Author: PeteBrown

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Six ways to spot if anti-drink stories are trying to mislead you

Our old friends, the media’s favourite ‘binge drinking’ shots. One of these is staged by an actor. The other two show what might well be moderate alcohol consumption.

I do get bored of writing pieces that take down the regular tide of increasingly dishonest scare stories from anti-alcohol lobbies. But I also get increasingly angry that no mainstream news outlet seems prepared to do the same.

The other day we had yet another scare – the third in a week – when the coalition of anti-alcohol groups known as the Alcohol Health Alliance wrote an open letter to George Osborne warning him not to abolish the Duty Escalator, as this would lead to an increase in the £21 billion cost of alcohol to society, which far outstrips the £10billion raised by duty on booze.
While no newspaper challenged this as far as I can see, Christopher Snowdon did an excellent takedown on it, all the more effective for being so dispassionate. Chris, along with Phil Mellows and Paul Chase, are often quicker off the mark than I am these days, and have a surer grasp of the sometimes complicated stats that make it so easy for temperance groups to lie to us. Add all three to your blog roll. 
So I think Chris has this latest one covered – though it does anger me that I took apart the £21 billion claim four years ago and it’s still being quoted as fact.
It struck me that rather than simply repeat what Chris said in an angrier fashion, it might be more useful for me at this point to share some of the tips I’ve learned over the years for reading through these claims in the first place. Most of them don’t require you to do any extra reading, but do arm you with the healthy scepticism you need to read almost anything written about alcohol in the national press these days. (Many of them are also quite useful for any article on benefit scroungers, immigrants, urban foxes, or any other issue the Daily Mail is seeking to create a moral panic over.)
So here we go: seven questions to ask yourself when trying to work out if an article on drink is trying to mislead you:

1. Does the piece focus on specific examples rather than overall trends?
The common, time-honoured tactic of papers like The Sun and the Daily Mail is to take isolated cases and make them appear to be the norm. It’s extraordinarily effective: this North London muslim cleric is preaching hate speech against the west; this family of asylum seekers cheated the system; this family on benefits gets £30k a year and says they will never get a job… run two or three stories like this, and we start to believe they’re all at it. Almost always, in each case, any data available shows that these are random, isolated examples and are not reflective of the bigger picture, yet we start to believe they are. 
Using personal examples to bring a statistical story to life is good journalism. Using isolated examples to imply a trend when there is no data to suggest such a trend exists is not.
When the Daily Mail goes out to find pictures of drunken excess on New Year’s Eve, it will find them, because it knows where to look for them, and goes there, then pretends they are showing something typical of everywhere. They don’t reveal how hard they had to look, or how selective their choice of pictures had to be. 
(These stories are close relations to the Express’ ‘Global warming must be rubbish because it’s snowing outside my house,’ and the Guardian-style ‘Setting up your own online ethnic jewellery business must be THE trend of 2014 because two of my friends from uni are doing it’.) 
2. Has new research been published or is there any other genuine hook for the story?
New figures, such as the regular new studies that show moderate drinkers live longer, or that alcohol sales have declined again, are newsworthy because they are new. If there are none in the story, then its newsworthiness must be questioned. There was nothing new in yesterday’s letter to George Osborne. In fact the data it relied on is a decade old. I often have positive stories about beer and pubs rejected because they have no news hook. The same criterion seems not to apply to stories scaring people about alcohol.
3. If there are numbers, what is their source and how recent are they?
If the facts don’t fit, anti-alcohol groups have a habit of simply making them up. Last January, for example, Alcohol Concern launched its Dry January blitz with some sensational stats claiming 40% of daytime and 60% of nighttime hospital admissions were caused by alcohol. They provided no source for these figures, and ignored requests to do so. Of course their claims were still reported as fact, even though NHS figures show nothing of the kind. Look for stats compiled by the NHS and by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), which present the most accurate guess at what’s happening to our behaviour and, with the exception of liver disease, show long term, consistent decline in just about every measure of alcohol consumption and alcohol related harm.
Also, check how recent the data is, and where it’s from. The estimated £21 billion cost of alcohol to society is, on top of all its other flaws, based on a cabinet office report that is now 10 years old and therefore reflects higher levels of consumption, and drinking patterns as they were before the 2005 licensing act came into force. The much referred to ‘Sheffield Study’, on which the whole case for Minimum Unit Pricing is based, relies heavily on research carried out between 2002 and 2009 in two Canadian provinces – Ontario and British Columbia – where the availability and sale of alcohol is state controlled and operates entirely differently from the UK, and therefore is limited in its suitability as a comparison to the situation here.
As the problem with alcohol continues to recede, there’s an emerging trend to quote old data even when newer data shows the problem is in decline. In this example, Alcohol Concern knowingly and deliberately used out-of-date figures about under-age drinking that had been superseded by more recent figures that showed a marked decline in the problem. This led to newspaper headlines about ‘soaring’ alcohol abuse when the very data this claim was based upon showed it was actually declining.
This last example also illustrates a more popular method of misrepresenting data. Beware claims such as ‘Worry as over 45s now drink more than students’. This could be due to over 45s drinking more, or it could be due to students drinking less. If it is because over 45s are drinking more, you can guarantee the story will talk about a ‘shocking rise’ in figures that are ‘soaring’. If such an increase is not specified and the number is presented as a snapshot with no context over time, you can pretty much guarantee that the figure, whatever it is, and however shocking it might seem, is actually in decline over time, and that’s why they have not told you what the trend is.

4. Who wrote the piece and what is their interest?
As a Guardian reader, I get upset when a paper I generally trust (go on, take the piss here if you really need to) suddenly turns into the Daily Mail. On closer inspection, many of these articles are written by a ‘health editor’, who probably therefore has a different agenda and a different set of close contacts than a news reporter would (just as, to be fair, a business editor would have closer links with industry.) In articles such as this one, Guardian health writers consistently attack ‘the powerful alcohol industry’ for lobbying against Minimum Unit Pricing, when the facts are that large portions of the beer world – including CAMRA, many pub operators, Greene King, Tennents, the All Party Parliamentary Beer Group and the supposedly irresponsible (hint: they’re not irresponsible) Brew Dog were all publicly and loudly in favour of Minimum Pricing. At one stage the chief executives of twelve pub groups, brewers and night club chains wrote an open letter to David Cameron demanding he introduce minimum pricing. Yet the article above illustrates claims about the power of ‘the alcohol lobby’ killing MUP with a picture of beer. Whether you agree with these pro-MUP brewers and retailers or not, articles that repeatedly accuse the government of dancing to the tune of the drinks industry when the government is in fact acting against the wishes of a significant chunk of that industry are grossly inaccurate. That inaccuracy is borne out of the bias (or sometimes plain laziness) of the author.

