Author: PeteBrown

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Why it’s fruitless to try to paint beer as the new wine

Last year we were having the kitchen done and the house was a building site. The year before that I’d just got back from Kolkata. The year before that we left it too late, and the year before that our mad neighbours scared off a lot of the people we wanted to talk to. Jesus – thinking about it, we hadn’t had one of our traditional Christmas drinks parties since 2005.

I wanted to make a good impression. On top of that, I had so much beer in the cellar that if I was to try and drink it all before it turned to vinegar I would surely kill myself. So I laid out a beer extravaganza on the table.
I never try to force beer down people’s throats – you never win hearts and minds by doing that. So in the afternoon, we went to Majestic Wine and bought a case of decent, zingy Chilean Sauvignon Blanc and a case of light, fruity Italian. Owing to a schoolboy-error oversight in my beer scrounging and having spent far too much of 2009 obsessing over hop bombs and whisky aged tar-flavoured stouts, I also found myself rather embarrassed at having to buy a case of Asahi.
Come party time, the Asahi and the sauvignon were chilling in an ice bucket. On the table stood bottle of the cheeky red, and about fifty assorted beers from the cellar. We had tumblers and wine glasses at the ready, and bottle openers in profusion.
When the guests arrived, I offered them drinks, and talked them through what was on offer. By the end of the evening I’d made a dent in the beer lake, and converted one or two people to beery delights they hadn’t had before.
But there was one conversation I had seven or eight times, and it’s been rolling around my mind for two months now so I wanted to write it down to see if by doing so I can make sense of it in my head. Here goes:
Me: “Hi! Long time no see! So, what can I get you to drink? We’ve got beer and wine and a bit of fizz if you like. There are a lot of beers so let me talk you through them: there’s lager chilling in the bucket, these ones here are blonde and pale ales and are lightly chilled and a bit fruity and zingy, then you’ve got these ones which are a bit darker, more caramelly and may be with flavours of ripe red fruit or toffee or caramel. Then these here are stronger and darker and maybe a bit challenging, but if you like rich red wine you might like them, they have chocolate and coffee and sometimes oaky flavours. And here’s some wheat beers that are light and refreshing, some fruit beers and some other surrealist shit from Belgium*.”
Guest: “Um… I’ll have a wine, thanks.”
Me: “Sure! What kind of wine would you like?”
Guest: “White, thanks.”
Me: “What kind of white?”
Guest: “Eh? I dunno, just white.”
Me: “Any particular flavour? Any particular style?”
Guest: “No, just white.”
To me, this exchange – which, like I said, I had several times without much variation – reveals a major misconception in the way both beer fans and wine lovers think about the relationship between the two drinks.
They argue that beer is crude and unsophisticated. We reply strenuously that beer has just as much flavour and complexity as wine.
But just like the majority of beer drinkers, the majority of wine drinkers don’t actually care that much about complexity and depth of flavour. When someone orders a bottle of Pinot Grigio in All Bar One and has it served in an ice bucket and drinks it at about 2 degrees above freezing, they do so not to appreciate the flavour, but to look and feel good while they’re drinking it, and to manage their arc of inebriation in a way with which they feel comfortable. They’re showing the same level of discernment, and the same physiological and psychological needs, as a Carling or Bud drinker.
If you started to talking to a Carling or Bud drinker about the subtleties of difference between a French and a Californian Chardonnay, they’d run a mile. Similarly, someone who chooses a wine on the basis that it;s not the house wine but one above it, so you don’t look like a cheapskate but you still get good value and gosh doesn’t it slip down quickly, is going to be completely unimpressed by arguments that the malt of a porter or the hop of an IPA can compete with the intensity of a Shiraz or Kiwi Sauvignon.
The vast majority of drinkers simply aren’t that interested in flavour. That’s not a criticism. you can’t make someone start obsessing about taste buds any more than you can inspire in them a sudden interest in fashionable hosiery if it isn’t something they’ve already pondered. The way to get these people into beer is to cast beer as fashionable, something with a favourable image.
I’m, not arguing in favour of total superficiality here – one way of doing that is to get respected people to proselytise about beer. If we really want to evangelise beer, we need to find the people who are interested in flavour, and engage them on their level. In turn, they pass on their enthusiasm to those who don’t care as much.
Yes, it is annoying when the person who says “Just white” walks away with their glass of “just white” actively thinking they have made a more discerning, premium choice than any of the beers you were offering, many of which cost more per millilitre than the wine in their hand. But in the final analysis, that’s their problem, not yours
*This was not to dismiss Belgium, but I didn’t want to go on too long or scare novices away completely.

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How “87000” glassing injuries a year gave the neopros a bit of a headache

We had a bit of fun yesterday over the latest hysterical media circus around the dangers of drinking.

The Home Office have employed a design agency to come up with a new, safer beer glass in an attempt to reduce violent attacks with broken glasses in pubs.
The most important bit first: the design agency claim to have come up with a glass that looks the same as a normal beer glass, feels the same, and costs the same for pubs to buy, but has a laminate coating that means the glass will not shatter into shards if broken. Here’s what it looks like when dropped:

And here’s a link to a BBC video of how it works.

This is a clever move – when the initiative was announced back in September they scared us with the prospect of banning glass from pubs. Newspapers pronounced the ‘death of the pint glass’ and its replacement with some crappy plastic/polycarbonate thing that would probably be the wrong shape and have pictures of flowers on it to calm everyone down. So if this new glass is everything it’s cracked up to be (sorry), and if the laminate coating doesn’t impact upon the flavour, aroma or carbonation of the beer, you’d have to be a bit of a mental to think that it’s not a good idea.
So what’s the problem?

The problem is the epidemic of broken beer glass assaults that this new design is going to help solve. The money and attention given to this initiative is necessary, we are told, because of the sheer number of assaults, the terrible injuries they do, and of course the cost of all this to the NHS and society at large.

The Times tells us that ” Last year 85,000 people were attacked with glasses, leaving many scarred for life.” The BBC agrees, reporting that “Nearly 87,000 injuries are caused by glass attacks each year in England and Wales, according to the Home Office. Many more are hurt as a result of accidents.” The Mail tells us there are “around 87,000 violent incidents involving glassware each year, which costs an annual estimate of £100m in NHS, police and court costs.” The Telegraph goes further, with “Up to 1,000 youngsters a week suffer serious facial injuries in drunken assaults with many left scarred for life”, and that “Treating such injuries costs the NHS £2.7 billion a year”.

