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.
Hoxton Mini-Press collects beautiful old photos thematically. I was delighted to be asked to write the intro for a gorgeous new collection on London Pubs, published today.
What’s better than reading about pubs? Looking at gorgeous, evocative photos of pubs (while also reading about them.)
Hoxton Mini Press is an independent publisher based in East London. They make collectable photography books, based mainly, but not exclusively, on the people and geography of East London. I find they make phenomenal last-minute Christmas presents for people you want to impress.
From their website:
“In an age when everything is virtual, the book as an object is more important than ever. But all too often big art books are aloof and expensive. We want to make books that both the collector and the non- specialist can enjoy – and that everyone can afford.”
This new book is a collection of photographs of pubs from about 1910 to some time in the early 1970s. I was delighted when they asked me to write the introduction – about 1200 words commenting on the importance of pubs in London life – and some of the captions. Here’s an extract from the intro:
“London has always been a diverse city brimming with strong characters. It breeds people with a thirst for life, and acts as a magnet for thirsty people born elsewhere. Throughout the twentieth century, they made the city’s pubs blaze with light and life.
“Everyone is here: Pearly Kings and Queens revelling in the spontaneous subculture they have created; sailors home on leave; courting couples stealing kisses over tables full of empty glasses; sharp-suited men from the Caribbean introducing their music and dance moves to their new neighbours; old ladies holding court, staring down the myth that pubs were male-only spaces. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards prop up the bar like two blokes at the end of a hard day at the office. Suzi Quatro takes time out from being the Queen of Rock and Roll to play a game of snooker. Teddy Boys hog the juke box while men old enough to remember the Boer War play pool. Meanwhile, dogs wait stoically at the bar, and children hover somewhat less patiently just outside the door. “
It sounds counter-intuitive. Especially when drinkers face the prospect of losing any disposable income we may have had. But all the available market data suggests that the best way to sell more cask ale is to make it more expensive in comparison to other drinks on the bar. Here’s why, in six handy points.
1. People who already drink cask are perfectly happy to pay more
Cask drinkers have always been, on the whole, older, more upmarket and more affluent than the average beer drinker. They have a higher than average income, and spend more on average when they go out to the pub. In one survey of reasons why they drink cask, “price” scores 10th on a list of 13 options, with just 21% saying it’s important, versus 53% citing “flavour” and 39% saying it’s important that it’s “brewed locally.” In a separate study, “better value for money” comes 8th in a list of ten factors, with 25% saying it’s relevant versus 74% again claiming “flavour” is what matters. 72% of all ale drinkers say they tend to buy quality rather than quantity, compared to 44% who say they tend to be influenced by what’s on special offer.
It’s worth noting that cask ale drinkers are drinking less cask ale than they did. What are the drinking instead? Craft beer in other formats such as keg. 67% of all craft keg beer sells for north of £5 per pint, whereas over 70% of cask ale sells for less than £4 a pint.
Cask ale drinkers are telling us they care about quality more than price, and proving this by switching from cask to drinks that are far more expensive.
2. Non-cask drinkers already think – wrongly – that cask is more expensive than the fancy Mediterranean lagers they’re currently drinking. So what have you got to lose?
Get a load of this recent story from spoof news website The Daily Mash:
It’s a funny story – ignorant and badly informed, based on a premise that’s entirely false – but funny nonetheless. On average, cask ale is cheaper than any other pint on the bar apart from bog-standard cooking lager. And yet, the rapier wits at the Mash aren’t the only people who believe it’s eye-wateringly expensive.
In a survey of beer drinkers who do not drink cask ale, when asked what the barriers, are, “price” comes second in a list of 15 possible reasons, just behind “taste”, and well ahead of the clichés we all tell ourselves matter, such as the perception it’s warm (3rd), old-fashioned (6th) or flat (9th). Almost by definition, these people are already drinking beer that’s more expensive than cask ale is in reality. So putting the price up isn’t going to deter them any more than they already are. And they could afford it just fine if they had a reason to want to buy it.
But why do they think it’s so much more expensive than it really is? Partly, people assume darker beers are more expensive. Many also mistakenly believe cask is on average higher in ABV than other beers, and therefore more expensive. But the main reason, to my mind, is that outside the beer bubble, among the vast majority of drinkers and in places like the Daily Mash, people see cask ale and craft beer as synonymous. (And why shouldn’t they?) Check out this splash from a feature in the Guardian from 2019: A “craft beer enthusiast’s guide to Manchester”… illustrated with a pic of six cask ale handpumps.
If craft beer is expensive relative to other drinks (and it is) and real ale is the same as craft beer, then that’s also going to be expensive – isn’t it? Makes you wonder why the opposite is true.
In terms of price, non-drinkers of cask wrongly assume it is priced close to craft beer. You could always seek to correct this perception and point out how cheap cask is… but you’d be wrong to do so.
3. People are increasingly choosing more premium products across the board
“Premiumisation” has been one of the dominant trends in marketing for at least the past thirty years, and it’s not going away. For anyone above the poverty line, there’s a basic version of most consumer goods that’s easily affordable. As status-driven beings, we therefore actively seek out premium versions of the products that matter to us, to help us stand out and feel special. Yeah, you do.
In beer, this is why Peroni exists. The most recent example of premiumisation across the board is the performance of different beer styles as the on-trade had opened back up post-pandemic, versus their relative price. As a general rule, the more expensive something is (the blue bar) the better its volume performance when comparing 2022 with pre-pandemic 2019 (the red bar). The best performing segment in the whole of the on-trade drinks is “Mediterranean lager”, likely to be the most expensive mainstream beer on the bar, beaten only by craft. Standard lager and cask ale – the cheapest pints on the bar – are performing worse than anything else in the pub.