5. Are the ‘experts’ being quoted really experts in what they’re talking about?  
When I’m ill I go to my doctor and I trust completely what she tells me about my health. If she were to tell me that alcohol had damaged my liver, I would believe her, especially if she referred me to a liver specialist who told me the same. 
But if my doctor were to say, “You know what? If you put a beer logo on a football shirt, that will make ten year old fans of that football club want to drink that beer,” I would say, “Well that’s your opinion, but you’re hardly an expert in that area, so there is no way you can assert that as fact with no research to back up your opinion.” 
That’s not how it works in public though. The 2009 Alcohol Select Committee report chose to believe a representative of the British Medical Association’s claims about the effect of alcohol advertising on children despite an independent report from people who were qualified in this area (unlike, say, a medical doctor) casting severe doubts on both the methodology and conclusions of the doctor’s claims. There are doctors and doctors. Some doctors, for whatever reason, have a personal passion against alcohol, and because they are doctors, their personal opinions are quoted as fact. When a doctor says that alcohol advertising deliberately targets kids, that doctor has nothing in his training that qualifies him better than anyone else to make this assertion. And I know that that doctor has never had an ad banned or a script rejected, like I had on many occasions in my advertising days, on the mere possibility that it just might appeal to children, even when there is no evidence that it does, when it contravenes neither the spirit nor letter of the strict advertising guidelines on this issue, and when there has been no complaint received that it does appeal to kids.

6. Are the claims being made by the protagonist countered or challenged in any way?
Use of language is an immediate giveaway as to whether the piece is impartial or not. Here’s a classic: Minimum pricing would save 860 lives a year, study finds. Not ‘study claims’, but ‘study finds’. The headline tells you all you need to know: here is a press release from an anti-alcohol organisation that has been accepted as incontrovertible fact by the (health) journalist writing the story. 
Moving beyond the choice of words used, the people quoted in the piece prove clear bias and a total lack of impartiality. We hear from the Alcohol Health Alliance, the lead author of the study, and of course professor Ian Gilmore. These three anti-alcohol voices are not balanced by one comment or contribution from the other side of the debate, and there is none offered by the journalist herself.
Once again, I’m not saying there is no alcohol problem. If you see an article where new data from an impartial source shows soaring alcohol problems, reported as news, then fair enough. But such articles are increasingly rare. As the true scale of our drinking problem continues to recede, all the tactics above are being used on an increasingly frequent basis to hide this truth from us. Next time you see a scare story on booze, give this checklist a try.

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| Alcohol, Dry January, Neo-prohibitionism, Social Trends

Eleven things I learned this Dry January

I can have a drink again the day after tomorrow. I might do, I might not. OK, I probably will. The lure of the hop, the anticipation of the crisp smack of the bittersweet apple, have been mostly dormant for the past four weeks, but now I’m so close to the finishing line, I’m getting thirsty again. I probably won’t drink the day after. Because whatever I do, and whenever I have my first drink, I won’t be going back to my old habits – not completely. Here are eleven things about drinking that I’ve learned over the last month and want to remember for the rest of the year.

1. Not drinking is amazing

In the first few days, you notice the better sleep, the higher energy, the greater clarity of thought. My blood pressure, which landed me in hospital in October, is now verging on normal. After a couple of weeks, you realise you’re thinking differently. You’re more in the moment, more thoughtful, more connected. This is not always pleasant. But like the physical benefits, it does feel like it’s doing you some good. My old mate, star of Three Sheets and Australian beer legend David Downie likes this side of things even more than he liked beer. This short account of his own experiment parts company with my own but has much in common, and is well worth a read for anyone who enjoys a drink, whether you ultimately share his path or not.

2. I’m not an alcoholic

No physical withdrawal symptoms, no cravings, no obsessive dreaming of drink, no problems being around people who are drinking. I drink for many reasons: because I’m stressed, because I’m relaxed, because I’m happy, because I’m sad, because I’m with people, because I’m alone. The times I’ve missed drinking the most are times relaxing with friends who are drinking, and that’s good because that’s when I should be drinking – something I can’t say so easily about some of the other times. I stumbled once, at a drinks industry event where the invitation clearly specified there were soft drinks available, and was wrong. Not even being able to get a glass of water, I cracked. But I drank less than I normally would. I didn’t feel compelled to carry on afterwards. I simply got back to not drinking the next day.

3. Many people are defensive around their own drinking

If you’re angry or annoyed with someone who is taking time off drinking, maybe you need to ask yourself why.

4. Each to their own

I take a month off every year because I drink heavily over the other eleven months. If you only drink a couple of days a week, or you stop after one glass, or any other permutation which means you are genuinely pretty sure you’re not overdoing it, you probably don’t need to do a #Dryathlon, whatever misinformation bodies like Alcohol Concern might spread. Your relationship with your alcohol consumption is your business alone (unless it reaches a stage where your actions harm other people.)

5. The eternal party you think you’re missing out on is not really happening

The social media networks we create for ourselves mean that every few minutes someone is telling us about the awesome beer they are currently enjoying. If we’re not drinking an awesome beer, we can feel like we’re the only ones missing out. But it’s just an illusion created by lots of people all drinking at different times and in different places. Not a single one of them is partying as hard as the aggregation of them makes it seem.

6. It’s an age thing

Lots of people drink heavily in their late teen and twenties. It’s a cultural norm, and it’s good for you. Lots of people then drastically reduce their drinking when they have kids and settle down and need to be sober enough to drive everywhere, or simply feel that propping up the bar every night is not a good look for someone with a family waiting at home. At some point, the childless among us need to stop drinking like 24 year-olds and recognise that, like fashion and hair styles, there’s a different way of doing it when you’re older.

7. It is possible to socialise without drink

It just takes some getting used to. Alcohol is a welcome social lubricant in many situations. Some of those can be almost as good without that lubricant. A scattered few might even be better.

8. Elderflower cordial is the hophead’s methadone

Nice and strong, with sparkling water, it seems I’m still a five-pints-a-night man. See also: spicy Virgin Mary, various proper loose leaf herbal teas.

9. The anti-drink lobby is in complete disarray

There’s nothing like a heavy drinker taking a break and being fine with it to illustrate the utter confusion among the anti-drink lobby. Parts of this lobby have mounted a massive campaign to persuade everyone to give up in January. Others say that if you feel the need to do this, it proves you have a problem. Other still say it might be bad for you because it encourages you to drink like a bastard for the rest of the year. I even read one article which tried to argue that an increasing number of people giving up alcohol in January was solid proof of more people drinking to greater excess – yep, that’s right – a rise in the number of people not drinking is proof that those people are drinking more. Some people simply drink a lot because they enjoy it, and are not alcoholics, and can stop as and when they need to. The more militant neo-prohibitionists hate this, because it disproves so much of their bullshit about the perils of booze. And that alone is reason enough to go dry for a month.

10. The pro-drink lobby is in complete disarray

As I wrote in a recent Publican’s Morning Advertiser piece, pubs don’t always cover themselves in glory in January. Heavy drinkers provide pubs with most of their profits over the year as a whole. Many of them go further than that by blogging, tweeting and otherwise spreading the word about how great their locals are. Often, these same people then get abuse when they decide to put their health before the pub’s profit for just a few weeks. That’s just plain nasty. Pubs are very quick to say they offer so much more than beer, and rightly so. If that’s true though, it shouldn’t be the end of the world if some of your regulars decide to temporarily abstain from alcohol. Maybe if pubs offered a decent range of soft drinks at sensible prices Dry January wouldn’t be such a financial problem. We Dryathletes still want to go out and see our friends in the convivial environment we love.

11. Drinking is amazing

By the second week you start to feel like a cultist praising the virtues of abstention. By the third week, you start to notice that everything is bright and shiny and hard. Perhaps a little TOO bright. It’s natural and healthy to sometimes want to fuzz the edges and turn the lights down to mood. I’ve missed that. But I’ve missed the sensory experience of drinking – the aromas and tastes of good beer, cider, wine, sherry and the occasional malt whisky, and the stories that go with them, the associations they have, the connections they make, the contemplations and flights of fancy they inspire – a whole lot more. Drink is special. It should feel like a treat, not something that’s so much a part of your routine that you hardly notice it, let alone appreciate it.

The end of my Dry January neatly coincides with a trip to Chicago next week for the American national cider conference. While I’m there, I’ll be taking in a new Lagunitas brewery opening, visiting Goose Island, and cramming in as many craft beer bars as I possibly can among the many wonderful US craft ciders. When I get back, I’m straight into looking at the drinks finalists for the Food and Farming Awards, then visiting Brew Dog in Aberdeen… and so it goes on. A rich and varied drinking life, and one that I want to be able to enjoy for many years to come.

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If you aren’t spending this weekend in a muddy field shouting at a tree, why not?

It’s wassail weekend. We covered Wassails in World’s Best Cider. I also wrote about different wassails for the now-defunct magazine Fire and Knives. Below is one edited piece that’s an amalgam of three of my favourite wassails. Photos by Bill Bradshaw. If you’ve never been to a wassail, now’s the time to start.

A man wearing a
facial disguise, a coat that looks like it’s made out of 1970s wallpaper and a
top hat with flowers and ostrich feathers on it advances towards me with a lit
blowtorch, his eyes gleaming in the firelight. 
There would be no point
trying to run – we’re up to our ankles in sticky mud. We’d be blind outside
this circle of firelight. And we’re in the middle of a field, miles from the
nearest village.
The man with the
blowtorch raises it above my head and lights a torch I’m carrying. Soon there
is a procession of us carrying yellow flames that give surprising illumination
against the night.
Strings of light
bulbs adorn the naked apple trees, turning them silvery and petrified,
faerie-like. 
We gather around a
large, hot bonfire, a poker protruding from its
embers, and the drizzle loses its spirit-sapping powers completely if you get
close enough to the flames.  Someone
plays a jolly tune on an accordion – and then everyone falls silent.  The Wassail Master of Ceremonies takes the
poker from the fire and plunges it into a wooden pail brimming with cider. The
liquid steams and foams, spewing onto the grass.  The MC carries the pail solemnly towards the
oldest apple tree in the orchard, steam flowing down its sides like a witch’s
cauldron.
Now, the Morris
men carry the queen on their shoulders and deposit her at the base of the
tree.  She takes a pitchfork with a slice
of toast speared on its prongs and dips it into the pail, then raises it into
the tree and teases the toast free from the prongs, leaving it in the branches
of the tree to attract robins, who will in turn attract good spirits to the
tree. The crowd raises a hearty cheer, and scores of flashlights fire, freezing
raindrops in the air like diamonds. 
The Queen’s reward
is a hearty drink from the cider pail, something she accomplishes so
enthusiastically it earns her another cheer. 
She pours the remains around the base of the old apple tree, giving back
the fruits of last year’s harvest to its roots. 
And now the entire crowd is gong batshit-crazy, banging sticks, cheering
and ululating, scaring away the evil spirits from the tree. Five men in flat
caps and neckerchiefs stride forward, raise shotguns and fire two volleys into
the branches, the retorts so loud I feel it in my chest rather than hear
it.  Orange sparks fly, smoke fills the
branches, and the air is thick with the smell of cordite.
And that’s when it
happens.  Reality shifts.
Mythology often
talks about ‘liminal’ places. 
Liminality, from the Latin limen,
or ‘threshold’, basically refers to a transitional state during a rite of
passage. Anywhere from an airport terminal to TV’s Twilight Zone could be described as a liminal place.  Throughout our history we’ve spun tales of
the existence of other worlds parallel to ours own, various heavens and hells
and, especially, the world of faerie. Normally these worlds are entirely separate
from ours and it’s impossible to pass between them at will. But there are
certain places – liminal places –
where the walls between the worlds are thin. 
A little magic seeps through and the edges, the margins of our world,
become infected by it.  Normal rules
bend, and at times don’t apply at all. 
In our search for
liminality, for mental freedom, we’re rediscovering that childlike ability to
simultaneously believe and disbelieve in magic. 
And as the cordite fills the air and the thick smoke hazes the faerie-lit
trees, for a few minutes I genuinely believe – I know – that we have succeeded in driving evil spirits from this
realm, back through the liminal space to the dimension where they belong.
Everyone else
knows it too. Tomorrow we’ll completely accept that the apple harvest is down
to weather patterns and soil, judicious stewarding and farming technology.  But not tonight.
Or maybe it’s all
just a good excuse to get pissed.
As the younger
children start to file out home, happy and tired, the Fallen Apples take the
stage and do a brief soundcheck, West Country style:
Harmonica player
(blasts a note): Z’at sound oroight?
Audience: cheers
Guitar (strums a
chord): Z’at sound oroight?
Audience: cheers
Bass (plays a few
notes): Z’at sound oroight?
Audience: cheers,
and then before the cheers have chance to die down, the band launches into
something so stupidly bluegrass-catchy that there’s a moshpit where families
were standing only seconds before.  Cider
flies through the air in golden arcs. 
The farmyard mud is stamped into submission.
It’s late by the
time they finish their set, but over in the big barn, the Skimmity Hitchers are
just getting going. These are the kings of the genre known as ‘Scrumpy &
Western,’ possibly because they invented it. 
In the hands of these funnier, modern day Wurzels (a band they’ve
supported), My Girl Lollipop becomes My Girl Cider Cup, and Ring of Fire becomes, well:
I drank down a lovely point of cider
It went down, down, down and my smile it
grew wider
And I yearns, yearns, yearns,
For a pint o’ cider
For a pint o’ cider
By the time Monkey Man is somehow impossibly
improved by its mutation into Badger Man,
and a fully-grown man in a badger costume takes centre-stage, the audience has
abandoned its earlier moderation. 
Everyone, myself included, has their own
two-litre carton of Jungle Juice hooked over one thumb.  Plastic glasses long since hurled through the
air, we drink straight from the spout.
As the set nears
its end, the audience reaction, while enthusiastic, sounds strangely incomplete.
Then I work out what it is: people are too drunk to clap.
One of the nice
things about this wassail is that it requires no crowd control. By midnight,
the crowd is simply too wankered to carry on, and everyone makes their way home
happily, haphazardly, with wide, warm grins on their faces.
But that’s not the
best thing about wassailing. The best thing is simply that it’s here, it
happens. Wassail simply sticks up two fingers to the most depressing time of
the year. It says, yes, I know party season is over, but we’re going to have a
party anyway, a really big party, and we’re going to hold it in a farmyard, in
the middle of winter, and it’s going to be really good.
And while I’ll
admit it might be the drink talking, I can think of no more laudable triumph of
the human spirit.

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If you love craft beer, set it free.

1989. Thursday.

We gathered in the hall of residence common room after gobbling down dinner quicker than usual for our weekly sneer at Top of the Pops. What depths would the Stock Aitken and Waterman ‘Hit Factory’ have sunk to this week? Would its bland fare be distinguishable from last week, and every other week? Would there be any wavering from the template of happy synths peddled by the bland mainstream year in year out, lowest common denominator music that offended no one except those with good music taste like us?

Doubtful. We proto-Beavis and Buttheads would just have to make this week different from last week by upping the level of our competitive ‘witticisms’, annoying the rest of the room who didn’t see anything wrong with what they were being spoon-fed.

And then this happened.

The most exciting band on the planet monkey-walked into your living room and said, “Nice, we’ll take it.”

In days when there was no internet or i-Tunes, when pop and rock musicians were never in the tabloids, when all you heard on TV and radio was safe top 40 hits and you had to seek out specific record shops to buy the music you liked and specific clubs to hear it in public, suddenly the Stone Roses were on Top of the Pops because they were in the charts.

It felt like a revolution was happening. I expected the Domestic Bursar to come in and confiscate the TV.

And while we were still reeling from that,  a few minutes later this happened:

Now we were screaming and hollering. Cars were set alight in the street outside. Bros and Go West were strung up from lampposts. Dave Lee Travis was executed with a bullet to the temple while he knelt at the feet of Shaun William Ryder, who looked down and threatened to “Lie down beside yer and fill yer full o’ JUNK.” Or so it seemed for those glorious two and a half minutes as Kirsty MacColl, who everybody loved, played kingmaker, nailing her colours to the baggy mast.

We had won. We had taken over. So what if Fine Young Cannibals were on next? The indie kids had staged the most marvellous coup, and no-one – not even we indie kids ourselves – had seen it coming.

Afterwards, it was puzzling to feel somewhat deflated. Let down. To feel a sense of loss. Since I’d arrived at uni a few years before, wearing black overcoats and breton caps and listening to the Mighty Lemon Drops and the Bodines had been a lifestyle, an identity, a way of stating my opposition to the bland, bourgeois mediocrity, to the people who got drunk at university because that’s what you were supposed to do at nineteen, and then got married and got jobs as accountants after graduation because that’s what you were supposed to do at twenty-two.

So it was confusing, after the dozen or so indie kids at St Andrews Uni swapped our Joy Division overcoats for Stone Roses flares and hoodies, to see all the other kids – corduroy clad, U2-loving students and casual, wedge-cut townies – do the same. We could no longer tell who was in our tribe. And then our tribe didn’t exist any more. We liked music that was in the charts, and lots of other people liked it too. That was surely a bad thing. And yet privately, it felt good.

The music and beer analogy. Works every time.

Just before Christmas, analysts Mintel released their latest report on the UK beer market, and it’s all about craft beer.  I didn’t have chance to write about it at the time, and you were probably too drunk to read it anyway, but it deserves some attention from everyone who thinks craft beer is something to be debated and argued over rather than simply drunk and enjoyed.

Mintel’s research uncovered some interesting stats:

  • One in four British adults has drunk a craft beer at some time in the last six months – that’s around 13 million people.
  • 35% of all beer drinkers believe craft beer is worth paying more for, because they associate it with higher quality.
  • 50% of beer drinkers expect that a craft beer will taste better than other beers.
Our collective failure to agree on a definition of craft beer doesn’t seem to be doing craft beer any harm. But whatever that definition is, we probably can’t hold on to ideas about size and scale of brewer for much longer. 40% of drinkers say they aren’t sure what the term ‘craft beer’ actually means, and 45% of drinkers say they would find craft beers more appealing if they knew more about them, so there is a need for greater clarity. But at the same time, 40% of drinkers also say they would be keen to try a craft-style beer for a large brewer.
This is where we get back to Madchester taking over Top of the Pops, and I get to be a sensible middle-aged man again rather than an over-excitable music snob. 
Bigger brewers are risk-averse and can never hope to have the same flexibility and intuitive approach to brewing that smaller brewers have. But big brewers can provide widespread training, information and education that drinkers are saying they want from craft beer.
Should craft stay small? Is it wrong that it’s going mainstream? I’d be interested to hear from any craft brewers, as opposed to drinkers, who think their potential market should stay small and niche. Much as I loved the Mighty Lemon Drops and the Bodines at the time, they’re probably driving cabs now. Ian Brown is a multi-millionaire.
Alan McLeod has been writing a lot recently about the problem of taking craft beer too seriously, culminating in a new ebook co-authored with Max Bahnson, The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer. And while I fear Max and Alan may be in danger of taking ‘not taking craft beer too seriously’ too seriously, you should definitely give it a read.
We don’t own craft beer any more than ten indie kids in St Andrews owned the Stone Roses. People want good beer, and they think that means craft beer, and I for one think that is the most exciting news I’ve heard in a long time.
But there’s also a message here for the big brewers as they no doubt increase their forays into craft through 2014.
The amount of beer we drink overall is still decreasing. According to Mintel, 31% of beer drinkers claim to be drinking less than they did a year ago, versus just 13% drinking more. People are drinking less but better. 
But better has to mean better. 
There’s a meltdown of old distinctions happening in the beer market: on the one hand, drinkers are increasingly happy to drink beers from brewers they are unfamiliar with – and this extends into lager and nitro-stout. In 2013 we saw many small and regional brewers launch their own “craft” lagers and Guinness clones, because many drinkers no longer need a multi-million pound ad campaign to tell them what to drink. 
On the other hand, drinkers are perfectly happy to try a craft-y beer from a big brewer – so long as it is genuinely better than the mainstream.
As far as the drinker is concerned, big can do small and small can do big – just so long as you are true to what ‘craft’ promises. As Mintel’s beer and cider guy and author of the report Chris Wisson says, 
“Rather than focusing on size, craft should be more of an ethos which stands for high quality and artisan skill, giving the consumer a different drinking experience… as prices of many drinks continue to go up, many drinkers are looking for discernibly higher quality to justify the cost. Focusing on the quality of ingredients such as hops and the brewing process should help brands to convey their superior quality to beer drinkers.”