Pretty conclusive, right? So where does this 85,000-87,000 figure come from?
I spent an hour yesterday trying to find it somewhere. But the only Home Office figure I could find was 5,000 – a figure quite different from that quoted in every single newspaper report that covered the story. But the newspapers clearly said that 87,000 was a Home Office figure.
What was going on?
When I couldn’t, I asked my followers on Twitter to help me. The results they brought back speak volumes about how anti-alcohol scare stories are being spread.
Melissa Cole phoned the home office and was told that the figure was 5000 when the initiative was announced, by had leapt to 87000 in the intervening months. Given that alcohol-related crime is down, and that violent attacks of any kind are down 33% over the last 12 years (none of the newspapers seemed to find this relevant either), that seems unlikely.
@junklight went back to the Telegraph story and found that, even though the headline claimed 1000 people a week were scarred by glass attacks only 5000 of these attacks took place every year. Skipping over the physics-defying possibility that every single glass attack somehow results in scarring injuries to ten people, the Telegraph goes on to quote a figure of 80,000 ‘threats’ as well as the 5000 actual attacks to get to that 85,000 figure.
Peter Haydon of Meantime Brewing was at the press launch for the new glass and asked where the figure came from. He was told by the Home Office representative there that 87k was the total number of alcohol-related assaults, and that the number involving glassware was actually 5,000.
@Iamreddave found a home office report on violent crime and worked out some stats from that. This data gives a total figure of 2164000 assaults of any kind in the Uk, and in a different charts says that bottles or broken glass are involved in 4% of all assaults. Divide the total, and you get 86560.
So looking at it, I’d suggest Red Dave is right about where the 87,000 figure comes from. The trouble with that is that it relates to ALL assaults of any kind with any glass or bottle, anywhere – and yet the media is claiming every single one of these assaults is someone with a broken pint glass in a pub.
Elsewhere in those Home Office tables, there’s a figure for all violent crime ‘in or around pubs’, and that figure is 623000 assaults. Here it claims glasses or bottles were used in 10% of all assaults – which gives you a figure of 62,300.
Another antineopro blogger with a source close to the action confirmed to me last night that the official Home Office figure is 5,500 reported assaults, but that there are another 37,000 that go unreported. As he points out, if they’re unreported, how do they know?
In other words, this is a news story that is based upon a complete and utter fabrication.
Here are some real facts:
  • The £2.7 billion figure quoted as the cost of glassing accidents to society is actually the estimated cost of ALL alcohol related conditions treated by the NHS, according to the NHS.
  • NHS data shows that the other figure – £100 million – is the cost of ALL glass-related injuries treated by the NHS, accidental or otherwise, alcohol-related or not.
  • The Hospital Episode Statistics from the NHS list all external causes of hospital admissions. In 2009 it treated 10413 for unspecified ‘contact with sharp glass’ and a further 5226 people for injuries sustained by an ‘assault by a sharp object’. The former covers every single accident involving glasses, the latter includes knife injuries etc. The true number of beer glass-related injuries is buries somewhere within one or both these figures and is therefore clearly much smaller than we are being led to believe. It’s not clear why the ‘many’ of the Times‘ 85,000 who are ‘scarred for life’, or the Telegraph’s ‘1000 a week’ who receive horrific glassing injuries, are not going to hospital to have these injuries seen to.
  • To put this in context, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents reports that 40,000 people are injured in accidents in the pub. So should we ban pubs then? Hardly – people might go home instead, and that’s far more dangerous – 100,000 people injure themselves each year trying to assemble furniture, and last year there were 5310 accidents involving trousers.

Home Office data shows that 2% of all pub-goers are involved in any kind of assault each year. 43% of these assaults are described as ‘grabbing or pushing’. Only 16% of assaults result in cuts of any kind. Around two thirds of victims in alcohol-related assaults describe themselves as being affected ‘not at all’ or ‘just a little’, with around 15% affected ‘quite a lot’ and 15% ‘very much’. Only 4-10% involve glasses or bottles, The vast majority involve fists, feet or blunt instruments.

So why such a huge focus on the pint glass? Why has the government spent so much time and money on something that, while horrific for those exposed to it, affects fewer people than those hurting themselves trying to put together a crappy IKEA wardrobe?
Now we’ve established that those are actual figures, and that no one in the media or the Home Office seems to know what this 87,000 figure is or where it came from, and that 87,000 is actually sixteen times higher than the REAL Home Office figure, go back and read those newspaper quotes on stats again. And get angry. Get very angry.
Just don’t get angry enough to glass anyone.

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Is the worst over for pubs?


After last week’s report that beer sales are not quite as shit as they have been, there’s similar cautious optimism this week for pubs – while not exactly something to shout from the rooftops, there are two bits of news suggesting that things have at least stopped getting even worse.

First, The Publican reported yesterday on claims from Merrill Lynch that pub performance is improving. The city broker chained that pubs face a brighter outlook in 2010, “with trade recovering, debt at manageable levels, regulatory concerns back to historical levels and property values having bottomed out”.
They were looking mainly at the big PubCos of course, and claimed in that the tenanted sector in particular was improving, with the underlying performance trend improving and top-end pubs showing “greater resilience”.
Today, this was followed by new data compiled for the British Beer and Pub Association by CGA Strategy, showing that the rate of pub closures slowed in the second half of 2009. We’ve spent six months quoting the horrible figure of 52 pub closures a week – that has now slipped back to 39 a week. Hardly great news – before we got up to 52 this was shocking – but after 52, it doesn’t seem quite as bad, and suggests that some of the factors killing pubs have done their worst.
A total of 2365 pubs closed in 2009, with the loss of 24,000 jobs. There are now 52,500 pubs in Britain – well down on the 58,600 pubs operating when the Licensing Act came into force in 2005. In addition to the loss of these vital community hubs, the Government is set to lose over £250 million in tax revenues this year, if the current closure level continues.
Food for thought for PubCo haters – in the second half of 2009 the rate of closure of free houses was far higher than tenanted or leased pubs – from July to December 575 free houses closed compared to 320 tenanted and 117 managed pubs.
The data also shows that pubs serving food led pubs continued to do better than those that don’t – just 130 of the pubs that closed were food led, with 883 drink-led.
It convinces me that while the trade is absolutely right to point fingers are factors such as supermarket pricing and in particular Thunderbirds Boy and his moronic tax rises, the recession has clearly been a particular bane to pubs, and now it’s easing, so is the pub’s plight.
The industry is by no means out of the woods and could still do with a helping hand from government rather than yet more punishment, but the pub is not going to die. Many (though I’ll admit, not all) of those who behave in an entrepreneurial way and continue to offer people something relevant will survive, and many are prospering.

I’ll be talking about this on Five Live’s drive time show later today.

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Wikio rankings for January 2010

I’ve now agreed with Wikio to be their ‘beer blog monitor’. As such, I get sneak previews of the monthly rankings and keep a lookout for any blogs that should be featured and aren’t.

Whether you think this is a bunch of self-congratulatory mutual backslapping or a credible guide to who’s blog is best, I don’t know many people who can resist a list. I find it alarming when people actually get angry about its very existence – this suggests to me a severe deficit in stuff happening in life offline. At the end of the day, it’s a bit of fun. If you think it’s more than that, have a word with yourself, so here it is – the charts for January:

1 Pencil & Spoon (+1)
2 Pete Brown’s Blog (+1)
3 Brew Dog Blog (-2)
4 Woolpack Dave’s beer and stuff blog (=)
5 Tandleman’s Beer Blog (=)
6 The Pub Curmudgeon (=)
7 The Beer Nut (=)
8 Jeffo’s Beer Blog (=)
9 The Bitten Bullet (+5)
10 `It’s just the beer talking` ? Jeff Pickthall’s Blog (+11)
11 Boak and Bailey’s Beer Blog (+7)
12 Spittoon (-3)
13 Jamie goode’s wine blog (=)
14 Real Ale Reviews (-4)
15 The Wine Conversation (-4)
16 Impy Malting (+3)
17 Brew Wales (-5)
18 Reluctant Scooper (-3)
19 Bibendum Wine (-3)
20 Zythophile (-3)

Ranking by Wikio

Not much movement at all really in the top spots, though I think Brew Dog James’ month on a trawler in the North Sea is a pretty good excuse for slipping down the blog rankings. But congrats to Young Dredge for his perseverance in getting to the top spot – he’s taken a medium and run with it, working incredibly hard. Also nice to see Boak & Bailey, Impy and Jeff moving up.

Anyway, if you have or know of a blog you think should be featured, or if you would like to host the preview of the rankings yourself any time in the next few months, please let me know!

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An open letter to Frank Dobson MP regarding his comments on drinkers

Dear Frank Dobson

I’m just listening to you speak on Decision Time, Radio 4, broadcast on 27th January.

You’ve just claimed – and I’m quoting your words exactly here – that “heavy drinkers cause a vast amount of disorder, get involved in sexual assaults, get involved in accidents and are a major nuisance with loutish behaviour.”

As a heavy drinker myself, I find your comments astonishingly offensive. I have never been involved – even in my youth – in any of the behaviour you describe above, and neither have any of my friends. You are quite clearly implying that if I drink, I am more likely to assault someone violently or sexually.

Your failure to specify ‘some’ or ‘a minority of’ drinkers, or to qualify your claims in any other way, means you are quite clearly claiming that ANYONE who drinks heavily is more likely to carry out such an assault. Having studied NHS and ONS data closely (I’d recommend you do the same) I know for a fact that there is no proof of this. While those who are already prone to sexual or violent assault may well have a drink before carrying out an attack, you are making a grave and slanderous error by implying that alcohol itself makes people more likely to commit such an attack. You are wilfully confusing correlation with causation.

On behalf of myself and the vast majority of drinkers who consume a legal drug that in the vast majority of cases enhances and benefits social interaction rather than damaging it, I demand an apology from you for this appalling slur on our characters, and suggest you check the facts before you open your mouth on this topic again.

As a beer writer, I’ll be copying this email in various channels and urging my many law-abiding, respectable readers to make their feelings known to you in a similar fashion.

Cheers

Pete Brown

Write to Frank at –
Frank Dobson MP
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AARing Frank on –
020 7219 4452 or 020 7219 5840Fax Frank on –
020 7219 6956Email Frank on
patelm@parliament.uk

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Beer Cocktails. Only nice.


I’ve never been a fan of beer cocktails.

When we have people round for parties I often make a cocktail for the start of the evening and have a few recipe books. I like the idea of beer cocktails, but when I check the books that have sections on these they tend to be creations that I wouldn’t describe as cocktails necessarily, but as the horrible mixtures we used to drink as students when we wanted to get throwing-up pissed as quickly as possible. Whereas rum, vodka and gin-based cocktails reek of sophistication (until you stray too far into paper umbrella territory), depth charges, boilermakers and other shooter combos smell only of stale vomit, and a black and tan doesn’t really count as a cocktail at all.
So I had to go to Belgium overnight last week (Joe S – I would have called, but I was with clients and we had about one hour spare to devote to bars) and we were staying in the Sofitel in Brussels, a posh business hotel that manages to be just about as classy as it thinks it is – a rare thing indeed on the kinds of business trips I take these days.
And on the menu they had a section of beer cocktails, and they looked… interesting at least.
‘Mojikriek’ was – yep, you guessed it – a Mojito made with kriek, as well as rum, lime, mint and sugar.
‘Coro Island’ was tequila, lime, blue Curacao and Corona.
‘Captain Leffe’ was old rum, caramel syrup, strawberry syrup, and Leffe.
Each was served in a tumbler, shaken and poured over ice. I was on the detox, but then again, I was in Belgium. So between us, we decided to give each a try.
The Captain Leffe was not to my personal taste, but was probably the most successful as a cocktail revolving around beer as a main ingredient. You got a gorgeous, deep, caramel hit first, followed by a touch of citric sourness and then a lingering, drying, toffee-infused bitter finish. In other words, it was the sum of its parts – very tasty, but a little sweet for my palate.
I preferred the Mojikriek as a drink, although there was little beery character to it – just a faint, gentle dryness at the end of a cavalcade of candy sweetness and citrus acidity, taking it down to a lingering dry, candy fruit that reminded me of fruit pastilles.
And the Corona one was fucking horrible – I swear I could taste the lightstruck skunking even through the syrupy layers of the other ingredients.
Overall though, quite inspiring, albeit with no outright divine revelation. I get the sense that there is an amazing beer cocktail out there somewhere, that has a beery character to it and yet looks, tastes and feels like a ‘proper’ cocktail (ie something flavourful to be served in hotel bars in small glasses over ice, and sipped slowly between handfuls of those posh nuts that seem to have been coated in varnish that no one ever, ever asks for but gets given anyway and eats without quite knowing why). If anyone knows any other good beer cocktails along these sorts of lines, I’d love to hear them.

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This week’s dose of neopro distortion and lies

Look, I don’t want to keep banging this drum. But the media assault is now a constant bombardment.