People are premiumising their drinks choices because they’re going to the pub less often and so need things to be a bit more special when they do go. It’s not necessarily that they WANT to spend more – but they are PREPARED to spend more rather than accept something they see as inferior.
4. This applies even – especially – during economic hard times
When money is tight, certain types of treat become more, not less, important. Premium versions of mainstream brands tend to do best during economic downtimes: “I can’t afford a nice holiday. I can’t afford a new car. Sod it, I’m going to splash out on a more expensive cut of meat/fresh orange juice/morning coffee.”
In June, CGA Strategy asked a broad range of consumers, “If your disposable income is reduced as a result of rising costs, which of the following do you plan to prioritise for spending over the next 12 months?” People were given 12 options for things they were most reluctant to cut down on, and invited to tick as many as they liked. The top answer was “visits to hospitality venues”, with 35% saying this would be important to them – double the percentage who cited entertainment packages such as Netflix.
Having said that, people still believe they will be spending less money overall on going out. But how are they planning on economising? The top answers revolve round going out less often, and drinking less when they do. Choosing cheaper, less premium versions of what they drink came second-bottom, with just 12% saying they’d consider this, just below visiting less premium outlets. More people said that the cost of living crisis will make them MORE LIKELY to choose quality/premium drinks (32%) than those who say it will make them LESS LIKELY (28%).
Economic hardship makes us more, not less, likely to choose more expensive/premium drinks.
5. Pub groups actively don’t want to sell more cask right now
So here’s a weird and slightly unsettling thing. At the beer industry seminar for which I gathered all this research, CAMRA and SIBA presented a new marketing campaign to get people to drink more cask ale. They’re seeking funding from across the industry to get it going. After the presentation, there was some grumbling from some people in the room who run groups of pubs. They protested that if the campaign were successful, it might make people drink cask ale rather than drinking other beers. Given that they were there because they are part of an industry body called Cask Matters, you might think they saw this as a good thing, not to say the whole damn point. But no: they were concerned about this possibility. Their pubs are struggling. The last thing they want just now is for people to stop drinking expensive world lager or craft beer, which pays pubs a decent margin, and start drinking more cask beer, which delivers a lower margin, instead. Therefore, with relative prices as they are, large pub groups are likely to OPPOSE any marketing activity that seeks to grow cask at the expense of other beer. We are in the ridiculous situation where companies selling cask beer – sometimes even companies that brew it – are potentially actively opposed to growing cask ale’s share of total beer.
Let’s be frank: if this remains the case, cask beer is utterly fucked outside the specialist independent pubs that make it their mission. The only possible way of changing this is to raise the price of cask beer relative to other beers on the bar.
6. Where cask is more expensive now, it actually sells more
If you still aren’t convinced, if you need one final argument, it’s this: where cask ale is more expensive on the bar currently, it actually sells more quickly. Surveying 4765 pubs across the country in 2019, CGA strategy found that in pubs where a pint of cask cost more than £3.70, it sold 32.5% more pints than in places where it cost less. Stripping out London and looking at the rest of the UK, it sold 9.5% more pints where it was selling for more than £3.45.
Now – chances are, these pubs were not just selling cask more expensively. They were probably nicer pubs charging a premium across the board. Interestingly, drinkers tend not to judge price in absolute terms. You know that in one venue, drinks generally are going to cost more than in another venue. If you’ve ever chosen to go to a nice pub instead of a nearby Wetherspoons, you know what I mean.
Across ale generally, the brands that are succeeding are the brands that are most expensive. Check out the growth in the top ten ale brands (cask and keg) between 2019 and 2022:
Beavertown Neck Oil has grown by 482% since before the pandemic – I guess not many people are too bothered by it selling out to Heineken. A substantial chunk of this growth will be due to Heineken’s powerful sales force shoving it out to pubs across the country. But even if simple distribution growth were responsible for, say, 70-80% of this growth, it’s clearly still selling like hotcakes in the pubs it’s flying into. This proves that drinkers have a thirst for a flavourful, sessionable pale ale – if it looks good on the bar, comes in a nice branded glass etc. The growth of Camden Pale makes the same point, somewhat less emphatically.
When we get to cask, the only brand in the top ten experiencing similarly strong growth is Timothy Taylor Landlord – a beer that sells into the trade at a higher price than its rivals, is less likely to do deals on price, and therefore tends to cost more at the bar.
So there are lots of contributing factors to this, and it’s not necessarily a direct correlation. But the data shows that if you’re keeping and selling cask properly, you can charge more for it – and sell more of it as a result.
The cask ale industry is currently in a pricing death spiral. Pubs are looking to buy it as cheaply as possible, and among 2000 breweries serving a shrinking market, there’s always a brewer who will undercut their rival. This is stripping value out of the market, which is why small brewers are switching to keg, publicans are often keeping cask badly, there’s not enough investment in marketing it to make it relevant to image-conscious, promiscuous drinkers, so it’s staying on the bar too long, so it tastes shit, so even die-hard cask drinkers are going “Hmm… not sure about the quality in here. Best stick with a Neck Oil just to be safe.”
Just put the fucking price up, guys.
I was a marketer long before I was a beer writer, and I still like to keep my hand in. For more marketing insight, sign up to my regular industry newsletter, or get exclusive, paywalled content via my Patreon. If you’d like to have a chat about you business specifically, drop me a line.
Back in May, the announcement of the closure of Sheffield’s oldest brewery felt too awful to contemplate. Now, a group including Thornbridge Brewery have stepped in.
The press release says:
Kelham Island Brewery, Sheffield’s oldest independent brewery, has been saved from closure by a group from Sheffield.