But that means you actually have to use decent ingredients and processes in the first place, rather than just pretending.

As social media gives the public more of a voice than ever before, any brewer paying lip-service to craft and cynically exploiting it will be called out and ridiculed. With beer choice no longer determined solely by the size of the marketing budget, and more craft beers from smaller brewers on the bar, quality will out and sub-standard beer simply won’t cut it, whoever it’s brewed by.

Any big brewer who ignores craft beer in 2014 (laughably, I’ve heard some still privately dismissing craft beer as an East London fad) is an idiot. Anyone who does craft beer and executes it badly is a fool. And anyone who thinks that craft can and should remain the preserve of small, independent brewers and a tiny band of devoted aficionados is sadly misguided.

No doubt it’s going to be a bumpy ride, and there are bound to be those on all sides who fly in the face of that last paragraph and prove me right. But I think that for anyone with an open mind, 2014 is going to be a great year for beer.

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Think you, or someone you know, is the best drinks producer in Britain?

Food and drink. It’s lovely.
Are you frustrated by how the mainstream media always seems to ignore beer and cider? Are you a wine lover who wishes more people were aware of how good English wine is? Following my post yesterday, do you wish there was more focus on interesting soft drinks? Or are you excited about the imminent boom in microdistilleries?
This year I’m delighted to be once again judging the drinks category in the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards, along with wine writer Victoria Moore. As the official blurb says, “From pioneering brewers to traditional distillers, wine makers to juice producers. We want to hear about the people using carefully sourced ingredients and skill to produce an outstanding drink. From producers bringing new ideas to the world of drink, to businesses keeping traditions alive, tell us who deserves recognition in 2014.”

In 2012 our three finalists were the Kernel Brewery, Once Upon a Tree cider, and the Kilhoman distillery. We had to sideline some pretty amazing drinks producers to get to that list, and if we could have then split the award three ways we would have – it eventually came down to a very close vote, which Once Upon a Tree won.

Me and Val Warner with last year’s winners. I actually think I may have lost weight since this was taken.
Beer has done really well recently – as well as Kernel coming so close, the award has been won by Bristol Beer Factory and the Wye Valley Brewery in recent years. Last year the showing from wine was very poor, and Victoria wants to change that – as do I. But I also want to make sure that beer and cider do as well as they did last year too. We had for more brewers and cider makers enter than any other drinks category.
The judging is extremely rigorous. The judges from all categories come together to agree with each pair of judge’s shortlist and the eventual winner. This year, that means a producer could be discussed by the likes of Sheila Dillon, Richard Corrigan, Valentine Warner, Charles Campion and Raymond Blanc. It’s great exposure, even if you don’t win. And if you make the final three, you’ll be featured in a Radio 4 programme with me and Victoria.
These awards are for everyone. Anyone can nominate their favourite producer by filling in the entry form on the BBC website. And just to clear up any confusion arising from that wording, producers are welcome to nominate themselves.
NOM-inations (sorry) opened yesterday, with a programme which you can listen to here. Entries close on 27th January, so you have to be quick (but the form is easy and straightforward). The winners will be announced at a ceremony in May, which looks likely to form the centre of a series of food and drink events.
This award transforms the businesses of those who win it. And the more producers that enter, the more we show the rest of the world how vibrant beer and cider (and everything else) are. There are of course other categories if you also know a great market, food producer, farmer etc.
So go on, make my life agony as I try to choose a winner from the very best of British drinks!

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Dry January

This is the strangest time of the year to be doing what I do.

With grim inevitability, we are told that we should all stop drinking alcohol for a month, just to prove we can.

Just as inevitably, those of us who decide to do so are met with sometimes extraordinary hostility by those who don’t want to.

Both sides are now pissing me off.

Any reader of this blog knows where I stand on the cynical creep of neo-prohibitionism. My last blog post is just below this one if anyone has any doubt.

But I try to go dry for January every year, and have done so for years – since long before it became a piece of nonsense to beat people with.

I drink too much. I counsel that we should feel free to drink more than we are told. I rubbish the distortion of data that suggests we’re all drinking ourselves to death. But even by my own more relaxed standards, I drink more than is good for me. I am two stone overweight and am on medication for high blood pressure, and this is related to the amount of alcohol I drink. It’s an occupational hazard, and it’s also more than that. Going dry for January is my way of proving to myself that I still control my relationship with booze. When I do it, I lose weight. I sleep better, and have more energy. When I start drinking again, my tolerance is lower and I drink slower and less frequently. And gradually, through the year it creeps up again, until over Christmas my alcohol consumption is excessive by any standards, and January provides a reset.

When I talk about this, it’s amazing how many people seem to know more about my body and my psychology than I do. The neo-prohibitionists would argue that the above paragraph proves I’m an alcoholic – that if I need to stop drinking for a month, that proves I need to stop drinking altogether. Some idiots even try to say that dry January is dangerous because it encourages people to drink with abandon for the other eleven months of the year – a point of view that garners headlines every year despite having absolutely nothing to back it up.

On the other side, people tell me that detoxes don’t work, implicitly asking me to ignore the evidence of my senses and the bathroom scales. Others seem threatened, like I’m betraying the cause of drinkers somehow. And then there are those who attack January abstainers for ruining the businesses of microbrewers and closing pubs.

This last point is particularly annoying. I appreciate that a campaign suggesting we all abandon pubs for a month might anger people whose livelihoods might be damaged by it. But beer enjoys a cyclical year. In December, pubs were packed. Some drinkers and publicans complain about the Christmas ‘amateur drinkers’ who turn up to their pubs, packing the place out and ordering in annoying fashion as they throw money over the bar. A few weeks later the same people complain that pubs are empty.

