Author: PeteBrown

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Fat Lori ov Derby is a Slag

Hops & Glory is just going through legal proof reading just before it goes to design and print, and it’s throwing up some bizarre battles to keep in some of my favourite pet lines.

It seems that legal issues over books have intensified since I slagged off Anheuser Busch in Three Sheets to the Wind to the point where I included the unproven allegations about one Busch family member escaping a manslaughter charge because the evidence that would have proven it mysteriously disappeared.  
Those were the days!
Now, it seems that lawyers are reading non-fiction books with the sole purpose of finding something they can create a libel case out of, then contacting the injured person or institution, making them aware of what’s said and trying to persuade them to launch a libel action – largely because Britain has the harshest libel law in the world.  My publishers have been hit with five writs in as many weeks, for stuff they thought was safe.  Makes a change from chasing ambulances I suppose.
Anyway, one of several contentious issues arises early in the book, when I’m trying to convey the atmosphere in Burton on Trent today and harking back to its former glories.  In the middle of this bit comes the following passage:
Behind the storm fencing and DANGER KEEP OUT signs outside the derelict Riverside shopping centre and the abandoned Club Extreme, the Salt’s Brewery well still runs beneath the litter-strewn concourse, workers’ portaloo and graffiti informing us in emotive and disapproving terms that Fat Lori of Derby is liberal with her sexual favours, complete with her mobile phone number.   
It turns out that there has been a case where someone has referred to graffiti like this, then when the book is out the person on the graffiti has suffered harassment and sued.  Would Fat Lori share the same fate?  
The building in question was derelict at the time.  I figured if it had been pulled down by now, the number would have vanished and no-one could harass poor Fat Lori.  So I phoned my mate Rudgie (who you’ll get to know well in the book) and he confirmed the building is still there.  However, he left his very busy desk at Coors to go and see if the graffiti still adorned it.
It seems the building has been fenced off and you can’t get near it.  And someone has nailed what looks like a door to the wall which obscures most of the message, so all you can read is:
Fat Lori
is a
07
It looks like me, Pan Macmillan and Fat Lori are all safe.  But in the book Lori has become Jodie, just to be sure.
 

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Four weeks to go till Britain’s biggest celebration of cask ale

Apologies for the lack of activity in recent weeks – an unexpected close family bereavement has kept me away from the real world for three weeks or so.  The only consolation to come out of a pretty horrible time was becoming more familiar with beers around Wales, which I might rave about later at some point.

Anyway, back to business, and my first brush with the outside world came last week, when I attended a meeting of regional and local ale brewers who spent half a day discussing how cask ale might be promoted more bullishly and effectively.
The first thing to share out of this was the latest news on the first ever National Cask Ale Week, which starts on 6th April wherever you see this logo, and runs over Easter.  What’s special about this is it’s not just an initiative by CAMRA or Wetherspoons.  Organised by Cask Marque, it has active support across the entire beer and pub industry, with major pub cos, the Daily Telegraph, various celebrities and (to date) over 5000 pubs joining in, as well as the aforementioned stalwart cask ale champions.  
Full details are here.  
The idea is to recruit a million new cask ale drinkers over the course of the week, and I think they’ll do it.  Whatever happens, this kind of big idea, with support from so many bodies, is exactly what the brewing industry needs.

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Beer and food again and again

And here’s me and fellow beer scribe Adrian Tierney-Jones at a very memorable beer and food matching event at the legendary Rick Stein’s seafood school in Padstow, Cornwall, courtesy of Cornish Brewer Sharp’s.

It was an awesome occasion.  The Publican write-up is here.

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Beer and food again

I mentioned recently that I’d been doing a lot of journalism, and quite a bit on beer and food. Just discovered that a recent piece I did the The Publican magazine is available online here if you’re interested.

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How much do you want your pub to stay open?

Good news from the BBPA: more than a hundred MPs have signed an early day motion supporting the ‘axe the beer tax – save the pub’ campaign, launched by CAMRA and the BBPA last year and covered by me quite vociferously at the time.

This signals a growing widespread view that the plan to continue to tax the living daylights out of beer at a time when pretty much every other sector of the economy is receiving financial aid is simply not acceptable.
A press release from the BBPA yesterday also states proudly that 10,000 people have written to their MP about the issue, and 20,000 have signed the online petition and joined the Facebook group.
This pretty lady has shown her support.  Why haven’t you?
Nuts and Zoo fixture Jennifer Ellison at the campaign launch
Well great.
To put that 20,000 into context, the Top Gear Appreciation Group has 238,907 members.  The group ‘If 500,000 join this group I will change my middle name to Facebook’ has 172,371 members.
If 100 out of 646 MPs have expressed support, that means 15% of all MPs have done something. If every single person who signed up so far was a member of CAMRA (they’re not) then that would still mean that only 20% of CAMRA members have signed up.  Fifteen million people go to the pub at least once a week.  That means 0.13% of pub goers have signed up.
I’m pleased the campaign has made a dent on public consciousness, but really this isn’t good enough.  A quick google search reveals that coverage of the campaign consists almost entirely of blogs and trade press sites, with the occasional hit from the Wigan Weekly Post or Huddersfield Examiner.  As far as I can see the only national paper to have ever mentioned it is the Daily Star, and in that piece Jen’s breasts (above) loomed more largely than anything else.
Do we want to save our pubs or not?  The fact that one in six MPs have signed the early day motion shows the will is there to get something done.  The fact that probably a significantly smaller proportion of CAMRA members have signalled their support is deeply disturbing.  
I’m not picking on CAMRA (again) – it’s just that of all the people who claim to care about the preservation of their local, this group is supposedly the epicentre.  And CAMRA co-organised the campaign.  Every member gets regular updates from the organisation – there’s no excuse for them not to know about it.  
CAMRA itself represents only a minority of cask ale lovers – an estimated 7 million regular cask ale drinkers versus CAMRA’s membership of 97,000.  You can only get cask ale in pubs. Do 6.98 million cask ale drinkers – 99.7% of them – not give a shit that their pubs might close, thereby denying them the chance to drink cask ale?
Beer sales are at their lowest for seven years.  They fell by 10% in the last quarter of last year alone.  And beer drinkers – beer fans, beer aficionados – seemingly couldn’t give a fuck. 
If you know someone who likes going to the pub and enjoys drinking beer, get them to sign up. Let’s see if we can get more people motivated to try to save the pub with no more than a simple mouse click than there are members of ‘If it’s not from Yorkshire it’s shite‘ (76,922 members). On the other hand, that is a group I need to join.  But then, that’s so easy to do.

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OK so drinking beer might make you feel horny – but packaging it?

Last week a customer at Asda found a little more than they bargained for when they bought a four-pack of Cobra Zero beer from Asda in Shoeburyness, Essex.

Inside the cardboard outer packaging there was a thoughtful free gift – a condom.  A used condom.  
An Asda spokeswoman said, “We are at a loss to understand how it got there,” while Adrian McKeon, chief executive of Cobra beer, apologised and stressed the company;s strict quality control procedures.
Good job it didn’t actually get into one of the cans – there are already enough people of the view that lager tastes like piss without introducing other bodily fluids…

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Pub Fact – or Fiction? The first in an occasional series

Thought it might be a nice idea to share a query with you I had from a Canadian reader.

Voytek writes:
“My wife thinks that it used to be customary for some pubs to play “God save the queen” at closing time, sort of a tradition for the last call. