Author: PeteBrown

| Brewing, Brooklyn Brewery, Cask ale, Thornbridge

Thornbridge and Garrett Oliver Save the Famous Burton Unions

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.

You might also like...

| Mental Health, Uncategorised, Writing

A Personal Update

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.

I hope you’ll stick with me for the ride.

You might also like...

| Beer

New Report to explore if Sheffield is STILL the best city in the world for beer!

The Sheffield Beer City Report, first published in 2016, is now being revisited, revised and updated, to be launched at the 2024 Sheffield Beer Week.

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.

You might also like...

| Cask ale

BEER INDUSTRY CAMPAIGN REIGNITES CONVERSATIONS ABOUT CASK ALE

I’ve been working for the last six months on the cross-industry ‘Drink Cask Free’ campaign, which aims to make cask ale more relevant to a younger audience who only drink it now and then. Here’s the press release we just issued about the camapaign. It contains links to download the presentation slides and a video of my presentation yesterday.

There’s growing interest in cask ale amongst younger drinkers, according to the results of a test campaign by a cross-industry coalition, as issues like freshness, craft and local provenance top the list of priorities when choosing drink and food options.

The campaign was designed to make cask ale more noticeable and relevant to drinkers younger than its core base. It succeeded in making cask more visible on the bar, prompting conversations among drinkers and staff, and generating sampling activity. In some pubs this translated into increased sales.

Consumer research found that people do not hold the long-parroted stereotypes about cask ale. They see it as a more considered, mellow, flavourful drink that’s perfect for slower tempo occasions. They like and respect its tradition and heritage, and are even more interested in the fact that it is often locally produced on a smaller, more hand-crafted scale than big lager brands, and offers a wide variety of flavours and styles.

The main reason they don’t drink cask more often is that it’s increasingly less visible on the bar, which is where they often decide what to drink. All other draught beers are now served at eye level, from tal fonts, into branded glassware. Cask is falling behind in the visibility arms race, and needs to catch up. The product, and the variety it boasts, needs to be celebrated visually.       

Campaign coordinator Pete Brown said, “As we’ve seen before in all the research on cask, there are no deeply held prejudices against cask ale. What we’ve learned from this pilot are some specific fixes in-outlet. It’s clear that the vibrant line-up of cask, with constantly changing guest ales, is part of its appeal. But this also means that the issues would be best solved at a category level, with the industry working together to promote the visibility and relevance of cask as a whole.”    

The summary presentation of the Drink Cask Fresh campaign is available here: https://we.tl/t-zx1bpnzivd

A video pf Pete Brown presenting it, followed by Q&A at the trade day of this year’s Great British Beer Festival, can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/849416299/50082713ad?share=copy

The collective behind the trial are now urging the cask and hospitality industries to fund a national roll-out of the campaign later this year or in early 2024.   

ENDS

***

NOTES FOR EDITORS

  • The pilot phase of the Drink Cask Fresh campaign ran from w/c 6th March to w/c 8th May.  
  • The campaign comprised of 20 pilot pubs, each with a paired control pub, similar in profile and cask sales, and measuring the difference between them over the pilot period As well as examining sales data, qualitative market research was undertaken with pub staff and with drinkers, to understand exactly how the campaign was working.  
  • Drink Cask Fresh was co-founded by SIBA’s Head of Comms and Marketing Neil Walker, and former CAMRA Senior Communications Manager Katie Wiles. Writer and consultant Pete Brown succeeded Katie Wiles as Project Manager. Creative work was by Ape Creative and campaign research was undertaken by Jane Lyons of Research Management & Consultancy.
  • The pilot campaign was funded by Arkells, Asahi, BBPA, CAMRA, Greene King, Harveys, Hogs Back, IFBB, Lincoln Green, Robinsons Brewery, Sharps, Shepherd Neame, SIBA, Timothy Taylors, and Wadworth.
  • The project was supported by breweries, pub groups and organisations across the beer and hospitality industries, including Admiral Taverns, the All Party Parliamentary Beer Group, the BII, Black Sheep, Camerons, CAMRA, Cask Marque, Festival Glass, Greene King, Harvey’s, Lincoln Green, McMullens, Robinsons, Sharps, Shepherd Neame, SIBA, Star Pubs & Bars, Three Acres, Titanic, and Wells & Co.
  • The organisers would love to hear from anyone wishing to help support the campaign as it rolls out beyond its pilot phase to become a national campaign. To get involved, find out further information, or get more comment or imagery, please contact petebrownsemail@gmail.com, jane.eason@camra.org.uk, or head to www.drinkcaskfresh.co.uk.

You might also like...

| Clubland, Working men's clubs

Harry Belafonte’s near miss with Barnsley Clubland

Just saw the news that the legendary Harry Belafonte has died. He was the subject of one of my favourite stories I was told while researching my last book. It’s fucking hilarious. It also reveals the extent to which he was a progressive activist as well as a gifted singer. I shall be eternally in Ian Clayton’s debt after he shared with me not only the story, but also the means of verifying it.

From Clubland:

American singer Harry Belafonte wrote to Arthur Scargill to say that he was coming to England and would like to meet up. Arthur invited Harry and his wife to come and stay with him and Ann Scargill. Before he arrived, Arthur went to the Swaithe Working Men’s Club in Monkspring, near Barnsley, to ask if the Concert Secretary would like to have Harry Belafonte sing a few songs. The Concert Secretary thought for a bit and said, “Ooh! I’m not sure about that Arthur. I’ve got plenty of top turns booked up well in advance. I can’t just make exceptions at the drop of a hat. Arrabella who, did tha say?” 

*

There’s only one question in my mind the first time Ian Clayton tells me this story. I think you can guess what it is. How the hell did Harry Belafonte know Arthur Scargill, and why did he want to come and stay with him? 

“The Scargills were guests of Fidel Castro at the 11th World Festival of Youth and Students in Cuba in 1978, explains Ian. “While they were there Arthur sat with the dignitaries; Joshua Nkomo, Yasser Arafat, who was carrying a silver pistol, and Harry Belafonte, who was there as some sort of cultural ambassador. Ann went swimming with Belafonte and his wife every morning. Arthur tells a brilliant story about how at the closing ceremony they were all sat close together on a podium. He leaned over to Belafonte and said ‘It’s to be hoped if any snipers are thinking of having a pot at Fidel today, that they’re a good shot!’”

The paperback of Clubland is published on 8th June.

You might also like...

| Uncategorised

New campaign to boost the image of cask ale

Finally, the beer industry has come together to promote cask ale. And I find myself right in the thick of it.

This week, the “Drink Cask Fresh” campaign launched in 27 pilot pubs across England. 

And after one of the co-founders of the campaign left the beer industry for a new job, I find myself running it.

The woes of cask ale can be pinned down to three main factors:

  • Quality: can be variable, especially if left on the bar too long ior not looked after properly.
  • Pricing: a beer that is every inch artisanal, quality, is priced cheaper than almost any other beer on the bar. Not only does that not exactly scream premium (see above) it means less margin for cash-strapped publicans, so they don’t prioritise cask, which exacerbates the other issues. 
  • Image: we tell ourselves that people see cask ale as the drink of old men with flat caps and weird beards (but not the hipster kind of flat cap and weird beard I guess). 

It’s within the gift of the brewing and pub industry to sort out the first two problems. All that’s needed is bold leadership and decisive action by people who care.  

The image problem is the one that’s externally facing. 

Each time we do talk about the negative image of “real ale” and its drinkers, we’re the ones perpetuating a stereotype that simply isn’t there outside the beer bubble. Every piece of research I’ve seen in the last sixteen years – and that’s a lot of research – shows that most beer drinkers haver the occasional pint of cask. When asked why they don’t drink more, only a tiny minority raise issues of the negative image we talk about. If they’re given a bunch of reasons to choose from, the most popular answer is usually “Don’t know.” In a world where repertoires are growing and breadth of choice is become a problem rather than a luxury, cask ale just doesn’t get into the consideration set.