Given that pubs know a lot of punters take a breather in January, why not cater for them? Where are the specials on interesting artisanal soft drinks? The promotions on non-alcoholic cocktails? Why not put some detox-friendly dishes on the menu? We get very indignant about the idea that pubs are mere drink shops. We spend all our time saying that they are more than that, that they are important community centres that provide many benefits.  So in January why do we then act as if beer is all they can do?

Just because I’m not drinking for a few weeks doesn’t mean I’ll be going to the pub any less in January. I still want to get out of the house and see friends. But when I do so I’ll most likely be drinking stupidly overpriced lime and soda, having viewed and rejected the range of excessively sugary, crap-filled soft drinks available, and wondering yet again why there isn’t a single dish on the menu that isn’t full of fat, cream or grease.

Dry January, like Christmas and ‘NYE’ before it, is a result of our desire for shared experience. We are social creatures and for the most part we enjoy the knowledge and experience that we are all going through something together. The rise of social media has intensified this sharing. Most of the time that’s good. But it does also create a shared sense of obligation that some of us rebel against. A month ago newspapers were full of articles about What You Must Do To Enjoy The Perfect Christmas, and every one of them had comments below from people complaining that they didn’t want to do Christmas that way, but somehow felt that they were forced to against their will. Why? Now, when Dry January is suggested we either feel we must go along with it as if it’s the law or we get angry and ask ‘Why the hell should I?’

It’s part of the infantilisation of our culture. Being scolded on a regular basis by government, the NHS, and a media that invariably refers to the recommended guidelines on alcohol consumption as limits sits alongside advertising voiceovers that uniformly sound like a parent talking to a toddler, and food packaging and restaurant menus that talk in lower case sans serif fonts about things being yummy and nom.

We buy into this infantilisation. When we nip out for a cheeky scoop, or enjoy food that is tasty but not healthy, we invariably talk about being ‘naughty’, as if we are children breaking the rules. When everyone else breaks the rules with us we feel like we’re getting away with it. When we’re given rules we don’t like and see others conforming, we start behaving like children who have been caught, or stamp our feet and fold our arms and say ‘Don’t want to.’

I say all this because I’m guilty of it, as much as anyone. There is an inner child in me saying “Go on, go for a drink. Because you can. You can get away with it.” It’s not a craving for alcohol per se, more a desire to transgress some rule that is entirely in my own head.

So here’s my New Year’s resolution, which I offer up for anyone else to share: be a grown-up around alcohol, and take responsibility for your own decisions. If you want a drink, have one, and if you don’t, don’t. Going dry for January is my personal way of resetting my relationship with alcohol. If you’re someone who only drinks a couple of days a week you may feel you don’t need to do this. If you’re someone who drinks most days to a point where you’re vaguely concerned it might impact your health, think about what else you might do to counter it. Or don’t, if you don’t want to. If you’d rather go dry for a different month of the year, or try to institute a regimen of at least two alcohol-free days a week, do that instead. If you’re content that your lifestyle is going to be way more fun than anyone else’s but means you’ll probably die of heart disease in your late fifties or early sixties, that’s fine too.

What’s right for me probably isn’t right for you, as we have different histories, hang-ups and habits. But we don’t have to do anything – or refuse to do it – because others are telling us to. I’m going dry for January not because of some sly anti-alcohol publicity campaign, but because it works for me and has done for years. If we were all to simply do what works for ourselves, and not try to tell everyone else what a good or bad idea their course is, it would be a happy new year indeed.

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Why it's OK to drink a lot this Christmas

Ah, Christmas: the time for peace, love, laughter, and stern bollockings about how dangerous our socialising behaviour can be.

Let’s get the essential disclaimers out of the way up front. Firstly, I am aware that some people in Britain suffer from the effects of alcohol abuse, either directly or indirectly. I know that drink problems can kill, and I make no attempt to trivialise that.

Secondly, I know that Christmas is a time when many take it too far and end up vomiting in the street, visiting A&E, or worse. I have no desire to defend these people – they spoil it for the rest of us, both when they’re screeching in pubs or fighting outside, and afterwards when the vast majority of happy, convivial drinkers are demonised for the actions of a childish minority.

My problem is that reports of truly destructive behaviour are invariably accompanied by warnings from medical experts that 25% of us are drinking to hazardous levels. What they tend to omit is that the definition of ‘hazardous’ is anyone who has drunk more than the recommended daily guideline of alcohol consumption, which equates to a pint and a half of beer for men, or one pint or one medium-sized glass of wine for women.

That’s right: the shocking truth of Binge Britain is that one in four of us drinks at least two pints of beer or one large glass of wine on at least one day in any given week.

Doesn’t quite sound so ‘hazardous’ when you put it that way, does it?

That’s why those seeking to persuade us to cut down on our drinking turn to ever more extreme methods to scare us (fact: most of us already are cutting down. New figures released last week show overall alcohol consumption, as well as heavy drinking, have fallen yet again). There’s a deliberate blurring of the yob who drinks a bottle of whisky and trashes the place and the couple who share a bottle of wine over dinner.

Just two weeks ago, the latest horror story was that people in their forties are the latest group that are drinking themselves to death and bankrupting society as they do so. Apparently, the shocking truth is that 20% of all alcohol-related hospital admissions are comprised of people within this age band.

When I first read this, it reminded me a bit of that spoof stat about how we’re all skivers because 40% of all sick days fall on a Monday or Friday.

I honestly didn’t think the figure too high: if you have been abusing alcohol for most of your adult life, you’d expect your forties to be the age when it would start to take its toll (unless you’d rather believe the alternative shock stories about how binge drinkers in their early twenties are swamping hospitals with cases of liver failure). And while health problems increase with age, older people tend to drink less (unless you’d rather believe the alternative shock stories about how the over-65s are a ticking time bomb of alcohol-related woe.)

In any case, 20% didn’t sound particularly high. And by the time I had Googled ‘UK population split by age’ and learned that there is a population spike in this age group (14.6% of us are aged 40-49, compared with 13.6% aged 20-29, 13.1% aged 30-39, 12.2% aged 50-59 and 10.8% aged 60-69) I realised that this supposed shock was a complete non-story. It’s a shame no one in the national press undertook the same due diligence before repeating it (inevitably accompanied by images of people drinking beer, of course).

Alcohol is an addictive and potentially dangerous drug – we know that, because we are told it every day. But it also happens to be intrinsic to our civilization, a constant in our history, both sacrament and everyday treat.

Like fire, alcohol kills, maims and wrecks lives every year, and has done since the Stone Age. But also like fire, alcohol is one of our greatest ever discoveries, something it’s hard to imagine living without, something that has, in general, immeasurably improved the quality of our lives.

