Author: PeteBrown

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2010: What the blazes was all THAT about? (Part one)

It’s that time of year again.  As the post-Christmas hangover turns into a week of bleary limbo dreamtime and the whole country forgets what day it is, and beer bloggers turn from listing obsessively every beer they drank on Christmas Day to listing obsessively everything from their Favourite New World Hop of the Year to their Favourite International Collaboration Between Brewers of Between 500 and 3000 Barrels Output Per Year Featuring Russian Oak Barrel Ageing And Resulting In a Beer of 60 IBUS or Above.
I first did a review of the year two years ago, partly because I thought it would be a bit of fun and partly to reflect on broad trends in brewing and pubs.  I repeated the exercise last year and found myself just one of scores of bloggers listing their favourite brewers, favourite beers etc. 
This year, with the Golden Pint Awards, it all seems to have got a bit serious and standardized and regulated and defined, like many things in the beer blogosphere.  I congratulate and support everyone who lists their year’s highs and lows, I offer my piss-take above in good spirit, and I hope you have a good time doing it – it’s great for everyone to be able to compare notes.  It’s just not for me.
So this year I’ve taken a broad sweep in trying to summarise the year in beer.  I’ve invented category titles to fit what I want to write about.  It’s a mix of pure self-indulgence and commentary upon the state of the industry, with the odd great beer thrown in – which kind of sums up my blog. 
The beer blogosphere is expanding so rapidly, evolving so quickly, and becoming so much more intense, I honestly don’t know what or how I should be blogging any more.  Most bloggers don’t worry about that – the whole point of blogging is writing what you want, with no editorial constraints.  So that’s what I’m going to do.
Part one today – the most self-indulgent part.  Part two tomorrow, and thoughts on 2011 Thursday or Friday, if you’re interested. 

“What the fuck was that wooshing past” sensation of the year: Beer Writer of the Year 2009

As I said at the Guild dinner this year, it didn’t feel like a year – that’s because it wasn’t, it was only 51 weeks.  
But it felt like ten.  
I worked for about five years towards winning the BWOTY award.  It’s not like it was the only reason for writing or anything like that, but this is now my chosen career and so I wanted to be recognized as being at the top of the game.  After the work that went into Hops & Glory, winning was more a relief than anything else – I knew it was the best I could do.  If I hadn’t won with that, I doubted I ever would win. 
After I won, I realized I’d been so focused on winning, I had no idea what to do afterwards.  What can or should a beer writer of the year actually do?  
I had hoped I’d be able to be a bit of an ambassador for good beer to the broader world.  Having the title certainly opened some doors and got me some opportunities I wouldn’t have had otherwise, but it failed to get me the presence in national press that I and so many other beer writers still crave. Between us we have had more press opportunities in 2010 certainly than I’ve had before.  But we’re still lacking that big breakthrough.  Newspapers like the Guardian and associated weekend magazines enjoy a significant proportion of good beer fans among their readership, but seem almost ideologically opposed to allowing regular beer coverage in their pages.  Same with TV shows like Saturday Kitchen. 
I’ve enjoyed and been very humbled by the recognition I now get within the beer world.  But I’ve been just as frustrated by my inability to spread the beer word beyond the already converted.  It’s a long job.  We’re not giving up yet.  But by the time I was handing the title over, it felt like I was only just getting started.  
Happily, after reading through a record number of entries (there are so many of us writing about beer) I passed the title to someone who is very successfully spreading the word about great beer and great pubs to the broader public – Simon Jenkins.