The brewery’s rescue is a collaboration between Tramlines co-founder and Sheffield venue owner James O’Hara, his brother and financial analyst Tom O’Hara, Simon Webster and Jim Harrison of renowned Thornbridge Brewery, Peter Donohoe, founder of Sheffield based creative studio Peter and Paul and Ben Rymer marketing manager from beer festival organisers, We Are Beer.
James O’Hara, who put the group together after hearing about the brewery’s closure, said: “Kelham Island Brewery, and its flagship beer Pale Rider, are known and revered beyond Sheffield. It’s heritage that we, as a city, should be really proud of. We couldn’t let that just disappear, it means too much within the city and to the UK’s beer culture for it to become another Wikipedia entry.”
Finally, some good news.
The closure of any brewery that is run by dedicated, enthusiastic people and produces good beer is a tragedy, and there have already been too many of those post-pandemic. But Kelham Island was more than that.
When the closure was announced in May, brewery owner Ed Wickett blamed “a whirlwind of problems,” a list topped by Covid and lockdowns. They were being hit by surcharges on fueL and other utilities, and at the same time the brewery was in a dilapidated state and needed new investment. In a broken cask ale market that is indulging in a foolhardy race to the bottom on price, there was simply no margin to survive.
Ed ran the brewery for ten years almost to the day following the death of his father, Dave. He has done a great job and devoted ten years of his life to Kelham Island. But I imagine somewhere in the sadness over the closure, there was also relief.
A generation of craft beer drinkers has emerged since Dave passed away from cancer in May 2012, aged just 64. I might be wrong, but it feels like his name is not known to many these days. But he was a pioneer in Britain’s craft beer revolution. Our beer scene today would not look the same without him.
Wickett the pioneer
Kelham Island Brewery was a trailblazer. When Wickett opened it in 1990, it was the first new brewery opening in Sheffield for over a century. Everyone told him he was mad. But they’d said the same to him when he opened the Fat Cat pub ten years previously. Wickett’s favourite beer was Timothy Taylor Landlord – it’s neverbeen out of stock in the Fat Cat. The brewery were so sceptical of a new real ale-centric pub in the centre of Sheffield’s decaying industrial district that they refused to deliver to him. So Wickett drove a van up to the brewery in Keighley and picked it up himself. When he was back a day or two later for more, they started to believe in him.
Kelham Island’s flagship was – sorry, is! – Pale Rider, a pale blonde ale with pronounced citrusy hop aromas. It won Champion Beer of Britain in 2004 (the year everyone thinks Greene King IPA won – it actually came second.) But Pale Rider’s significance was far greater than that.
Wickett was a stubborn maverick who didn’t suffer fools gladly. He acknowledged that he wasn’t always easy to work for, and there was a steady revolving door of brewers in and out of Kelham. The thing is, when they left – either fired or storming out after being unable to work with Wickett any longer – they’d often go just up the road and open their own brewery. Grudgingly or not, they still wanted to brew pale, citrusy cask ales in Sheffield’s now post-industrial heart. There was a cloud of small, independent brewers around Kelham Island years before they started spreading across the country. And that pale rider-inspired blonde ale has become Sheffield’s signature brew.
The birth of British craft beer
Exact recollections of events vary between him and some of the people he worked with, but here’s how he told the story to me.
By the early 2000s, Kelham Island was struggling to keep up with demand. One day Wickett was visiting his mate Jim Harrison, who had recently moved into the magnificent but then run-down Thornbridge Hall in Derbyshire. They went past an old stable block in the grounds and Wickett (everyone called him Wickett, never Dave) joked that it would be a perfect spot for a small brewery. They talked some more, and agreed that Thornbridge Brewery could be a handy overflow for when Kelham Island needed extra capacity. Instead of hiring some seasoned old cask ale brewer, Wickett interviewed two young men just out of brewing school, Stefano Cossi and Martin Dickie.
Neither was especially wedded to the Sheffield cask pale ale tradition. They were excited by new hops from America and New Zealand, which at that point had hardly been seen in Britain. Thornbridge began brewing British cask ales with American hops, used American style. Their flagship, Jaipur, went on to win just about every award possible, and Wickett ended up having to build a new brewery for Kelham Island instead. In 2007, Martin Dickie left to do some kind of start-up brewery in Scotland, and Cossi left soon after. But the Thornbridge blueprint was established.
Family saves the day
I don’t know too much about the other people involved in the consortium, but I do know Tramlines now defines Sheffield as much as the brewing tradition Wickett began. But it feels so right that Thornbridge is part of this move. Without Kelham Island, there would be no Thornbridge. Now, without Thornbridge there would be no Kelham Island. There couldn’t be a more perfect end to what started out looking like a tragic story.
Writing this has made me think a lot about the time Wickett invited me to the Fat Cat to do a talk about my second book, Three Sheets to the Wind, back in 2006. I had been invited to meet Thornbridge the following day, and they were putting me up at the hall that night. As Wickett took me out to the taxi, he said, “I’m jealous of you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re going to Thornbridge.”
“But you’ve been loads of times!”
“Yeah, but you’re going for the first time. You can never get that feeling again.”
It’s Cask Ale Week, and Britain’s ‘special’ beer style is in freefall. It’s time to cauterise the wound that’s bleeding out.
Last week, at the launch of Cask Ale Week, I was asked to present a summary of all the market data and research that various brewers were willing to pool and share. I learned a lot. But here’s one of the most urgent points for cask ale brewers.
The whole on-trade drinks market is still recovering from Covid (just in time to be pummelled by a cost of living crisis and the collapse of the economy). But some parts of it are suffering worse than others. Standard lager is struggling as people trade up to “premium” options such as the newly invented “Mediterranean lager” category. Still white wine is having a rough time as people – especially young people – switch to cocktails instead.