We know that fire needs to be treated with respect and caution. We understand completely that if we control it, it’s a boon, but that if we let it get out of control, it can cause devastating damage. That’s why we keep children away from it, and why there are very clear guidelines on how to handle it.

We don’t see people calling for the abolition of fire. We rarely see people blaming fire itself when it destroys. We understand that when it kills, it was either deliberate and criminal human action, a tragic accident, or the result of negligence. We might say that such tragedies show the need for better education around fire or clearer warnings, and of course that’s right. But we don’t hear anyone arguing that a house fire proves we should only be allowed to cook a meal or stay warm once or twice a week.

It’s a sign of our collective sickness and anxiety that anti-alcohol rhetoric peaks at Christmas.

Christmas, like birthdays and weddings, is a time of celebration. Intoxication lowers inhibitions, creates feelings of euphoria, relaxes us and helps us interact with people. We think we, and those around us, are funnier, sexier, and more interesting than when we’re sober. And as a society, we are somehow in the process of convincing ourselves that this is a bad thing.

If alcohol were that bad for us, we probably wouldn’t be here now. Because in the past we drank a hell of a lot more alcohol than we do today.

If it were that bad for us, the other piece of booze related news last week – the latest in a long line of studies that proves yet again that moderate drinkers live longer than teetotallers as well as alcoholics – would never have appeared.

So this Christmas, don’t drink responsibly – not all the time. Christmas is a holiday from our day-to-day responsibilities, and that’s why it exists, as an essential safety valve from our lives.

Don’t drink to black out. Don’t drink till you throw up. Don’t drink to punish yourself or others. That’s the behaviour that suggests you have a problem in life that isn’t drink itself.

But do drink more than two units per day for men or 1.5 units for women. Drink until you feel like singing. Drink until you feel epic and marvellous. Drink until you feel confident and comfortable enough to ask out that person from work on a date. Drink until you feel a hangover the next day, on a day when having a hangover doesn’t matter, and reflect on the yin and yang, on our ability to heighten euphoria to new levels and then take the knocks for it the next day with good grace.

Christ’s first miracle – if you believe that particular superstition – was turning water into wine at the wedding in Canaan. According to the Bible – and I think this is a fairly close translation from the original script – the saviour of mankind announced his presence on Earth by getting people shitfaced and showing them a good time.

So don’t get drunk every day over Christmas. But do get drunk at least once. And if they complain, tell our Puritan overlords that it’s what the Baby Jesus would have wanted.

Merry, merry Christmas.

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Golden Pints 2013

I don’t normally join in this annual beer bloggers’ exercise in navel gazing because I’m too busy and I think I can do something similar but better and used to do my own round-up before they came in. But this year I’m not too busy and, more importantly, I can’t think of anything better, and Zak Avery just did a really wonderful post that has urged me to try my own hand, so let’s see how we get on.

Two things happened for me in 2013: one, I turned 45, moving into the 45-54 demographic. I’m middle bloody aged and that came about far too quickly. Second, I celebrated Man Walks into a Pub, my first book, being in print continuously for ten years. In 2003 I was a fresh young voice in beer writing, younger than pretty much every other writer I met. Now I’m an establishment old fart. That’s how quickly it happens and it’s just not fair.

In keeping with this development, I’m becoming curmudgeonly and going retro. This year the headlong rush of craft beer in London started to get a little wearing.

“HEY LOOK AT ME, I’VE MADE YET ANOTHER SINGLE HOP CITRA PALE ALE USING TWICE AS MANY HOPS AS I SHOULD HAVE. I’M A CRAFT BREWER AND I’M AWESOME.”
No you’re not, you’re a hipster chancer who needs to learn how to brew a balanced beer. Remember how Picasso had to learn how to paint properly before he could do all those seemingly random paint splashes and make them work? You need to know how to brew boring brown ale well before you’re qualified to mess around with more diverse stuff. And cloudy, yeasty, alcoholic grapefruit juice became the new boring blond beer in 2013.

“YES BUT I’VE STARTED MAKING AWESOME SAISONS NOW INSTEAD.”
No. You really haven’t. Go away, drink a Saison Dupont and think about what you just said.

“OK BUT BEFORE I GO WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY A BOTTLE OF MY AWESOME NEW EXPERIMENTAL BEER? IT’S STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS, IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT YET…”
Well what the fuck do you think you’re doing charging people four or five quid for it?

There were brilliant new craft beers this year of course. But for me 2013 was the year I remembered about Belgian Trappist ales, perfectly balanced, crystal clear best bitters, the original American IPAs, and stopped worrying about whether or not I was keeping up to speed with the latest new opening.

Best UK Cask Beer
How should I know? If I drank all 4000 of them I’d be dead. Because of what I said above, the beer that had the biggest impact on me was Truman’s Runner. It took me back to simpler times when I first got into beer, and anyone who dismisses this style as ‘boring brown beer’ needs to figure out whether they actually understand flavour.

Best UK Keg Beer
Camden Hells. The best lager in the world. I was there when it was judged to be so and rarely have I seen an international group of brewers unite around something so completely.

Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer
Thornbridge Chiron. The once unimpeachable Jaipur has become a little patchy of late. Chiron simply rules – a slam dunk that pulls me up short whenever I’ve tasted it.

Best Overseas Draught Beer
A popular choice in the GPs, Lagunitas IPA. I was delighted to see it appear in craft beer pubs this year. One of the first US IPAs I ever tasted back in ’04, despite the marketing moving on and becoming bolder and more diverse around it, it still kicks ass.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer
Rochefort 10. Always.

Best Beer For quiet contemplation
Worthington White Shield still nails it for sitting there and being mindful, always revealing more, always developing.

Best Beer for gabbling with mates and seizing the day
The beer that has evaporated from the glass, pint after pint, while we make plans and put the world to rights, is probably Howling Hops Pale Ale number 2.

Beer I haven’t drunk enough of in 2013
Magic Rock.

Welcome surprise beer style that crept up on us and is likely to be huge next year 
Rye/RyePA/Red ales

Best beer for crying into
The new Fuller’s Imperial Stout. A case of this arrived at my door about ten minutes before the vet who came to put Captain the Celebrity Beer Dog to sleep after ten brilliant years with us. Two bottles of this 10.7% ABV magnificent bruiser gave him his wake.

Best Branding, pump clip or Label
Box Steam’s Brewery’s lovely Evening Star is the only beer I’ve impulsively tweeted a picture of like a giddy fanboy.

Best UK Brewery
Sharps. No really. I’ll never knowingly drink another pint of Doom Bar, but the Connoisseur’s Choice range has been consistently excellent and thought-provoking without being weird for the sake of it. Although I still haven’t yet tried the beer brewed with woodlice. Not weird for the the sake of it at all. 