Today’s (or rather yesterday’s) villains are the Daily Telegraph, with the story “Children drinking more than adult safe levels, official figures show.” Thanks to Jeff Pickthall for sending me the article and for finding the actual data – he’s very bullish about stuff like this.
Nowhere in the Telegraph article does it give you an actual percentage figure for the number of children who are doing what the headline claims they are doing. By any conceivable standards, that’s just poor reporting. Incompetently poor. So why a professional journalist would do such a thing?
Before we answer that, it’s important to say that the data seems reliable, with one caveat: it’s a survey of 11-15 year olds, and there’s a pretty huge difference between the attitudes, habits and behaviour of an 11 year-old and those of a 15 year-old. Sure, you’ve got to create your data breaks somewhere, but the Telegraph subhead about “Children as young as eleven are drinking two bottles of wine a week” is pretty disingenuous when you don’t have a breakdown of ages within the group. If 63% of all 11-15 year olds have tried alcohol at some point in their lives, I’m guessing that figure is several times higher for 15 year olds than for 11 year olds. You simply cannot draw the conclusion from the data available that any child as young as eleven is drinking as much as the Telegraph claims. They may well be. But the data as it’s presented does NOT say that they are.
(By the way – if it seems tedious that I keep referring to 11-15 year olds, it’s because that’s the age group of the survey – there’s quite a difference between ‘children’ – which is what the Telegraph are claiming the story is – and 11-15 year olds – the oldest third of all children.)
But whatever, it’s still all under-age drinking, right? Which is of course wrong (because Liam Donaldson said so, without any research or data to back up his personal belief).
So what does the “official data” referred to by the Telegraph actually say? Unsurprisingly, even a cursory look suggests quite a different picture from the one the newspaper paints:
  • The percentage of 11-15 year olds who have ever drunk FELL from 55% in 2006 to 52% in 2008
  • The percentage of 11-15 year-olds who have drunk in the last week FELL from 21% in 2006 to 18% in 2008
  • The AVERAGE alcohol consumption for 11-15 year olds who have drunk alcohol is between 13 and 16 units – so not higher than safe limits for adults at all then. And as that’s an average of 11-15 year olds who have ever drunk (52%), simple maths tells you that the average for ALL 11-15 year olds must be half that – around 7-8 units.
  • Why focus on the North East? Because that’s the region where 11-15 year olds have drunk more than anywhere else. It’s not typical of the country as a whole. 63% of 11-15 year olds have drunk alcohol there, compared with only 39% in London.
  • The Telegraph correctly reports that ‘more than one in four’ 11-15 year olds in the North East have drunk in the last week. It doesn’t report that in London, this figure is only 12%. Everywhere else, it’s between the two.
  • In terms of average weekly consumption, girls marginally exceed the safe limit for women in five out of nine regions, by an amount that is within the standard margin of error quoted by statisticians. For example, in West Midlands girls drink an average of 14.2 units a week, with a standard range of error of 1.27, meaning they could be as much as 15.9 or as little as 12.5.
  • In no area of the country do boys drink an average of more than 21 units – the recommended limit for men. The Telegraph headline is therefore factually inaccurate on yet another count. In the body of the article it states where teenage girls drink too much. It doesn’t mention the figures for teenage boys because they don’t fit with the story the newspaper is fabricating – so let me say once again, IN NO REGION OF THE COUNTRY ARE 11-15 YEAR OLD BOYS DRINKING MORE THAN THE ‘SAFE’ LIMITS FOR ADULT MEN.

The headline “Children drinking more than adult safe levels” clearly suggests that the typical or average child is doing so. The “official data” emphatically shows that this is NOT the case, and also shows – like all other recent data on the subject – that under-age drinking is declining, something the Telegraph does not see fit to mention at all.

Here is a serious and incredibly well-respected newspaper deliberately distorting NHS data to create a story that is significantly more alarming than the truth. The sub-editors have taken a story the journalist has already distorted, and written a headline and sub-head that is simply not true on several counts.
Why? Do they have their own agenda? Or are they just resorting to cheap, tabloid-style sensationalism? Anyone know?