Personal warm glow of the year: The Beer Trilogy

We all judge books by their covers, and we never quite got it right with my first two.  The paperback release of Hops and Glory gave me the opportunity to repackage Man Walks into a Pub and Three Sheets to the Wind, and the chance to heavily rewrite the former to bring it up to date and also get rid of all the factual inaccuracies and repetition of received myth that characterized the first edition.  I’m very, very proud of the reworked edition of my first book – there’s a lot of new stuff in it.  But I still haven’t found anyone who’s actually read the revised edition.
But it has worked – each of the first two books sold double what it did last year, and Hops paperback has sold well too.  
This is partly due to another endless round of book events – talks, tastings and so on, the highlights of which were selling a 250-capacity venue at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and another almost as big at the Ilkley Literary Festival, at which my old English Lit teacher, whom I haven’t seen for 25 years, loomed up out of the crowd.  If we weren’t both Yorkshiremen, we’d have been blubbing like babies.  We almost did. 
These highlights gave me the strength to shrug off the crushing sense of doom and despair when a mere six people turned up at the Notting Hill Travel Bookshop in October, and only two turned up to my final event in Sheffield last week.
I’m now seemingly doing a permanently ongoing round of after-dinner speeches, literary festivals, food festivals and private/corporate tastings – a whole new side to my strange career.  That’s the thing about beer.  It’s never dull, always evolving.

Heroes of the year: How many do you want?

Ron Pattinson for his obsessive historical quest.  I’ve read and used some of what he endlessly quotes, and I’ve read some stuff he hasn’t.  But I could never imagine attacking old brewing records with the gusto he does.  God knows why he does it.  But he’s built up an essential beer history resource.
Fuller’s – who among their multi-pronged approach to examining the relationship between beer and age, did a collaborative brew with Ron and their own past.
Andy Moffatt at Redemption, officially the nicest man in brewing, a man who simply will not let you buy a drink, and then turned up to my Christmas Party with a barrel of London Brewer’s Alliance Porter (more on London Brewers later).
Garrett Oliver.  Thornbridge.  The insane Jamie Hawksworth of the Sheffield and Euston Taps.  The new wave of Czech craft brewers like Matuska.  Stuart Howe at Sharp’s for a commitment to invention that’s made it into the national press.  And everyone who is brewing so much good and interesting beer, I’ve given up even trying to keep track.

More tomorrow.  (This may actually be a three-parter.)

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December Vlog – Christmas beers with the two Peters!

So, three weeks there with no posting.  Did you miss me?

If so, sorry about that.  Three reasons contributing to my silence:

  • I’ve been insanely busy, working 14-16 hours a day on stuff that pays money, not because I want to but because if I didn’t, HMRC were going to come round and auction off my rare beers and CD collection to pay my unpaid tax bill
  • My hard drive died and I was computerless for a while.  Today I heard that, for a mere £500, a specialist data recovery agency has been able to do what a mac engineer could not, and salvage all my data from the old hard drive.  Not only can I now do my accounts, look at 10,000 photos and listen to 30,000 songs, I have my entire archive of everything I’ve ever written back safely.
  • I was in no great hurry to blog anyway.  I needed a break from the relentless negativity that infects some parts of the blogosphere.  I swear that if I was to post an exclusive along the lines of “Brewer creates beer that cures cancer – and by the way, it tastes fucking awesome” – I would only have to count to about 40 before someone out there commented that it probably, in fact, tastes shit, or is brewed by the wrong-sized brewer, or is served under gas, or doesn’t have enough hops.  Sure I have my own rants, but I always try to be constructive – I did actually taste Stella Black, for instance, before writing about what an appallingly fucking shit beer it is, and I gave some very clear pointers as to what I thought was wrong with it, and how I thought they could have done it much better. But some of you seem determined to see only the negative in everything, to close down all options apart from the inevitability of shit.  It’s not your fault, it’s the internet.  It’s what it does to some people.
Anyway, it’s nearly Christmas – and I’ll brook none of that behaviour now.  
Annie Lennox doesn’t like Christmas.  She’s released an album with which she is attempting to destroy Christmas.  She takes Christmas songs and sings them like the ghost of a premenstrual Scrooge-ess whose puppy died one Christmas and doesn’t see why anyone else should enjoy Christmas if she can’t.  It was playing in a Starbucks I was in yesterday, and the snow began to melt, and turned to rain, and now London has no snow for Christmas.  Coincidence? Yeah, right.
I’m the opposite. I love Christmas.  For much of the year I’m George Bailey in the final third of It’s a Wonderful Life.  I’m that despairing, that pessimistic.  And then it gets to Christmas and I realise the difference between Bedford Falls and Pottersville is merely state of mind*, and I become end-of-film George Bailey.
That’s why we’ve done a Christmas beer blog. It’s fun-filled.  It’s cheesy.  It’s meant to be.  We also happen to taste some really good beers and give you a blueprint for a beery Christmas Day that you can take way and adapt to whatever beers are available in your locale.
Having finished his videos of the brewing process, Peter Amor joins me for a drink.  I drink one of his beers in one of his pubs. Then we drink some more.  We hint at what beers go with each stage of Christmas dinner.  We drink beer, enjoy it, and have a laugh.

That’s what beer is about.  That’s what Christmas is about.  No brainer.

From now on our blogs are available for you to cut and paste from Vimeo and disseminate into the wider world.  And in the New Year, while I’ll still be posting monthly video blogs here there will also be a separate British Video Blogs site attempting to spread appreciation of great British beer more widely.
So just ask yourself: are you a George Bailey?  Or an Annie Lennox?
  
*If you don’t get this reference, you need to stop reading, right now, and go and watch It’s a Wonderful Life before you do anything else.  This is important.  Your life could depend on it.

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Who’s the Christmas number one?

Ah, that’s better!

Wikio.co.uk – December Beer and Wine Ranking

1 Pete Brown’s Blog (+3)
2 Brew Dog Blog (+1)
3 Pencil & Spoon (-1)
4 Boggle About Beer (-3)
5 Zythophile (=)
6 The Pub Curmudgeon (+2)
7 Tandleman’s Beer Blog (-1)
8 Are You Tasting the Pith? (+3)
9 Beer Reviews (-2)
10 Thornbridge Brewers’ Blog (+5)
11 The Wine Conversation (+7)
12 Rabid About Beer (+2)
13 Woolpack Dave’s beer and stuff blog (-1)
14 Called to the bar (-5)
15 Spittoon (+4)
16 “It’s just the beer talking” – Jeff Pickthall’s Blog (+19)
17 The Beer Nut (-4)
18 Master Brewer at Adnams (-8)
19 I might have a glass of beer (+3)
20 Beer. Birra. Bier. (+1)

Ranking made by Wikio.co.uk

Boggle’s Sidebottom Crusade keeps him in the top five, and it really is quite a good blog aside from that. Nice chap too.  Cooking Lager’s Jonah-like aura continues to wreak its harm though.  Since he defected from Team Avery to form Team Boggle, Zak has recovered and gone back up three places – mirroring precisely the fall suffered by Cookie’s new cause.  The blogosphere’s reaction to Kelly Ryan’s return  home sees Thornbridge’s blog rise five to break into the Top Ten.  And Jeff Pickthall stages a stunning recovery based on a mere three posts, covering beer judging and busting a potent myth.

Full updated rankings will go live on Wikio on Sunday 5th December.

So, Christmas number one – does that make me the Cliff Richard or the X-Factor winner of the beer blogosphere?  Well now you’re here, why not watch my latest Vlog and draw your own conclusions.  But please, if you’re moved to comment on my weak chart-based analogy, remember it’s the season of goodwill.

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November V-Blog: The Astonishing Rise of London’s Brewers, and the Jolly Butchers!

With just hours of November left, the team behind our video blogs have managed to pull together the edits of me in the Jolly Butchers, and Peter Amor’s latest instalment of brewing fun.

In previous V-Blogs we’ve gone around various pubs trying a variety of beers.  This time we stayed closer to home – very close to my home in fact – just around the corner from my house, and focused the whole episode on the astonishing rise of London’s small brewers.  Four years ago, London had Fuller’s and Meantime.  Both among my favourites, but a shockingly small choice for the nation’s capital.  A couple of years ago something exploded in the collective beery psyche.  The result, well, click below…


Pete Brown’s British Beer Blog – November from Ian Hudson Films on Vimeo.

By the way – I’m slurring a bit – that’s not drunkenness – just tiredness.

