judged a couple of home brew competitions in Continental Europe recently, and they’re increasingly interested in traditional British ale styles. Partly they’re looking for session-strength beers, but with some interesting flavours. But is there something else behind it too? What will they look to next?
Remember you’re allowed to like more than one thing. Increasingly, social discourse is binary. Short attention spans reward constructs like, “Are you Team A or Team B?” “This random thing: good or bad?” The world isn’t like that. Not all big brewers are awful and not all small brewers are good. Mild doesn’t have to be either the coolest thing going or utterly irrelevant. You can enjoy both cask and keg, craft and macro, Batham’s Bitter and Vault City 24k Maple Caramel Carrot Cake. Drinkers do. Be more pluralistic. Less binary.
If you’re a brewer, read a book. It doesn’t have to be one of mine (but it would be nice if it was.) But books take a long, broad view, stepping back and taking things in. They reveal history and explain things. The best compliment I get as a writer from brewers is “You made me want to do this” or “You reminded me why I do it.” Maybe inspiration and joy still lurks on the shelves.
If you’re a commentator, do a brew day. I understood brewing on an intellectual level for several years before I actually went to a working brewery. It was only then that I truly got it. It’s the aromas – the stomach-rumbling breakfast cereal smell of mashing in, the heady perfume of the hop addition. Even today, after twenty years, any time I’m in a working brewery on brew day it reminds me why I do this, and I grin like a loon.
Try something that’s not on-trend. But don’t do it because it’s not on-trend. It’s not about trying to make dark milds cool again. It’s about brewing and/or drinking a dark mild (or a tripel – please – or a wheat beer, or a saison – remember them?) on its own terms, and asking yourself, have I missed anything here?
Answer this question honestly. Why don’t you think of Timothy Taylor Landlord as a Craft Beer? Or Budweiser Budvar? Or Orval? You do? Great! You’re still in touch with what most people out there think of as craft beer. If you don’t – why not? Is it because you don’t rate that particular beer? Or is it because, secretly, your own personal definition of craft beer isn’t about quality and flavour and ingredients and process and intent, but about whether it’s new and it’s got a label with cartoons on it and it’s using this year’s cool new hop? If so, I’m afraid you’re starting to sound a bit like my old Stella and Heineken clients. Craft beer has always been around, even if it hasn’t always been called that. It always will be, in some form.
For my own part, I’m going to search for the good news stories. And when I find them, I’m going to share them. This is me relaunching my blog, after neglecting it for years. It’s Friday. It’s sunny. Let’s go drink something great.
A Bank Holiday Monday seems an odd time for Carlsberg Marston’s to announce a major story about Britain’s brewing heritage. But we live in odd times. Whatever – it’s good news.
Sometimes there’s a happy ending.
In January, Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company (CMBC) announced that they were getting rid one of the last remaining pieces of Burton-on-Trent’s brewing heritage. For decades, the old Marston’s brewery insisted that you couldn’t brew proper Marston’s Pedigree unless it went through the unique, eccentric Union fermentation system. Then suddenly, the story changed, and you could brew Pedigree even better in the same kind of fermenters everyone else uses.
Anyway, now it turns out that at least one of the Union “sets” has been saved. It’s currently being installed at Thornbridge in Derbyshire (photo above). This was announced, sort of, today by CMBC, who posted the tweet below. At the time of writing, the accompanying link is broken and there’s no relevant press release currently on the CMBC website.
Happily, Thornbridge will be providing clarification over the next day or so. And I’ve had a sneak preview.
The deal seems to have been orchestrated by Garrett Oliver, legendary brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery. Oliver has had a close relationship with Thornbridge for many years. And Brooklyn Brewery has a longstanding commercial relationship with Carlsberg. (It’s complicated – Carlsberg don’t own Brooklyn, but do have international rights to sell Brooklyn beers in Europe and other parts of the world.)
Oliver said:
“When I heard that the unions were slated to go silent, I immediately thought that Thornbridge would be the perfect inheritors of this beautiful piece of British brewing heritage. I’m thrilled to provide the ‘assist’ on this historic play.”
For their part, Thornbridge are going to do some really exciting things with the Union set that kick against the narrative that contributed to CMBC’s decision to discontinue the Unions: that cask ale is supposedly in terminal decline and brewers can’t make money from it any more.