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Beer sales not quite as shit as they have been lately

Every quarter, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) releases a quarterly ‘beer barometer’ that gives you a snapshot of how beer sales are doing in the UK.

As you’re probably aware, UK beer sales have been tanking over the last few years, and this has put the much-criticised BBPA in a difficult position. As the body representing British brewing interests it should be a cheerleader for the industry, actively promoting beer. But increasingly it sounds like a doom-monger, doing more than any other organisation to give the impression that no one is drinking beer or going to the pub any more.
Fortunately, the latest figures – while not exactly positive – are significantly less shit than they have been recently, and this has allowed the BBPA to take a welcome, slightly more upbeat tone.
The headline of the press release is “Beer starts to shake off recession slump”. The key figures are:
  • Total beer sales down 3.6% in October to December 2009, the lowest 4th quarter fall since 2006
  • Beer sales for the whole of 2009 fell by 4.2%, compared with 5.5% for 2008
  • Sales in pubs and bars for the final quarter of 09 were down 5% – compared with 9% in 2008
  • Beer was down in supermarkets and shops in the final quarter by 2.1%, compared with 6.4% in 2008
  • However, over the year a a while, off-trade beer sakes were down 3.1% – the largest annual fall since records began in 1978. This at least raises questions about the received wisdom that the main problem facing pubs is cheap beer in supermarkets
  • Based on these figures, despite Alastair “A barman nicked my girlfriend when I was 18 and my entire economic policy is based on extracting a slow and humiliating revenge from an industry I have learned to hate” Darling having raised duty on beer by more than 20 fucking per cent in the last two years, and having done so purely as a revenue raising measure (anti-binge drinking etc was not a consideration), government revenues from beer have in fact fallen by an estimated £258 million. Nice one, Thunderbirds-boy.

So. People are drinking less beer, and it’s looking like the recession has been a key cause of that. But as BBPA chief executive Brigid Simmonds comments, “As the economy moves into recovery, so will the beer and pub sector. In fact, as in previous recessions, it may emerge first and fastest.”

But Simmonds also warns “What is certain is that any recovery could be thrown off course and destabilised by Government intervention on tax or regulation. What is equally certain is that any move by Government to increase beer tax further this year would be very damaging and place pubs and jobs at greater risk.”

Come on Alastair, get over it. It was a long time ago. Let her go.

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The Great Dentist’s Chair Hunt – Results

Last week I asked for evidence of the infamous ‘dentist’s chair’ promotion – where one person lies back in a chair while others pour spirits down their necks.

It was quoted in every newspaper and radio news report on the government’s introduction of a mandatory code for pubs as being typical of the kind of binge drinking promotion that needs to be stamped out. I’ve never seen one, and asked if anyone else had spotted one in a UK licensed premises over the last ten years.
We’ve managed to identify that this activity definitely does happen in Sam Jacks in Newcastle (it just had to be Newcastle, didn’t it?). Thanks to Beer Nut and Stringers Beer.
But so far, we’ve failed to find evidence of it happening in more than one of Britain’s 105,000 on-licensed pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants.
And then, yesterday, I received an e-mail from someone who works for one of the UK’s largest circulation national newspapers. For obvious reasons I can’t reveal that person’s identity. But what they have to say speaks volumes about the media and neo-prohibitionism:

“I was asked to find images showing the aforementioned chair for our paper last week. One of the picture researchers spent a couple of hours on the case without finding one single picture of this occurring anywhere in the world, never mind Britain. That search included 13 or 14 commercial picture agencies handling millions of stock images which, I think, shows that this particular form of drinking – disregarding one event involving England footballers almost 15 years ago – is non-existent.”
It’s good to know that even among the people who are compelled to spread the myth of ‘soaring’ binge drinking, there are those who realise what a crock of horseshit this whole media-generated moral panic really is.

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