If you enjoyed these, and haven’t seen previous ones, check out my adventures in Nottingham and in South Wales.

Meanwhile, Peter Amor, after taking us through beer’s ingredients and the process in the brewhouse, moves now to fermentation – in both the brewery fermentation room, and the pub cellar.


Peter Amor’s British Brewing Blog: Episode 3 from Ian Hudson Films on Vimeo.

Just before Christmas, Peter and I join forces to taste some great seasonal beers.  See you back here in a few weeks.

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Pub closures: is the worst over?

I was at a presentation the other day by CGA strategy, the company who does all the market stats for the UK on-trade market.  Over the past couple of years, when you’ve seen grim headlines about the number of pubs closing every week, it’s been based on their figures.

Enough already.

Well, perhaps I’ve been too busy, or maybe it’s because good news never tends to get as much coverage as bad news, I seem to have missed their latest figures, whenever they came out.  But while pubs are still closing at a depressing rate, it does seem as the the worst might be over – and the closure rate is falling faster than CGA had forecast.

They calculate the figure every six months, and the trend is as follows:

June 08 to December 08 – 39 net pub closures every week
December 08 to June 09 – 52 pub closures a week – the figure that really hit the headlines
June 09 to December 09 – 39 closures a week
December 09 to June 10 – 29 closures a week

As I said, 29 pubs every week is still a shocking rate of decline.  We’re losing about five per cent of Britain’s pubs in less than a decade.  But it has fallen by almost half in a year.

CGA reckon that the pubs that are closing are those that didn’t adapt to suit changing needs in the recession.  That may be too much of a generalisation, but they’re probably right when they say the pubs left behind may be smaller in number, but will be stronger.  They reckon proper recovery in the pub market will begin in 2013.

Another interesting stat is what happens to those closed down pubs?  Property company Christies says that 60% of the boarded-up pubs they sell on eventually reopen as pubs.  That will be included in CGA’s net figure.  But it does show that there is still some dynamism in the pub market.  Both the Jolly Butchers and Cask and Kitchen were failed pubs before they were taken over and relaunched as craft beer pubs.

So – hardly joyous tidings to shout from the rooftops.  But as I’ve always maintained, reports of ‘the death of the pub’ are greatly exaggerated.

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Simon Jenkins crowned Beer Writer of the Year

So last night I had to hand over the title.  It’s not fair – my year as Beer Writer of the Year passed very quickly – partly because it was only 51 weeks, with this year’s dinner being a week earlier than last year.

Part of winning meant I had to be chair of the judges this year.  We were deluged by a record entry: 45 individuals entered work.  On average, they each entered 2.3 of the available six categories, with between one and six pieces of work each time.  My fellow judges and I read about 400 different pieces of beer writing, from 400 word columns to 1000 page books, and everything in between.

Last night, after a cracking beer and food dinner prepared by Michelin star chef Sriram Aylur, we revealed the winners.  I’m too hungover to go into great detail about each one, and if you’ve read this far you probably just want to get a quick look at the names anyway.  There are some familiar names and some new ones.  If there’s anyone here who you’ve never read before, I urge you to check them out.

I’ll just say a bit about our overall winner, Beer Writer of the Year 2010, Simon Jenkins.  Because he writes in a regional newspaper not many of us get to see his work, and he’s already being described as a ‘new face’ despite the fact that he’s about my age and has been writing pub reviews for years.  It’s so good then, that we have a regional category that allows great writing to reach a wider audience.  I’ve put a link at the bottom of this post to a random pub review he’s written for the Yorkshire Post, and I’d urge you to follow the links from that page to the other reviews listed down the side.  I’ve also linked to all other winners’ work where I can.

There was an awful lot of writing to read while judging.  But with some people we got to the end of their submission and were disappointed that there wasn’t any more to read.  Simon exemplified this.  That’s one reason he won.

Another reason is that pubs are going through hell at the moment, and anyone reading Simon’s review will be overcome by a desperate urge to go to the pub – any pub – by the time they’re halfway down the page.  I said when presenting the award last night that one of the biggest challenges facing all beer writers is the struggle to reach a wider audience, to not just preach to the converted.

I really don’t want to sound ungrateful to any of the beer fans who read this blog, my books or any of the work produced by the writers below.  But the aim of the Guild is to spread the appreciation of beer.  We’re getting better at doing that, we’re more successful all the time, but we still struggle to bring in new people to the world of beer.  With his pub reviews, the judges felt this is exactly what Simon excels at.

Cheers.

Brewer of the Year 
Stefano Cossi, Thornbridge Brewery

Budweiser Budvar John White Travel Bursary
Winner: John Conen, Bamberg and Franconia – Germany’s Brewing Heartland

Bishop’s Finger Award for Beer and Food Writing
Winner: Will Beckett, Imbibe magazine

Brains SA Gold Award for Best Online Communication 
Winner: Mark Dredge 
Runner-up: Jerry Bartlett

Adnams Award for Best Writing in Regional Publications 
Winner: Simon Jenkins, Yorkshire Evening Post 
Runner-up: Duncan Brodie, East Anglian Daily Times 

Wells & Young’s Awards for Best Writing for the Beer and Pub Trade 
Winner: Larry Nelson, Brewers’ Guardian 
Runner-up: Isla Whitcroft, Beer, the Natural Choice

Molson Coors’ Award for Best Writing in National Publications 
Winner: Zak Avery
Runner-up: Adrian Tierney-Jones 

The Michael Jackson Gold Tankard Award – Beer Writer of the Year 2010
Simon Jenkins
(This link takes you to one of Simon’s pub reviews in the Yorkshire Evening Post.  There’s a list down the right hand side of more pub reviews – all Simon’s.)

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So last night I came across Stella Black…

Oh no, not another post about Stella and its sinister clownish owners A-B Inbev.

Why do I do it?  Why do I care?  Why do I obsess about this particular mass market, tasteless lager more than any other?

A few reasons:

  • It’s responsible for my entry into the world of beer – I started writing about beer when I was advertising Stella, so there’s a past history, an historical fondness.
  • I don’t just write about craft beer, I write about all beer – and Stella is one of the biggest beer brands in the UK.
  • It could have been so much better than it is if it didn’t keep making such spectacular business errors – it could have been a gateway between mainstream and ‘interesting’ beers.
  • Even by the standards of mainstream, industrial lager, it’s so bad I’m drawn back to it with morbid fascination – it’s a slow motion car crash.  I find Foster’s undrinkable, but aligning with comedy and resurrecting Alan Partridge was an inspired move to make the mainstream drinker a bit fonder of it.  Carling is bland and tasteless but its ‘You know who your mates are’ campaign has produced some of the best classic beer ads for nearly twenty years.  Heineken is mainstream and dull and always gets its advertising wrong, but whenever I taste it, I have to acknowledge that it’s a well made beer.  But Stella… it’s becoming a textbook case study in marketing failure, as well as a shocking example of how to devalue a once OK beer.  (I know some people like the French Riviera advertising and the Draught Masters thing got some praise, so maybe I’m being unfair. But read on.)
So I was in a Nicholson’s pub last night, and spotted the Stella Black font.  
What was I expecting?  Was I anticipating an amazingly complex beer?  Something that aficionados like me would love?  No.  I wasn’t expecting it to be great.  But having learned that it’s brewed with Saaz hops, coriander and orange peel, and having seen quite attractive press shots like this:
I was starting to suspect that it might at least be drinkable, that it might be one of those beers you could have in a pub where there are only mainstream, mass market brands available.

Is it aimed at me?  No.  But according to A-B Inbev, it is aimed at drinkers of “world beers” such as San Miguel, Budvar, Peroni. Not the most flavourful lagers (Budvar aside), but perfectly drinkable and decent quality, bought by people who want something that’s just a little more interesting than tasteless mainstream lager.

Also, as the beer is being restricted to the on-trade and is being sold in “hundreds, not thousands” of pubs, with bespoke training for bar staff, all intended to create a premium drinking experience, I was expecting the presentation to be pretty good even if the beer wasn’t – just look at that lovely photo above.
So I was surprised to see that in one of these handpicked pubs, this special, super premium beer looks like this on the bar:
No special font.  Just an ordinary tap along with all the other ordinary brands on the bar.  And look at the design.  A-B Inbev have some research that says people don’t think it’s a dark lager, even though everyone I’ve spoken to about it thinks it is a dark lager.  So confident are A-B Inbev that NO ONE will mistake Stella Black for a dark beer, they’ve made it look an awful lot like Guinness – the darkest mainstream beer there is.  
Now look closer, what are those words on the font?
“Matured for longer”.  That’s the main point on which they’ve chosen to sell this beer.  Nothing wrong with that – except they refuse to reveal how long the beer is actually matured for.  Several writers – including me – have asked what the maturation period is.  It’s the first question any competent writer would ask after being sold ‘matured for longer’ as a claim.  But A-B Inbev responded that this information was confidential.  It’s matured for longer – but we won’t give you any indication of what that means.   
OK, well, it’s a super premium lager.  At least it’s going to be served in an attractive glass, right?  Wrong.  Here’s my Stella Black:
 
So, handpicked bars, super-premium image, going up against the likes of Peroni which can charge over £4 a pint because it has a font two feet high and is served in a beautiful, unique glass.  And we’ve got a standard font, an anonymous glass, confusing brand imagery, and a product claim they refuse to tell you about.  Is any of this the pub’s fault?  We know how unreliable bar staff are.  Well, no.  It’s currently only in handpicked outlets that they really trust.  They said so.  And every other beer in the pub was being served appropriately in its branded glassware.  A-B Inbev have chosen to present the beer to you in this way.
So what’s it taste like?  I told you my expectations weren’t that high, but I was prepared to be open-minded.  Well.  No aroma whatsoever.  I don’t know what they did with the Saaz hops, coriander and orange peel, but they didn’t put them in this beer.  It’s so long since Stella has seen whole Saaz hops perhaps no one at the brewery knew what they were and they made a weird, bitter salad with them instead.  
The taste has a very brief flash of malty sweetness, then a chalky dryness that disappears almost instantly, and that’s it – until the unpleasant aftertaste starts to build after a few sips.  Then you need another beer to get rid of that.  Stella Black is one of those special, rare beers that manage to be both tasteless and unpleasant.  A beer that’s merely tasteless we can all understand, but this?  It’s like a 4.1% standard lager with a weird, Special Brew type finish.  The worst of all worlds.  Utterly undrinkable.
It fascinates me, the extent to which this once great brand can fall so far short of my expectations, no matter how low they are.  If the whole “we’re calling it super-premium but serving it in a standard fashion, calling it black but making it blonde, making longer maturation our main claim but then refusing to talk about maturation period” brand concept was presented by a bunch of hopeful 21 year-old graduate recruits on a final interview day workshop, they wouldn’t get a job in any agency I’ve ever worked with.  And if the beer was tasted blind in any competition I’ve judged, you’d either think it had a fault or was a nasty industrial, chemical concoction from the Balkans.        
One final joke – when coming up with the name for the beer, they obviously failed to get the internet ownership of it. www.stellablack.com takes you to this lady’s website:
Now that’s tasty.

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‘The Brewery Tap’ – the next generation?

Imagine you’re a microbrewer.  You’ve established a few successful beers and have won the odd award here and there at SIBA competitions and CAMRA festivals.  Sales are showing healthy growth and you’ve got some local recognition.  In a few years time, you might have to expand.  But there’s one thing now obsessing you.

Your own pub.  You want a brewery tap.

But you can’t get one.

Buying a freehold pub is a financial step too far – you just haven’t got that kind of money to hand.  You could of course get a lease or tenancy from one of the big PubCos but what would be the point of that?  The tie means you’d have to take beers from their limited range, and your not on it – you want a pub that showcases YOUR beers, as you want them to be seen.

This is a scenario facing many micros at the moment.  To some, it’s a symbol of what they’re fighting against – an outdated model in the British beer and pub industry.