It’s not looking good for cask ale
But down there at the bottom of the table is poor old cask ale. A quarter of the volume of the market had already disappeared in the decade to 2019. And as the rest of the on-trade makes its slow and difficult way back to parity with the pre-pandemic year, cask languishes a further 25% down in volume versus three years ago. The number of pubs stocking it is down. And in the pubs where it remains, it’s selling 18% less than it used to.*
There are far too many reasons for this to fit in one blog post – same as there are far more things that could be done to alter the decline. But what’s abundantly clear is that the strategies cask ale brewers, stockists and fans have been pushing up to this point are not working. If you want cask to survive, you need to change the conversation and actions around it.
When I write stuff like this, this is usually the point where some cask die-hards chip in with the “It’s snowing outside my house therefore global warming is a myth” argument. “I know loads of great cask ale pubs,” they say. “The quality and range in them is excellent. They are busy and punters are happy. Therefore you are talking bollocks, Pete.”
The premises of this argument may be true, but they don’t lead to that conclusion. Yes, there will always be great cask ale pubs that will make a profit from selling cask ale. And the people who love cask ale will seek out those pubs and drink in them. But what percentage of all cask ale pubs are like that? And if you look at the overall figures, how awful must the other pubs be to create such nightmarish headlines overall?
Well, now we know.
Throughput is king
One of the biggest of the many issues facing cask is throughput. While some brewers disagree, the industry consensus is that once it is on the bar, a breached cask should be sold in three days. After that, the quality starts to decline. It starts with it just tasting not as good as it should – not as good as an experienced drinker knows it could be – and it ends up tasting like vinegar. In pubs that are not core cask ale pubs, you probably wouldn’t take a pint back. If you did – trust me on this – the staff, who are not trained in perfect cask ale, will say, “Well, no one else has complained” or “It’s cask, mate. It’s meant to taste like that.”
The data shows that if you’re an experienced cask drinker, you’re 39% likely to never visit the pub again. You’d tell your mates not to go there either. But the vast majority of cask drinkers only do so occasionally. And what those people do is go, “Oh, I guess I don’t like cask ale.” They blame the drink rather than the pub. They order a pint of Neck Oil (up 482% in volume since 2019 – and no, that’s not one of my frequent typos) or a Negroni (on-trade spirits up 16% since 2019) instead.
This is a huge problem, and it’s getting bigger. Brewers would love it if publicans who don’t sell a cask in three days take it off sale. But as cost pressures on the publican mount, that’s the last thing they’re going to do. Only 24% of pubs selling cask sell enough of it to guarantee a maximum three-day shelf life. If you were to just look at the peak selling time of Thursday to Sunday, that number is 54% – but that’s down from 62% since 2019.
So pubs that can’t sell cask fresh enough are actively driving people away from drinking cask. And over the course of the week, that means three out of four cask pubs are actively turning people off cask. The industry has loads of quality and training initiatives. It also has loads of passionate landlords who pride themselves on their cask ale as the sign of a good pub. But they’re not in these pubs. So why are these pubs selling cask?
The Oxford Partnership looked at flow data measuring beer going through the pumps in a sample of designed to reflect the national average. They then segmented these pubs on the basis of how quickly they sell cask ale on one axis, and how big cask ale is as a share of all the beer that pubs sells on the other axis.
The results are interesting.
If you were a sandwich maker, would you put 20 fresh sandwiches into a shop that only sells three sandwiches a day?
Adding up the bottom row, we see that 21.7% of pubs are selling more than 72 pints of cask a day on average. No throughput issues here. These 21.7% of pubs account for 42.1% of all the cask ale sold.
Whereas look at the top left boxes. 39.3% of all pubs sell less than 48 pints of cask a day. Frustratingly, this is a different measure than the 24 pints per day that needs to be sold to keep cask in good nick. But the principle still holds. They’re not selling it quickly enough, which is why nearly 40% of all pubs selling cask can only muster 13.9% of all cask volume between them.
These are the pubs where there’s maybe one handpull on, or three with two turned round for most of the week. That handpull probably serves Doom Bar or Greene King IPA, because if you’re reducing your range after lockdown, in theory it makes sense to stick to familiar brands. But this simply reinforces the dull, staid image of cask, on a bar where spirits, cocktails, craft beer and lagers like Madri all have a bigger, more colourful presence than they did three years ago. And so the cycle accelerates.
So maybe it’s time to rip cask out of those 39.3% low volume, low share pubs, or at least a good proportion of them. (This is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of anyone involved in Cask Ale Week.) An additional 13.9% volume loss might seem unbearable on top of the volume loss the market is already suffering. But you’d be cauterising the wound. You’d be getting rid of the vast majority of shit pints of cask beer that are being served every day.
You’d break the cycle of poor quality pints turning off occasional drinkers. Only serve cask in outlets where it sells enough for the quality to be decent.
Once you’ve stopped the rot, you can start the recovery. Once you can be sure that curious, younger drinkers will be served a pint that won’t put them off for life, you can feel safe giving them good reasons to try it. But that’s another story…
I was a marketer long before I was a beer writer, and I still like to keep my hand in. For more marketing insight, sign up to my regular industry newsletter, or get exclusive, paywalled content via my Patreon. If you’d like to have a chat about you business specifically, drop me a line.
It’s been a rocky road back after four years away, but last Thursday we once again pitted brewers and cider makers of all shapes and sizes against each other to celebrate creativity on the outside of the bottle, can, glass or plastic tub.
We did the first Beer Marketing Awards in 2015, and added cider in 2017. The awards last ran in 2018. This year, in conjunction with Brew//LDN, we revived the contest. The idea for this event has always been that it is for the whole industry: a craft brewer with an idea and a social media account can compete against a multinational with a seven figure budget if the idea is good enough. Everyone has the same amount of space on a can or bottle label, or the same 280 characters on Twitter.
We had also hoped to host an event where the whole industry could come together under one roof to socialise and network. By 2018, our awards ceremony had built a strong reputation as a breath of fresh air in industry events. But in these strange and uncertain times, most of our entrants preferred an online, virtual presentation instead. So we broadcast a short announcement last Thursday, which you can view here:
Hopefully we can all get together again physically next year.
We made awards in thirteen categories, with our overall Beer and Cider Marketer of the Year chosen from those category winners. You might notice a distinct absence of cider – we only had TWO cider entries this year. I hope that changes next year. Anyway, the results were as follows.
Best Branding/Design
Gold: St Austell – Korev
This is such a big step change from where the brand was and pulls it away from the traditional cask style branding previously being used. It created a clear set of assets that have been consistently applied, and delivers a broad appeal whilst still anchoring back to the brewery’s Cornish roots with the nice line, “The coast is our compass”, combined with imagery inspired by the Cornish coastline.
Silver: The Potting Shed – Little Big BrewCo
Great approach literally applying named identities to each of their range. Although using some tried and tested visual approaches from the craft world, the result is a clean look and feel that position the product well in the market place.
Highly Commended: Asahi – Dark Star rebrand
Highly Commended: Vocation rebrand
Best Community Engagement
Gold: Brixton – The Beer Exchange
The Beer Exchange campaign promotes keeping things in the spirit of the community, wherever you are. The brewery has created a first-of-its-kind beer “exchange,” encouraging beer lovers in New York and London to buy each other a pint from across the pond. This transatlantic brewery collab came about in June 2021, as the Harlem and Brixton Business Improvement Districts started an exciting twinning partnership to celebrate the shared heritage, culture and values of the areas. Brixton Brewery has donated all the proceeds from the exchange to Norwood & Brixton Foodbank.
Silver: No award made.
Best Corporate Responsibility Initiative
Gold: Place of the Way – Please/Thank You
The goal of this charity is to raise awareness of mental health issues in the hospitality industry, which it did with colour and verve. They worked with no budget, collaborating with brewers who paid for production and artists’ time. Otherwise, they pitched for investment, received donations (mostly people’s time) or did the project for free. A great way to help an industry that serves us with a smile, by donating towards one-to-one therapy. They created a truly big impact with minimal resources.
Silver: Toast Ale – Companion Series
No strangers to these awards, Toast Ale’s founding mission is to create great beer while reducing food waste. This year they amplified their message by collaborating with a range of brewers to create beers using food waste to rase funds for charity partners and to send a message to world leaders in the run-up to the COP26 climate summit.
Highly Commended: Portobello – Polari
Best Digital Marketing
Gold: No award given
Silver: Untold Agency and Budweiser Budvar “Greetings From the Republic of Beer”
The aim of this campaign was to evoke the spirit of the Czech Republic in the minds of every Budvar drinker. The results were impressive across the board, resulting in Budvar overtaking its main competitor, Pilsner Urquell, to become the most successful export lager from the Czech Republic.
Best Experiential Marketing
Gold: Asahi UK, Peroni – House of Peroni
House of Peroni has been one of the most lavish and impressive experiential brand activations for years now. In 2022 they took the concept to BST Hyde Park, elevating the festival drinks experience in a way that was easily shareable with the wider world.
Silver: Cannabrew – Head in the Clouds
Not really experiential in the way we mean it, but what’s not to love about strapping your mum to the wing of a plane with a can of your new cider stuck in her hand in order to launch the new CBD-infused drink? Mum knows best!
Best Innovation
Gold: Signature Brew – Beer Grant
Signature Brew’s founding proposition is that music and beer go hand in hand. Giving beer grants to struggling live music venues post-Covid put their money where their mouth is, did genuine good and worked well for the brand too.
Silver: Place of the Way – Please/Thank You
A great charity initiative that raised awareness around mental health in the hospitality industry. The campaign put spotlight on a very important issue.
Best Integrated Campaign
Gold: Lucky Saint – Dry January 2022
This perfectly executed 2022 Dry January campaign was run in multiple platforms, from socials to newsletters, from on-trade to off-trade, from e-commerce to PR, and from sponsorships to events. A great job from a team that with a single beer has helped changed the perception of the Alcohol-Free category among premium brand drinkers.
Silver: Black Sheep – Drink Cask Beer
A lovely initiative to support local pubs and real ale, with a very simple message that’s executed in a fresh, modern way in a sector that’s often seen as conservative, old-fashioned and behind the times.
Best New Launch/Start-up
Gold: Anspach & Hobday – London Black
A nitro porter aiming to provide an alternative to Guinness. There’s a sly dig at Guinness with the tagline “Some beers taste better in Dublin. London Black tastes better everywhere.” Also, the offer to install nitro lines free of charge and take professional photos of the pubs for them to use as promo shots, are both great touches in growing relationships.
Silver: No award given.
Highly Commended: Place of the Way – Please/Thank You
Best Public Relations Campaign
Gold: Heineken – No and Low Product Placement
Used product placement for the first time in soaps to market Heineken 0.0 by placing in the viewers’ subconscious that no and low products are available and now part of the normal pub landscape. A bold new way to market alcohol to a wide audience.
Silver: Heineken – I am the twelfth woman
Used the opportunity of Women’s Euros to create a campaign to challenge gender bias in football. They created an advert with famous faces in men’s and women’s football in the UK and created and sold a T-shirt (I am the12th Woman) with all the profit going to Women’s Football.
Best Trade Marketing Campaign
Gold: Anspach & Hobday – London Black
Although small scale, this approach is a really great example of a mutually beneficial approach to trade support. Providing hi-res photographic assets is a great value add to maintain distribution alongside sharing that content through brand channels to add further value and create great content.