Adnams were a very close second, making any debates about a supposed distinction between craft brewers and real ale brewers irrelevant.

Best Overseas Brewery
I haven’t visited any overseas breweries this year so on the basis that nothing has come across my radar to change the view I’ve held for years, it’s Brooklyn Brewery.

Best New Brewery Opening 2013
I dunno. I’m going with Wild Beer Co. Yes I know they opened in 2012, but I didn’t do the Golden Pints last year so I can include them this year if I want to.

Pub/Bar of the Year
One’s local is a strange thing. There are lots of pubs we go into regularly, but few to which we give that special distinction. It’s a relationship we change less frequently than marriages or bank accounts, but I changed mine this year. My new local, 25 minutes walk from my house, is the Cock Tavern in Hackney.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2013
Like what I said about Wild Beer Co, the Hops and Glory opened in late 2012, but still feels new and exciting to me. 

Beer Festival of the Year
The only one of the new wave of craft beer festivals I managed to get to this year was IndyManBeerCon. I’m glad I made it – craft beer growing up, showing its longevity as well as its imagination and creativity.

Supermarket of the Year
M&S

Independent Retailer of the Year
Geerts Drankenhandel in Oostakker on the outskirts of Ghent is the best beer retailer I’ve ever visited. €1 for Saison Dupont? €10 for Deus 750ml? €1.25 for Rochefort 10? I should coco. €318 euros later the car boot was so full the axle was groaning.

Online Retailer of the Year
Haven’t really used any but there are some interesting new ones coming up – Eebria is very new but looks like it could become really interesting – love their approach.

Best Beer Book or Magazine
Pocket Beer Book by Stephen Beaumont and Tim Webb. Because together they’re two of only maybe four or five writers on the planet who could honourably take up the reins that Michael Jackson left. And because it’s the book that told me about Geerts Drankenhandel.

Best Beer Blog or Website
Zak Avery chose Adrian Tierney Jones’ blog for its “non-linear relationship with narrative.” I’ll echo that, with Zak as runner-up for that observation alone.

Best Beer App
Craft Beer London is the only one that seems worth using at the moment.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer
Simon Bloody Johnson of course! He’d already done enough before his cruelly premature passing in May to walk this one.

Best Brewery Website/Social media
I wish I could say Let There Be Beer, but the execution got off to the worst start imaginable. The intent is sincere, but the execution was botched. They are trying to remedy this now and not giving up, and I’ve been chipping in a bit of advice. Hopefully there’ll be a turnaround next year. But given how rubbish it was in 2013, I think the winner this year goes instead to Brew Dog. I don’t always agree with the beers they brew or the things they say, and inevitably they’re not as fresh as they were with so many people inspired by them now setting up in competition, but James Watt and Co still know how to use social media better than anyone. 

Music and Beer Pairing of the Year
Jimi Hendrix’s take on All Along the Watchtower paired with Chimay Blue. 

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year
Dinner cooked by Tim Anderson at Dukes Brew & Que back in May. Not all of it successful but all of it audacious and interesting. Gave me the most epic food hangover I’ve had this year, and my best celeb namedrop story ever.

Now – time to try that woodlouse beer…

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Pubs do not “further the social wellbeing or social interests of the local community” – says who?

It’s bad form to post two blogs in the same day, especially if they’re about the same topic, especially if you normally struggle to blog once a week, like I do. But a tidbit has just fallen into my lap that I can’t wait to share.

One of the practices for which PubCos are taking a significant amount of stick for is selling pubs off to become shops or flats. Fair enough – perhaps – if the pub has failed and closed and there’s no real call for it any more. But when the people running the pub really want to stay there and continue running it as a pub, and when there is a dedicated bunch of regulars happily spending money there, turfing them out against their will looks a bit mean, to say the least.

The Sir John Barleycorn is thought to be the oldest pub in Hitchin, having served the community for about 150 years. It’s the perfect model of a community boozer, with darts on Monday, a pub quiz on Tuesday, and crib or dominoes on Thursday. It hosts various local sports teams and a steady diet of live bands from the area. It’s currently owned by Punch Taverns.

Following the closure and conversion of other nearby pubs, a group of concerned regulars got together this autumn and applied to have the pub listed as an Asset of Community Value (ACV). This makes it much harder to change the use of the premises, helping preserve it as a pub for a five year period. ACV status was introduced by the 2011 Localism Act, and was brought into effect on 21st September 2012. Since then, around twenty pubs have successfully achieved ACV status.

When the Sir John Barleycorn applied for ACV status, there was an objection. This objection claimed that there was no need for the pub to be protected because there were plenty of other pubs nearby. And anyway, many of the valuable community activities listed in the application – the bands, quizzes and sports teams and so on – didn’t necessarily have to happen in a pub – they could happen in other community venues, such as, er… well, anyway, they didn’t need to happen in pubs. Even though that’s where they normally do.

But out of three objections, point two was perhaps the most vociferous:

“2. The various activities mentioned by the nominee in the application are ancillary to the use of the premises as a public house. They do not therefore comply with the purposes set out in Section 88 (1) of the Localism Act 2011. With regard to Section 88 (2), the current use of the premises as a public house i.e. a place where alcohol is consumed and sold, does not itself further the social wellbeing or social interests of the local community and therefore is not land of community value.” 
[my emphasis]

It’s sad but not entirely surprising to see such an objection. We do after all live in an age of neo-prohibitionism, where various groups are only too happy to see the decline of the pub, and where alternative means of buying alcohol for home consumption are proliferating.

So who was it who objected to the attempt to preserve a fine old pub in its traditional use? Who believes so strongly that pubs do not further the social wellbeing or social interests of the community? Alcohol Concern? A local church group or nearby school? A big supermarket chain?

Nope.

These are the words of Punch Taverns, the owners of the Sir John Barleycorn. A company that owns over 4,300 pubs believes those pubs are not good for local communities.

On its website, Punch Taverns says:

“At its core the Community Pub should always provide a relaxed and friendly atmosphere for customers living in the neighbourhood. To excel, Community Pubs need to be at the hub of their neighbourhood, a focal point for locals. Supporting the many and varied interest groups of the community; darts, pool, fund raising, local schools, business networking, whatever they may be, is key.”

And yet here they are, vociferously protesting against one of their own pubs which is doing exactly that, actively opposing attempts to keep one of their oldest pubs trading as a pub.

Happily, the local council disagreed with the UK’s second-largest pub landlord, and decided that pubs such as the Sir John Barleycorn do in fact perform an important social function in the community. They awarded the pub its community asset status.

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