For anyone wondering what the hell a union set is and why it’s important, this would be a good point to explain. It would be perfect if this news could have waited till after my forthcoming article in Ferment magazine on this very subject. But that’s going to be a week or two. And it’s now. So let me sum up briefly.
In the nineteenth century, Burton was the most important brewing centre on the planet, home of the OG IPA. The Union system emerged in the town in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a curious – no, let’s not beat around the bush – it was downright weird and strange and brilliant and British. A bunch of wooden barrels or a “set” – sat horizontally alongside each other in a kind of scaffold. Held in union. On top of this scaffold sat a big iron trough. Swan-necked spouts stretched form each barrel into the trough. After beer had been inoculated with yeast, it would be pumped into the barrels. As it fermented, the yeast pushed up through the pipes, foamed into the trough, and sat there happily for a bit before gradually running back into the barrels. It would keep doing this until it finished fermenting. Why? Apparently, it kept the yeast really happy and healthy, and that meant better beer. You want a definition of craft beer that’s actually about, y’know, the word “CRAFT” rather than who owns what? This was it.
That’s why it’s important that at least one Union Set has been saved. This is our brewing heritage. When Burton produced a quarter of all the beer in Britain, plus a big chunk of its exports, all Burton breweries used unions. To be fair to Marston’s, they clung to the unions decades longer than everyone else did.
CMBC cited “Low volumes due to the decline of the UK cask market” as the reason why “using the Union sets is no longer viable.” So why does a brewer like Thornbridge think they are?
Starting with a brew of their flagship beer, Jaipur, they plan to follow up by brewing other well-loved beers from their armoury, some brand-new new beers specifically designed for the Union set, as well as collaborations with other brewers who are keen to see what a union-fermented version of their beers will look like. I’m told at least one of these will involve Garrett Oliver, sooner rather than later.
Every aspect of this serves to premiumise cask beer, which is what cask beer has to do if it is going to thrive.
Let’s see what else Thornbridge reveal. Let’s see if CNBC can decide if they’ve issued a press release or not before then. I’m sure there’ll be lots of hot takes on this. But Britain now has an authentic union set brewing beer again. Which it didn’t have before this deal was struck.
If you’re a fan of my writing, you may be wondering where I’ve been for most of 2023. Here’s what’s been happening and what I have planned for the future.
I wrote 12 books at this desk. Over the course of 23 years. I won’t be writing any more here.
Rooms always look so defeated when you’ve cleared them. The very act of taking stuff out spreads dirt and dust. The denuding of shelves and corners reveals a lot of dust and dirt you never knew were there, all the better to spread around. You lay down the marks of your presence, your habits, your rituals, and your leaving reveals them, shamefully.
As of now, this room belongs to someone else. This week we completed on the sale of the house we’ve lived in since 2001. I am very, very lucky that I was part of the last generation to be able to just about to afford to buy property in London without having rich parents.
Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, we were lucky again when my wife Liz was made redundant under dodgy circumstances, because the payout gave us a deposit. We were lucky yet again four years later, when the rundown, dodgy neighbourhood we could afford to buy in was named the site for the 2012 London Olympics, and received billions of pounds of investment, sending house prices soaring to a level we could never have afforded.
You don’t make much money as a writer. I had a house that is worth an awful lot of money, but apart from that, I had only debt. No savings, no investments, no pending inheritances, not even a regular income I could rely on. The Covid lockdown ruined me financially – for two years I earned less than my mortgage payments.
We have no children to pass on our very expensive house to. So we’re cashing in – paying off the mortgage and all our debts, buying a house for less than half the price we’re selling ours for, and from now on, splitting our time between a small flat in London and a house in Norwich.
When I tell people we’re moving to Norwich, people who haven’t been there often repeat “NORWICH? Why Norwich?” with a facial expression like this:
I am eternally grateful to Steve Coogan, and his creation, Alan Partridge, for the image they have created for Norwich and North Norfolk. Partridge, in all his ridiculous pomposity, is the kind of person you think you’re going to meet if you go there. I reckon that’s kept a couple of hundred grand off the price of the beautiful Georgian townhouse we’re buying.