Silver: No award given.
Highly Commended: Magic Rock – Saucery
Best Use of Merchandise/Point of Sale Material
Gold: Brixton – Tap Handles
These US craft beer-style tap handles did a great job, helping the pubs that have decided to stock their beers as well as the brand itself, by creating really strong impact.
Silver: St Austell – Korev
The Korev rebrand that begins on the bottle and pump clip extends naturally and effectively into pubs and bars.
Best Use of Sponsorship
Gold: Asahi UK – Fuller’s London Pride x The British & Irish Lions
A sponsorship idea that genuinely links the ongoing strategy of the the brand with a core truth about the sport being sponsored. The depth in the sponsorship is great to see in terms of the content created and the use of ambassadors, and content in and around the fixtures themselves. The trade customer activity really landed how well the brand understood the tournament, celebrating not only the Lions team but also the host nation.
Silver: None
Overcoming Adversity
Gold: Place of the Way – Please/Thank You
The judges loved how the campaign managed to engage with a consumer base without the conversation becoming too heavy.
Silver: No award given.
Grand Prix: Beer and Cider Marketer of the Year
There were three or four strong contenders, with Heineken in particular deserving a special mention for simply owning the PR category for most of the history of these awards. To take both gongs in the category in the same year is an incredible feat.
But our winner – for the second year running – is St Austell, this time for the rebrand of Korev lager. It may have won gold in best branding, but it worked well across the board: great visual presence in outlet, and some nice activation activity outside. There’s a creative idea at the heart of it. It’s bold, eye-catching, linked to a strong sense of place and to the brand itself. The result: growth that outpaces even the runaway success of the world lager category.
Think you can do better? Look out for details of next year’s awards!
I was a marketer long before I was a beer writer, and I still like to keep my hand in. For more marketing insight, sign up to my regular industry newsletter, or get exclusive, paywalled content via my Patreon. If you’d like to have a chat about you business specifically, drop me a line.
Like one of those aged celebrities who hits the news on their birthday when you thought they’d died a long time ago, the working men’s club may be frail and half-forgotten, but we need it now as much as we ever did.
T’pies have come.
Today, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union (CIU) celebrates its 160th anniversary. Or rather, it should be doing. There’s a statement on the CIU website, a piece in their member’s magazine The Journal, and that’s about it. As far as I can tell, there’s no coverage at all in mainstream media. You can’t really blame them though – the CIU has no press office or bespoke media contact, and only seems interested in talking to its dwindling band of member clubs. It probably never occurred to anyone to issue a press release to celebrate the occasion.
Should we be bothered?
It’s twenty years now since clubs troubled mainstream media. Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights ran for two series from 2001 to 2003, and has remained the reference point for any scattered mentions working men’s clubs have had I local newspapers since then. Kay brought his trademark mix of fondness and ridicule to clubland, and while there was some genuine warmth there, the humour derived from working men’s clubs being presented as an anachronism in the newly-minted 21st century.
This cheesy public image of the club is rooted in the 1970s, because that’s when clubland provided a significant chunk of the talent on TV and in the charts. More than one in ten British adults was a member of at least one club. When trends in entertainment and culture changed, the club disappeared from public view. Like someone you last saw as a kid ten or twenty years ago, in the public imagination, they still look like that.
But this was never a complete picture of what clubs did.
Philanthro-pissed
On 14th June 1862, Unitarian Minister Henry Solly convened a meeting which founded the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union. At the time, philanthropists and reformers of all stripes were desperately trying to ‘improve’ the working man – some out of genuine concern for his plight, others because millions of men were about to get the vote for the first time and therefore needed to be ‘civilised,’ so they voted for the ‘right’ people. (This is a big part of why women were initially excluded from membership. Those who worked in service were already being ‘civilised’ by being exposed to their social superiors, and anyway, the vote for women was still decades away, so they mattered less in the thinking of reformers.)
Solly recognised that if he wanted to attract working-class men after a gruelling, monotonous, ten- or twelve-hour shift, they needed a place where they could relax as well as being lectured to. A club, rather than an austere institute, was his model. In the long run, he wanted these men to be able to run there clubs themselves. So the Union was an umbrella organisation that helped clubs set up and thrive. It created model rules and articles of association. It introduced a pass card, meaning a member of one club could drink in any other club in the Union. If one club fell foul of, say, licensing laws or contract law, the Union represented them, and shared any new learnings with all member clubs.
When – against Solly’s wishes – the clubs started selling beer, profits were invested back into clubs, improving their facilities, adding billiards rooms, concert halls, and much more.
Pints and empowerment
By the 1890s, clubs were being run by working men as well as for them. Middle-class patrons who believed that, without their enlightened input, the clubs would just descend into drinking dens were proved wrong. Working men did want a chance to improve themselves. But they wanted to do so on their own terms rather than those of people who thought they knew better.
Working men’s clubs gave uneducated working class men another chance to do something more than the jobs they had been prepared for. Those who joined the committees that ran clubs got a taste for politics and public service, with thousands going on to become local councillors, magistrates and MPs. Concerts allowed people to sing, dance, tell jokes, or design and build scenery and props.
As the money flowed in, the clubs widened their vision. They provided services such as baths and showers for people living in slums with no bathrooms, summer seaside trips for kids, scholarships for members who had had no choice other than to leave school at 12 or 14, welfare schemes for those who couldn’t work due to accident or illness, and convalescent homes when members could no longer live by themselves. Working men’s clubs provided a welfare state for those who needed it decades before the real thing came into being.
Writing about the CIU in 1987, George Tremlett remarked that most of these services were no longer needed, now the actual welfare state provided them. 35 years later, with 14 million people in the UK living in poverty, that’s no longer the case.