It’s not a question of changing the image of cask ale; but one of giving it a reason to be there. So what’s that reason? 

We’ve banged on for years about it being Britain’s national drink. That works for some people, but not the younger drinkers who aren’t into it now. There’s the skill ,craft, flavour and attention, but craft beer already provides that, and it comes in cans with cartoons on them. 

One thing drinkers say they do care about is freshness. It’s one of the top two or three things they mention when thinking specifically about the beer. And they currently believe the freshest beer on the bar is bottle lager Why? Who knows? Maybe a residual hangover from Budweiser’s “born on date” campaign, but that was a while ago now. 

Anyway, the last beer they associate with freshness is cask ale. Which is ironic. Because it’s the freshest beer on the bar. Once it’s on, it has the shortest shelf-life of any beer. It’s more likely to have been brewed locally. So if the pub is any good, it spends less time in the cellar before it goes on the bar, and less time on the bat once it’s there.

Drinkers don’t currently associate freshness with cask Will they? And will it make them reappraise cask if they do?

That’s what the Drink Cask Fresh campaign aims to find out. 

In the pilot phase, the campaign will be evaluated by comparing 27 pilot pubs with a paired control pub, similar in profile and cask sales, and measuring the difference between them over the pilot period.

Campaign kits developed by agency Ape Creative include bright wraps to fit around pump clips, branded glassware and bar runners, and beer mats with different messages about cask ale that link through to a website, https://www.drinkcaskfresh.co.uk. Here, they can learn more about how cask ale is not only the freshest beer on the bar, but also has a variety of flavours, is skilfully brewed and kept, and has strong sustainability stories. 

As well as examining sales data, qualitative market research will be undertaken with pub staff and with drinkers, to understand exactly how the campaign is working. This pilot runs from w/c 6th March to w/c 8th May. After that, if it’s successful, we hope to roll it out as a national campaign. At this stage, that’s when pubs who are passionate about cask can get involved.

But that’s going to take more budget from the industry. If you are interested in joining, please do drop me a line. In the meantime, please do visit the website and follow us on social media.   

You might also like...

| AB InBev, Bass Ale, Beer, Beer Marketing, Brewing, Brooklyn Brewery, Cask ale, Craft Beer, Dark Star, Fuller's, Goose Island, Lager, The Business End

Who Really Owns/Brews Your Favourite Beer?

There are many reasons to drink craft beer or real ale. There are other reasons to drink exotic ‘foreign’ lagers. But if ‘authenticity’ or supporting small, independent brewers is one of your motivations, you might find this useful.

There’s no getting away from the economic reality that if something challenges a big player in any market, the giant will either try to destroy it, replicate it, or if that doesn’t work, buy it.

As craft beer went mainstream, it attracted a much bigger audience than just beer geeks. It sold at a premium compared to mainstream lager. Big brewers had commoditised their own brands, so they got jealous and wanted a piece of craft’s action. (You might think that’s unfair, but if you were working for one of these big brewers, that’s what you’d do too.)

Many leading craft brands have now been acquired by the giants. That’s just how it is. Now – the ownership structure of the beer industry may be of no interest to you. If you’re already drinking mainstream lagers from global giants and you just occasionally fancy something hoppier, that’s up to you. I won’t judge.

However, if one of your motivations for drinking craft beer – or just as importantly, cask/real ale – is that you want to support small, independent businesses, it’s not always obvious whether or not the brand in front of you is the real deal. Big corporations pay a lot of money to acquire the cool cachet of craft brands, and they’re not always eager to tell you the truth.

So I’ve compiled a list of who owns what. If your favourite brand is not here, then it is what it claims to be – independent at least, if not always small.

I’m passing no judgement here. Some of the beers below remain excellent beers, and there are quite a few that I regularly buy myself. I’m not telling you not to buy them. I’m just providing the information.