But now, things are changing.  And it’s my old mates at Thornbridge who are leading the way, with the first pub on an interesting new deal with Enterprise Inns.

Well, not quite leading the way.

Three years ago, Midlands brewer Everards started a scheme called Project William.  They took over defunct, failed pubs – the ones that we read about that are closing every week – and went into partnership with local brewers around the Midlands and the north of England.  Everards invested in refurbishing the pub – in partnership with the local brewer – and took a traditional tie on lager, soft drinks and spirits – meaning the publican had to buy all these from Everards at their rates.  This is usual enough for PubCos and regional brewers.  But they made cask ales free of tie, simply asking that one Everards beer be stocked on the range.

Now, if you were a bog standard pub that relied mainly on industrial lager (as most of these pubs were before they failed), it doesn’t make much difference.  But if you’re a micro looking for a pub where you can stick six handpulls on the bar to showcase your own beers plus a range of other interesting micros, it’s giving you what you want from a pub with much lower risk and investment than you’d get elsewhere.

There are about twenty Project William pubs now, and they’re all – apart from one uncertainty – booming.  Everards gets the return on its investment from the other drinks.  The micro gets its Brewery tap.  A community gets its pub back.  Everyone wins.

I wrote about Project William in the Cask Report and The Publican.  It’s such a clever idea, the biggest question for me was why no one else had done it, why the big PubCos didn’t take heed.

Well now, someone has.

Thornbridge have worked with Enterprise – one of the two giants of the PubCo world with between 7,000 and 8,000 pubs – before.  The Cricket Inn in Totley is an Enterprise pub, but the leasehold model is not ideal for a brewer with as many great ideas and beers as Thornbridge has.  So brewer and PubCo have been talking about doing things differently.  When Enterprise decided to take a leaf out of Everards book and create a different kind of leasehold, Thornbridge was the first to jump.

The result was the Greystones:

God bless Farrow and Ball.

This was a failed pub in Sheffield called the Highcliffe, a great building that had just become a haunt for local, erm, ‘characters’, the kind of people who spend more money in a toilet cubicle than at the bar.  The refurb was a joint investment – with Enterprise chipping in most of the cash.  Thornbridge are free of tie on ales so they can showcase their range.  Enterprise gets a big pub run by people who know what they are doing.  Sheffield gets yet another amazing craft beer pub, which also has an emphasis on ‘arts and the local community’, with gigs and other events happening regularly.

The Greystones opened on November 3rd.  It sold 3000 pints in its first 48 hours.

So if you’re that ambitious micro, it’s not simply a case of walking up to Enterprise or Everards and saying, “Gizza pub” – they need to be convinced that you have the business acumen to make it work, and that if they pay for a refurb it’s going to pay back.  But if this model catches on – as it surely will – we’re going to see more abandoned pubs revived, and a much greater variety of drinks on British bars.

Hats off to Enterprise – not always the hero in stories about British pubs – for having the vision to do this.    Props to Everards for coming up with the original idea in the first place.  And well done Thornbridge, yet again.

I’ll be doing a Hops & Glory event with a tasting of Thornbridge beers at the Greystones on Thursday 16th December.

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Why Beer Matters – the final chapter