Join the club
After more than a decade of austerity, community assets are disappearing across the board. Libraries, youth clubs and community centres are all closing. So are many working men’s clubs. Those that remain open are often anonymous – you wouldn’t know they there there if you weren’t already a member.
Inside anonymous-looking buildings like this all across the country are bars, concert rooms and meeting rooms that would be perfect for coffee mornings, jumble sales, record fairs, dance classes, yogas classes, mother and toddler groups, slimming meetings, youth clubs, book events, WI meetings, band practices and such more. On a more prosaic level, as the price of a pint soars, they’re good places to get cheap drinks without giving your money to Tim fucking Martin. Yet for much of the week, they stand empty. The community often has no idea they’re there. And the committees who run these places – often now well into their seventies – have no idea how to market themselves. The CIU should be helping them, but it’s just as clueless about the modern world as they are. No one in the organisation seems aware that communities today live online.
Working men’s clubs could once again be vital and multi-faceted community assets. They have now mostly dealt with the problems of sexism that once blighted them – most successful clubs have women on their committees these days. Many are rebranding as social clubs. But not enough have benefitted from the injection of energy that younger people bring.
A significant anniversary such as your 160th is the perfect time to raise awareness of clubs, the roles they once played and could play again. Sadly, no one seems to be making that case.
This is a big reason why I wrote Clubland, and why we published it last week. The final chapter outlines what both the CIU and individual clubs could be doing to thrive once more. There’s a lot of humour in the book, but this is one of the serious bits. If you have a fondness for clubs, see if there’s one local to you and see if you can join. They need you – whether they know it or not – and we need them.
Clubland: How The Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain, is published by Harper North as a hardback, kindle and audiobook (which I read myself!) It’s available for pre-order at Amazon or, if you prefer buying from an independent bookshop, bookshop.org.
Can I have order all around the room? Thank you, please. The book I’ve been wanting to write for eighteen years is finally here.
Another brilliant book cover by www.neilgower.com
What does the phrase ‘working men’s club’ evoke for you?
Anything at all?
If you’re under fifty, I’m guessing the first place it will take you is Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights. Looking back at that series twenty years later, it’s obvious there’s a deep fondness for clubs at its heart, but even back then, some of its humour came from the fact that clubs seemed anachronistic in the 21st century, a humorous throwback to a previous age that had outlived its relevance.
If you’re a bit older, you might remember the Wheeltappers & Shunters Social Club. Shot in 1974, when clubland was at its peak, it’s already taking the piss (Colin Crompton, who plays the clubs concert secretary, was later overheard describing club-goers as ‘peasants.’)
It is – obviously – very easy to laugh at working men’s clubs. They’re old-fashioned and northern (except that’s not quite accurate), and that’s enough. Dig a little deeper, and they are also weighed down by accusations of sexism (the clue is in the name) and racism (subtly poking its head into the programme below at least once).
Next Tuesday, 14th June, marks the 160th anniversary of the Club & Institute Union, an umbrella organisation that was founded to help clubs work together to support each other and thrive. The clubs themselves were designed to provide working-class men with an alternative to the pub or music hall, where they come could come together and relax without being pressured into drinking to excess – something which temperance campaigners at the time saw as the cause for men stumbling home and beating their wives and families (the welfare of women has always been at the heart of the working men’s club movement in one way or another – which is not to excuse the inarguable sexism that did colour much of its history.)
I first became aware of this broader, deeper history of clubs when I was researching Man Walks into a Pub, my first book. Clubs obviously exist as an alternative, a rival to pubs, and some establishments blur between the two. But I soon realised that clubs were much more than, as George Orwell described them in The Road to Wigan Pier, “glorified cooperative pubs.” Owned and run by their members, there was no need for them to make a commercial profit. Beer could be sold more cheaply than pubs, which meant they were busy, and still made money.
That money was invested back into the clubs, building concert rooms, snooker and billiards rooms, and then, as their scale and ambition grew, services such as baths and showers for people living in slums with no bathrooms, summer seaside trips for kids, scholarships for members who had had no choice other than to leave school at 12 or 14, welfare schemes for those who couldn’t work due to accident or illness, and convalescent homes when members could no longer live by themselves. Working men’s clubs provided a welfare state for those who needed it decades before the real thing came into being. As the welfare state is dismantled, there’s an argument that clubs are needed once again.
Later, as those concert halls grew and club members got a bit more money in their pockets, the biggest stars of stage and screen were brought to the doorsteps of miners and steel-workers. When clubs weren’t booking major celebrities, they were creating their own – from the 1960s to the 1980s, pretty much any comedian, gameshow host or presenter on TV had come up through the clubs. Singers and musicians from Very Lynn and Tom Jones to The Jam and The Fall all played their clubland dues.
The important role that working men’s clubs played in shaping 19th- and 20th-century culture and society has been erased from history books – there’s just one other book in print on the subject apart from this one. Clubs are ignored in any history of working class leisure or British light entertainment. This project was a working of thrilling discovery, stretching way deeper and broader than I ever thought when I started it.
In the book, I speak to snooker legend Steve Davis, who credits clubs not only with the start of his career, but the survival of the entire sport. I talk to Les Dennis and Bernie Clifton, who went from club stages to being household names, and to the campaigners who fought for equality for women in the club movement and eventually won it – decades later than you might expect.
So, please buy my new book. It overlaps with writing about beer and pubs but covers so much more. It’s political, social and cultural, and at times, deeply personal too. In writing it, I think I finally resolved my conflicted feelings around being born into a traditional working class community and deciding to leave it as soon as I could – a decision that, it turns out, was shaped significantly by my own interactions with working men’s clubs.