As I went through the corporate websites, I also encountered a lot of what we now call “world lagers.” People often buy these beers partially because they’re buying into an idea of the country of origin, believing that they have been imported to the UK. But most of these lagers are in fact brewed in the UK. Some of them have never even been near the place they are supposedly brewed. So all the beers below are brewed in the UK unless otherwise stated.

First, here’s a list of brewery/beer brands in alphabetical order, so if you want to check on a particular beer, you can find it easily:

AmstelHeineken
Asahi (Brewed in Italy/UK – seems to be moving aroubnd a bit.)Asahi
BackyardCarlsberg Marstons
Banks’sCarlsberg Marstons
Bass (Brewed by Carlsberg Marstons)AB-InBev
BeavertownHeineken
BecksAB-InBev
Blue MoonMolson Coors
BoddingtonsAB-InBev
BrahmaAB-InBev
BrixtonHeineken
BrixtonHeineken
Brooklyn (not owned outright but Carlsberg Martsons has brand rights in Europe – they brew and sell the beers here)Carlsberg Marstons
BudweiserAB-InBev
Caffrey’sMolson Coors
CaledonianHeineken
Camden TownAB-InBev
CarlingMolson Coors
CarlsbergCarlsberg Marstons
CobraMolson Coors
CoorsMolson Coors
CoronaAB-InBev
CourageCarlsberg Marstons
Dark StarAsahi
DesperadosHeineken
Deuchars IPAHeineken
Eagle (Waggledance, Eagle IPA etc.)Carlsberg Marstons
Erdinger (Independently owned and brewed in Germany. UK marketing and distribution by CM.)Carlsberg Marstons
Estrella Damm (Independently owned and brewed in Spain, packaged in UK. UK marketing and distribution by CM.)Carlsberg Marstons
FostersHeineken
Franciscan WellMolson Coors
Fuller’sAsahi
Goose Island (Brewed in UK)AB-InBev
Grimbergen (brewed in Belgium, France, Poland and Italy)Carlsberg Marstons
Grolsch (Brewed in Netherlands)Asahi
Heineken (Brewed in Netherlands)Heineken
HobgoblinCarlsberg Marstons
Hoegaarden (brewed in Belgium)AB-InBev
HolstenCarlsberg Marstons
JenningsCarlsberg Marstons
John Smith’sHeineken
Kirin Ichiban (Owned by Kirin, brewed and marketed in UK by CM)Carlsberg Marstons
KronenbourgHeineken
Lagunitas (brewed in Netherlands)Heineken
LechAsahi
Leffe (Brewed in Belgium)AB-InBev
Lowebrau (Brewed in Germany?)AB-InBev
MadriMolson Coors
Marstons (Pedigree and all others)Carlsberg Marstons
MeantimeAsahi
MichelobAB-InBev
Miller Genuine DraftMolson Coors
MorettiHeineken
Murphy’s Irish StoutHeineken
Newcastle BrownHeineken
Peroni (Really brewed in Italy!)Asahi
Pilsner Urquell (Really brewed in Pilsen!)Asahi
PorettiCarlsberg Marstons
PravhaMolson Coors
Red StripeHeineken
RingwoodCarlsberg Marstons
Sagres (brewed in Portugal)Heineken
San MiguelCarslberg Marstons
Sharp’s (Doom Bar and all others)Molson Coors
ShedheadCarlsberg Marstons
ShipyardCarlsberg Marstons
SkolCarlsberg Marstons
SolHeineken
StaropramenMolson Coors
Stella ArtoisAB-InBev
Tetley’sCarlsberg Marstons
TigerHeineken
TuborgCarlsberg Marstons
TyskieAsahi
WainrightCarlsberg Marstons
Warsteiner (Brewed in Germany)Carlsberg Marstons
Worthington’sMolson Coors
WychwoodCarlsberg Marstons

Now, here’s the same list sorted by corporation – just for interest really – so you can see who owns what:

Bass (Brewed by Carlsberg Marstons)AB-InBev
BecksAB-InBev
BoddingtonsAB-InBev
BrahmaAB-InBev
BudweiserAB-InBev
Camden TownAB-InBev
CoronaAB-InBev
Goose Island (Brewed in UK)AB-InBev
Hoegaarden (brewed in Belgium)AB-InBev
Leffe (Brewed in Belgium)AB-InBev
Lowebrau (Brewed in Germany?)AB-InBev
MichelobAB-InBev
Stella ArtoisAB-InBev
Asahi (Brewed in Italy/UK – seems to be moving aroubnd a bit.)Asahi
Dark StarAsahi
Fuller’sAsahi
Grolsch (Brewed in Netherlands)Asahi
LechAsahi
MeantimeAsahi
Peroni (Really brewed in Italy!)Asahi
Pilsner Urquell (Really brewed in Pilsen!)Asahi
TyskieAsahi
BackyardCarlsberg Marstons
Banks’sCarlsberg Marstons
Brooklyn (not owned outright but Carlsberg Martsons has brand rights in Europe – they brew and sell the beers here)Carlsberg Marstons
CarlsbergCarlsberg Marstons
CourageCarlsberg Marstons
Eagle (Waggledance, Eagle IPA etc.)Carlsberg Marstons
Erdinger (Independently owned and brewed in Germany. UK marketing and distribution by CM.)Carlsberg Marstons
Estrella Damm (Independently owned and brewed in Spain, packaged in UK. UK marketing and distribution by CM.)Carlsberg Marstons
Grimbergen (brewed in Belgium, France, Poland and Italy)Carlsberg Marstons
HobgoblinCarlsberg Marstons
HolstenCarlsberg Marstons
JenningsCarlsberg Marstons
Kirin Ichiban (Owned by Kirin, brewed and marketed in UK by CM)Carlsberg Marstons
Marstons (Pedigree and all others)Carlsberg Marstons
PorettiCarlsberg Marstons
RingwoodCarlsberg Marstons
ShedheadCarlsberg Marstons
ShipyardCarlsberg Marstons
SkolCarlsberg Marstons
Tetley’sCarlsberg Marstons
TuborgCarlsberg Marstons
WainrightCarlsberg Marstons
Warsteiner (Brewed in Germany)Carlsberg Marstons
WychwoodCarlsberg Marstons
San MiguelCarslberg Marstons
AmstelHeineken
BeavertownHeineken
BrixtonHeineken
BrixtonHeineken
CaledonianHeineken
DesperadosHeineken
Deuchars IPAHeineken
FostersHeineken
Heineken (Brewed in Netherlands)Heineken
John Smith’sHeineken
KronenbourgHeineken
Lagunitas (brewed in Netherlands)Heineken
MorettiHeineken
Murphy’s Irish StoutHeineken
Newcastle BrownHeineken
Red StripeHeineken
Sagres (brewed in Portugal)Heineken
SolHeineken
TigerHeineken
Blue MoonMolson Coors
Caffrey’sMolson Coors
CarlingMolson Coors
CobraMolson Coors
CoorsMolson Coors
Franciscan WellMolson Coors
MadriMolson Coors
Miller Genuine DraftMolson Coors
PravhaMolson Coors
Sharp’s (Doom Bar and all others)Molson Coors
StaropramenMolson Coors
Worthington’sMolson Coors

This list is correct to the best of my knowledge but clearly things will change. I am more than happy to accept corrections and additions from either the brands and brand owners themselves or from drinkers who spot something I’ve missed. I will keep it up to date from now on.

You might also like...

| Beer Writing, British Guild of Beer Writers, Writing

How the Guild of Beer Writers judges its annual awards

Last week, as Chair of Judges at this year’s Beer Writers’ Awards, I presented Johnny Garrett with the award for Beer Writer of the Year for 2022. There’s always discussion and speculation about these awards online, which occasionally reveals that people don’t really know how they work. So here’s a full and frank account of how the awards happen.