I need to address an oversight.
Long term readers may remember that in January, I decided to give away a trip I’d won to the Budvar brewery, because I’ve been several times before.  I invited anyone who had never had their writing published in print media before to write an essay entitled ‘Why Beer Matters’.  Then me, Budvar and the Publican would choose a winner who would get my trip.
I published the first and second runners up back in the spring, but the winner was Mark Dredge. I wanted to wait before publishing his winning entry until it was published in The Publican, and that wasn’t happening till Mark did his trip, so he could write about that too. That happened way back in September, and sadly The Publican didn’t publish Mark’s full piece.
So now, much later than it should have been, here’s Mark’s take on Why Beer Matters.  We thought all the top three entries were evocative, passionate and wonderfully written.  Mark addressed very similar themes to lots of other entries; he just delivered them in the most compelling way.
Enjoy.
Our distant ancestors, the cave men and women, had the campfire. They would gather there, they lived around it and socialised around it, they learnt their life skills in its glowing, flickering flame. It was the centre of the community, the source of warmth, the source of heat to cook, the place where stories were told and learning happened. We don’t have campfires, we have the pub.
It’s the early drinking years which are the important ones. They come when we are trying to discover who we are, who we are going to be and they help to shape us into that person. In the pub, at this time, we become more socially aware of ourselves and others and catching the eye of a mate becomes the primary motive for almost every action. Strut to the door at 17, acting grown up, feeling 27, ballsy. They let you in (of course they shouldn’t but everyone knows this pub lets you in). It’s the first step. Inside, the area opens up. It’s a man’s world and you’ve taken your first adult steps. Ordering the first pint is a ritual ceremony and with that beer in your hand you are now a part of the adult world.
Those early years are fraught. There’s ID checks, your mates having too many, the knock-back from the girl, the running out of money when you want another drink, learning about life, talking to people, being a shoulder to cry on or a voice of reason, acting stupid, spilled drinks, loose lips and broken hearts. But there’s more than that. There’s the laughter, the fun, the growing up, the being with friends. I can picture the pub we drank in: dark and dingy, a loud rock club-pub, always smelly, always crowded, always smoky, always hot, always surrounded by friends. It was my campfire.
And in that pub, or in others, or at a friend’s house with some bottles, or in the park with some cans, that’s where I learnt so many things, so many life skills: effective communications (ease the raging drunk; say hi to the girl), societal order (that’s the manager so act sober; they are the cool group), self-control (I shouldn’t have had that last pint), budgeting (I’ve got £5.20 and a burger is £3 so what can I get to drink?), how to attract a mate (play it cool, smile, what’s the worst that can happen?), how to deal with rejection (‘Can I buy you a drink’, I slur, ‘Err… no’, she says), responsibility (looking after the one who had too much). And we learn these things on our own, away from the comfort and security of the parental nest. We are growing up, in the pub, pint glass in our hand: the beacon of beer is always there, a flaming torch to guide us.
And it’s always there. It’s the reason and the excuse to catch up with old friends; it’s the oil of our social life. Let’s go for a beer. Beer is currency: ‘thanks for your help, I’ll buy you a pint’. Beer is the offer of friendship: ‘Pint?’ Beer is business; beer is passion. Beer is food, beer is life. It’s there in the good times and the bad, like a familiar friend to laugh with us or ease our pain with us. It’s in the fridge when we get home from work or it’s at the forefront of our minds as the clock hands ache around the last hour of the last day of the week. As we move along the beer-drinking path it opens up a wider view over the whole, vast plains of possibility. It can be the simplest cold lager on a hot day or it can be the most complex, rich barley wine on a cold night. It can be challenging and thought provoking; enlightening and inspiring; light or dark or a thousand shades in between; smooth or rugged; mild or tongue-twisting. It comes in fat, round glasses or tall thin ones; it’s hand-pulled and frothing into a dimpled mug or carefully poured from a dusty old bottle into a crystal tumbler. And then there’s the nonic pint glass: the stunning vision and lasting beauty of great British design, right royally branded with the crown. Holding it provides the same comfort as your loved one’s hand: it just feels right; the perfect vessel, the perfect size and weight. We get halfway through and already we want it re-filled so that it looks handsome and proud and full of colour and life again. It’s the pint glass, that guiding light, which we’ve known since we were taking our first, uneasy grown-up steps back from the bar after saying for the first time, ‘Can I have a pint please?’
Our pub is the caveman’s campfire. We grow up there, we become ourselves there, we make important decisions there, we go there after a long day, we eat, we share experiences, we relax, we have a beer there. It’s changed from those primitive and fraught pub-going adventures and we’ve learnt the important things about life and love and where we are and where we’re going. Now we can just sit back and enjoy it, say cheers to our drinking partner and take a deep, long pull on that pint in our hand. Beer: it’s more than just a drink and it matters because it’s always been there and it always will be; the guiding torch around our campfire.

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