Clubland: How The Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain, is published on Thursday, 9th June by Harper North as a hardback, kindle and audiobook (which I read myself!) It’s available for pre-order at Amazon or, if you prefer buying from an independent bookshop, bookshop.org.
I’ll be hosting an online launch party for the book tomorrow, Wednesday 8th June, via Zoom. Tickets are free but places are limited – book yours here.
Advance praise for Clubland:
‘Pete Brown is a brilliant master of ceremonies as he brings the history of these fine institutions to life and demonstrates their importance in working class communities across the country.’ Alan Johnson, author of This Boy
‘A compelling mixture of social history, vivid reportage and candid autobiography, Clubland makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of Britain in the last century and a half.’ David Kynaston, author of Austerity Britain
‘Leave any flat-capped clichés at the door: Brown offers an earnest exploration of this crucially formative area of British social history.’ John Warland, author of Liquid History
‘Pete Brown writes poetically and with great authority on a slice of culture that has been ignored or derided for many years. He illuminates these arts centres, debating halls and palaces of carefree delight with love and care.’ Ian McMillan, author of Neither Nowt Nor Summat
‘At last the working men’s club gets its turn in the cultural spotlight. Pete Brown has written an important history and a heartfelt tribute to the friendship, organisation, humour and community to be found in these remarkable institutions.’ Ian Clayton, author of It’s The Beer Talking: Adventures in Public Houses
Our awards are under three weeks away and entries close this week. But there’s still time for you to send in something that’s going to win a shiny gong. Yeah, you need to have done some really good work. But you also need to write a good entry. Here’s how.
Judging the Beer and Cider Marketing Awards is always an educational experience.
Our judges are recruited from across the industry to provide a cross-section of opinions. I’m always delighted to find that when we get everyone together in a room, discussion is friendly, but robust.
One year, we had an entry that was all about a piece of experiential marketing at a beer event. It was an installation I’d visited personally, and when we came to discuss it, I waxed lyrical about how brilliant it had been, how original and immersive it was, how professionally it had been executed, describing all the little details that made it truly special.
The rest of the judges looked at me blankly, and when I finished, one of them said gently, “Yes, Pete, but none of that is on the entry form.”
I looked again, and realised all we had actually been given was a very brief written outline of what the event entailed, with little supporting imagery. I had to concede the point. The entry didn’t win its category.
It should have, because it was one of the most original and engaging pieces of marketing I’ve seen in recent years. But it was let down by a poor entry form.
Conversely, I’ve judged many pub awards schemes in the past. These usually consist of written entry forms in the early rounds, followed by scheduled visits to the shortlisted pubs. There was one particular pub that I’d seen shortlisted in every competition I’d judged. Every time, I was entranced by the stories of the location, the building, the events they put on, the beer selection, the energy and enthusiasm that leapt off the page. I was desperate to visit, so much so that when it came up one more time, I offered to do the site visit myself, at my own expense.
I went and stayed at the pub the night before my morning visit with the licensee, in one of the rooms they had to let (it really did have everything.) The service was lackadaisical to the point of rudeness. The food was awful. The beer wasn’t conditioned properly, and the whole place was shabby. When I met the licensee the following morning and they asked me if I’d come far, when I replied that I’d stayed the night before without their knowledge, the look of horror in their eyes said it all. This was a licensee far better at writing entry forms than actually running a pub.
The quality of the entry form in any awards scheme that asks you to present your case in narrative form rather than just submitting work is vital.
I’ve been in these situations myself. I know that something like an entry form keeps getting bumped down the To-Do list until the last possible minute, and then gets rushed.
But I also know that once you create some space, if there’s time to sit down and do it properly, you get genuine joy out of reflecting on your achievements and presenting your case to someone else. If the entry is one you genuinely believe in, it reminds you of why you do what you do.
If you’re proud of your work, it deserves a strongly written entry. There’s a saying in advertising that nothing kills a bad product as quickly as good marketing, because you drive people to the product in droves and they quickly discover it doesn’t meet up to expectations. That’s what happened with my multi-awards nominated pub.
But conversely, nothing kills a claim to great marketing quicker than a rushed or poorly written awards entry. So here are a few tips on avoiding a premature demise:
Read the form through first. There’s a shape to it. You shouldn’t be repeating yourself endlessly in each section.
Make time – do a really bad early draft that you can come back to and polish later. It’s always easier to edit than to start from scratch.
Use the space you’re given – if there’s one sentence in each section, they’re going to have to be pretty amazing sentences to make much of an impression.
Think of it as an argument rather than a form filling exercise. You’re not presenting information; you’re trying to convince a knowledgeable, engaged reader. Each section should support the others, building your case. By the time we’ve finished reading the form, we should be desperate to look at the work.
Avoid jargon. You may be being read by an expert in your discipline, or you may be being read by a brewer or publican who is very smart but doesn’t come across reach and OTS, spontaneous and promoted awareness or CAGR in their jobs.
When you have a draft, show it to someone outside your team, preferably someone unfamiliar with the work, and ask them if it reads in a convincing way.
It may sounds obvious, but please include examples of the work! If you’ve done TV or press advertising, it kind of helps if you send the ads in for people to look at. If you’ve done an event, think how best you can capture it and bring it alive. If there’s video, press coverage, captured tweets – anything – send them to us.
Confidentiality – you’ll have your own internal guidelines on this. If there’s anything on the form that you don’t feel comfortable answering or are unable to answer, just explain this and give us the best indication you can. No specific details or information will be shared beyond the judges without your permission.
Entries should be submitted here. The clock is ticking. Good luck!
Pete Brown is a British writer who specialises in making people thirsty. He is the author of twelve books and writes widely in the drinks trade press and consumer press.