About the Guild and the Awards

The British Guild of Beer Writers was formed in 1988 with the following objectives:

  • To promote excellence in beer, cider, and pub communications
  • To support beer and cider communicators in their professional and skills development
  • To help educate, inform and inspire people about beer, cider, and pubs
  • The Guild is formed as a non-political body to pursue these aims

The annual awards seek to reward beer writers with both recognition and cash awards. They change continually over time to reflect developments in beer communications. The scope and number of categories is reviewed on a continual basis.

The Guild is run by a Board of Directors, elected by members every year at the AGM. Of these directors, the Chair receives a small stipend, and in addition there is a paid, part-time secretary who works two days a week. The Treasurer also receives a small stipend. Everyone else on the Board donates their time on a voluntary basis. Directors must retire after three years by rotation, and seek re-election if they wan’t to continue on the Board.

The Awards and Dinner are a huge amount of work. While the Board oversees and approves any key decisions about the organisation of the Awards, such as recommended changes to categories, it has no direct involvement in the running of the Awards. This is outsourced to a paid, independent person or organisation who:

  • Finds and books the venue for the dinner
  • Recruits the judges
  • Advertises the awards and coordinates entries being received and distributed to the judges
  • Oversees the judging process

This means that the actual judging of the awards has no direct involvement from the Board (with one occasional exception – see “judges” below.) The Board, including the Chair, find out the results of the awards at the same time as everyone else in the room on the night, and have no decision making power.

Sponsors

The Guild looks for sponsors for the awards to (a) help pay for the dinner (the price of individual dinner tickets is kept below cost for Guild members) and (b) enable us to pay cash prizes to our winners. The Guild awards a cheque of £1000 for Gold tankard winners and £500 for silver tankard winners. This year the Guild awarded winners a prize pot totalling a record £19,500.

Anyone can sponsor award, but obviously, big brewers are more likely to be able to afford to sponsor. Some people are unhappy that large scale brewers have a presence at the awards. As stated above, the Guild is apolitical and as an organisation expresses no view on industry issues – though it works to support and amplify the right of any Guild member to make their own feelings known.

It’s perhaps understandable that people may worry about the potential for these sponsors in some way to compromise the independence of the Awards. The Guild takes steps to ensure that this cannot happen. The judging process has absolutely no input from sponsor organisations. Like the Guild Board, sponsors find out who the winners are on the night, at the same time as everyone else. Sponsors may ask to see the winning work that has been entered in their category after the event. As that work is already in the public domain, the Guild supplies it on request.

The Guild puts no pressure on any individual to not criticise a company just because they happen to be a sponsor. Often, sponsors are criticised by people entering the awards, maybe even people they are writing cheques to. Mostly, they accept this. If they don’t, they are free to withdraw their support from the awards. This has happened in the past.

Judges

Some comments that are critical of the awards talk of a clique of writers slapping each other on the back. Perhaps some of this comes from the fact that when someone wins Beer Writer of the Year, they are expected (though there’s no way of forcing anyone) to be Chair of Judges the following year. (The exception referred to above – this person may be a Board member, as I was when I won last year.I’ve won Beer Writer of the Year four times in total, so I have now chaired the judging four times.) This is actually intended to ensure that the same person can’t win year after year – you can’t win and then enter the awards the following year. There’s also an informal convention that the Chair of the Guild doesn’t enter the awards. (After winning Beer Writer of the Year in 2016, I judged the Awards in 2017 and then didn’t enter 2018-2021 as I was Chair of the Guild.)

So the Awards presentation may be given by familiar faces. But it’s a very different picture behind the scenes. The process of finding judges starts around April. Out of ten judges, very few are beer writers. Apart from the Chair, we look for a brewer who can read for technical accuracy, a journalist from outside the industry who’s lack of beer knowledge leaves them free to spot a good story, someone from the broader publishing world – a cross-section of different talents. Each year most of the judges doing this have never judged the awards before.