That house is twenty minutes walk from the centre of town, along (I swear on my life I didn’t know this when we first looked at the house) the NR3 Beer Mile, a stretch of eight or nine of the most delightful pubs I’ve ever seen. Beer costs 2/3 of what it does in London. The coast (all the North Norfolk coast, in different directions) is half an hour’s drive away. There are seals on the beach just now. People often ask “Why Norwich?!” That’s some reasons why. There are more. Here’s another:
This isn’t Ghent or Bruges. This is a pub 15 minutes walk from my new house. It specialises in cask ale and has 8-10 taps on at any given time, mostly from small local brewers. It has a deck that runs the length of the pub along the river.
What does this mean for my writing and your reading pleasure?
This has been the most difficult year of my life. In March my little brother died, alone, depressed and in anguish, due to illnesses related to chronic alcoholism. I didn’t want to write much about beer after that. I had to do a lot of soul searching, and a bit of therapy. I go stuck in the “anger” stage of grief for about five months, and my written output consisted mainly of me swearing at right-wing politicians on Twitter. If you wondered what was happening to me (some people did contact me, worried about my mental health) this was it. If you were offended or frustrated by anything I wrote, I apologise (unless you’re Rishi Sunak or Suella fucking Braverman.)
Anyway, I’m through that now. (You don’t get over grief; you just figure out how it live with it.) And the process of sorting out Stuart’s flat and estate gave us the impetus to move.
Now, without having to service thousands of pounds of debt every month, I have more time to write. And I can be choosier about what I do. In the New Year, I’ll be relaunching my writing career across varikous platforms.
A trade press article about trends in the fruited “cider” category which will take three days to research and pay £150? No thank you.
Reviews of afternoons spent in coastal pubs, musing life, just for the pleasure of it? Yes please.
Norwich is famous for its excellent pubs – it used to boast one for every day of the year. And everywhere else from the North Norfolk coast to the Norfolk Broads to breweries such as the excellent Duration, Ampersand and Little Earth Project are, at most, a 45-minute drive away.
Apart from the local attractions, I have two new book ideas I’m working on, and the time to do them – after Clubland, I simply could not afford to write another book, and have had to spend most of the working time I’ve had this year on consultancy projects instead. I probably don’t have another 12 books left in me (sorry, new writing room) but I hope my best ones are still ahead of me.
The report will once again be written by award-winning, Barnsley-born beer writer Pete Brown, and has again been commissioned by Professor Vanessa Toulmin, Director of City, Culture and Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield. Jules Gray, founder and director of Sheffield Beer Week and owner of Hop Hideout, completes the team behind the report.
“The first report had a huge impact on how Sheffield is seen, particularly in terms of the Visitor Economy,” said Professor Toulmin. “But the numbers in it are now nearly eight years out of date. It’s clear that the report is valuable, so we have to have an updated version.”
“A great deal has happened in the beer world since 2016,” said Pete Brown. “Sheffield is still a great city to drink beer in, but like everywhere else, brewing and hospitality have been hit by Covid and the cost-of-living crisis. Some brewers have closed, but other new ones have opened. I get the sense that the Sheffield beer scene is actually more interesting and diverse than it was, even more of an attraction to the city and the region than it was in 2016, but I’m very keen to put some numbers on that and dig deeper.”
The team will be exploring the Sheffield beer scene at this week’s Steel City Beer and Cider Festival, held at the Kelham Island Museum from Wednesday 18th to Saturday 21st October. They’ll then be gathering data from brewers to produce an up-to-date snapshot of current activity and trends, and exploring deeper themes including the role of brewing in the regeneration of parts of the city, and the increasing role of women in the industry.
The 2016 Sheffield Beer City report found that:
The Sheffield city region could claim the title of birthplace of the UK craft beer revolution.
Sheffield had one brewery for every 23,991 people – 4.7 times more brewers per capita than Greater London.
On a typical day 400 different unique beers were available in the city’s pubs.
The city region’s breweries turn out over 1,000 different beers each year.
As well as the report, in 2024 there’ll also be a series of podcasts and other online materials that will dive deeper into some of the issues explored in the report.
The report will be launched at the next Sheffield Beer Week, which will be taking place from 4 to 10 March 2024.
Pete Brown is a British writer who specialises in making people thirsty. He is the author of twelve books and writes widely in the drinks trade press and consumer press.