This year the awards were judged by me, a publican from York, a committee member of the British Institute of Innkeeping, a magazine editor, a brewer, a beer importer, two freelance journalists (an unusually high number) a book publisher, and a cheesemonger. Hardly beer writers slapping each other’s backs.

Many of these judges have never before seen the work of the communicators they are judging, and in some cases have never heard of the person submitting the work (none of us in this game is as well-known as we’d like to believe.) The judges can only make their decisions based purely on the work in front of them.

First Round Judging

We usually have 13-14 categories, and this year there were a total of 190 different entries. That’s far too much for any one judge to read, so judges are paired up and given a few categories each. These two judges read everything in the categories they are given, and from that prepare a shortlist of up to six finalists. They are also asked to give their opinion of who the winner and runner-up in that category should be. Each pair of judges selects their own shortlist and no one else’s. So no one person gets to go “This person should have five shortlist places, that person shouldn’t have any.” If you go shortlisted in four of five different categories, it means four or five different sets of judges have thought your work was good enough to go through without discussing it with each other.

Second Round Judging

The shortlists from each category are then shared with all the judges, so everyone reads each other’s once they are finalised. At the final judging meeting, each judge presents their shortlist and argues the case for their category winners. These decisions are debated, challenged and often overturned by their fellow judges. Often there’s consensus. This year many categories went to a vote, which was often very tight.

Once all the category winners are chosen, the Beer Writer of the Year is chosen from them. This is not just a process of maths – who’s won the most categories – through it often ends up going that way. But it’s never just nodded through.

An important point – once the judging is finished, then and only then are the shortlists made public. By the time the shortlist is published, the judges already know who the winners are. This means there is no space for lobbying that x or y should or shouldn’t win. By the time the shortlist is revealed, the judges know who the Beer Writer of the Year is, but no one outside the judging room (apart from the people who engrave the trophies and the AV guy who does the slides) knows who the winners are.

Bias and agenda

So to address some the criticism that is aimed at the Awards on social media after each year’s event, this exhaustive – and exhausting – process means “The Guild” has no say over who gets to win any award. It means very few people judge more than once, or in consecutive years, so there is no long-term agenda around who should or shouldn’t win. Each year has to be taken on its own merit because it’s a different set of judges and maybe even a different set of categories than the year before.

No one can guarantee that there definitely isn’t be someone on the judging committee who has either a grudge against or a bias towards any given entrant – there’s no extreme vetting process for judges before they are invited. But if such a situation did exist, that person would (a) Only be able to influence first round voting in two or three categories, and would (b) need to convince nine or ten other people in the room for second round judging to vote with their prejudice rather than with the other judges’ views on the work before them. It’s statistically possible that there might be more than one person in the room with the same grudge. But a majority? Year after year? The odds would have to be astronomical.

“The same old faces”

In 2021, we gave a total of 29 tankards or highly commended mentions. Eleven of these – more than a third – were to people who had never won a Guild award before. Best Newcomer and Best Citizen actually have it written into their descriptions that these awards cannot be for the same old faces. And of that sounds like some kind of patronising consolation – in 2015 the winner of the Best Newcomer Award (then called Best Young Beer Writer) swept several categories and won Beer Writer of the Year.

Seven awards last year were given to women: maybe that’s not enough, but it’s seven more than there were ten or fifteen years ago. In 2014, our Beer Writers of the Year were a male-female couple. In 2018, the Beer Writer of the Year was a woman in her own right for the first time. Two years later, the award was again won by a woman – who was only in her mid-twenties at the time.

This year, a further nine people were recognised in these awards for the first time.

No one can deny that there are cliques in the beer scene. But the Guild has worked extremely hard to ensure that doesn’t transfer to the judging of the Awards.

If you’re reading this and thinking “Hang on, that bit sounds like it might be open to abuse” or “That doesn’t seem fair,” please let me know and I’ll pass it on to next year’s judging team as part of my feedback from this year. Otherwise, I hope this reassures anyone reading that the awards judging process is fair and unbiased.

You might also like...

| Beer, Brewing, Water, Yeast

What is beer? No, seriously.

I’ve been writing about it for twenty years and drinking it for forty. But after a mind-bending dive into beer history, I’m not even sure what it is any more.

Last weekend I was in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, at the Ales Through the Ages Conference. I was honoured to be giving the keynote speech, which was titled “The Highs and Lows of Researching Beer History.” (You can see the full speech and slides if you sign up for my Patreon.)

In the speech, I questioned some of our assumptions about history. I basically took 45 minutes to say what Hilary Mantel said far more elegantly than I ever could in a couple of sentences: “History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record.”

And that record changes. As new technologies evolve and new discoveries emerge, the picture we have of the past changes: history changes. The past doesn’t change – obviously – but our understanding and knowledge of it does.

In a stroke of great fortune, these thoughts dovetailed perfectly with the opening speech of the conference proper. Travis Rupp, “The Beer Archaeologist,” spoke on the subject of “Defining Beer in the Ancient World.”

When I first started writing about beer, the consensus was that brewing began around 3000BC in Sumeria, because that’s how far the oldest evidence dated back. Within a couple of years, new carbon dating technology had pushed this back to around 7000BC. Then, in 2018, the whole ancient history of beer was rewritten once more.

Archeo-botanical evidence shows that the Natufian people of the Levant were fermenting grains 13,000 years ago, most likely to produce a drink for honouring the dead.

Does this make beer the oldest drink in the world?

Going into the conference, I’d followed the belief that mead must be older, because honey just got made in hives that hung around in forests. But Rupp completely disagrees. “It was very difficult, and very expensive, to gather enough honey to brew mead,” he says.

What about wine? Well, if we’re talking about something made from 100% grape juice, that’s pretty recent too. Wine was given a great press (so to speak) by the ancient Greeks and Romans, but before then, beer seems to have been dominant. New discoveries suggest the ancient Egyptians had commercial breweries capable of 5,000-gallon brews – way bigger than most craft breweries today.

But when we get back as far as the Natufians, we have to ask whether what they were making could technically be called beer. (For the purposes of this discussion, we’re ignoring the obsolete Middle Ages distinction between “beer” and “ale.” Hops were a very recent addition to beer across the total sweep of its history.)

I’ve always had a very simple distinction. All fermented drinks are based on sugars that yeast converts to alcohol. If those sugars come from fruit, the drink is wine (real cider is, effectively, apple wine.) If those sugars come from grains the drink is beer (which is why Japanese sake is technically rice beer rather than rice wine.) The domestication of grasses such as barley and Emmer wheat is pretty much the earliest marker for stable, permanent communities as opposed to nomadic wandering.

Ah. Says Rupp. But of the starches in the Natufian beer, only 34.2% came from grasses. The rest were a mix of starches from a wide variety of plants including lentils, tubers, leaves, even flowers. Fruit was likely added not primarily for flavour, but because the yeast on the skins would have started the fermentation.

So is this still beer?

For Rupp, it is. The key difference between the fermentable sugars in fruit and those in other plants is that the sugars in grains and tubers are stored as starch. Sugars in fruit will start fermenting as soon as yeasts can get to them. Starch needs to be modified in some way before yeasts can start to ferment. That’s why we malt grain in the brewing process, and why the evidence of Natufian brewing involves the grinding of both grains and tubers.

So for Rupp, “beer” is a drink that has been through a process we can loosely call brewing: it’s probably grain-based, but it has been mashed and heated in its production, before fermentation.

As the present changes the past, so the past changes the present. Just when you thought craft brewers had added everything imaginable to beer, let’s look forward to lentil, potato, rose and wheat beer…

Enjoyed reading this? Then please have a look at my Patreon and consider subscribing, from as little as £1 a month. It features exclusive and preview content and many other benefits such as free books, depending on your subscription level.

You might also like...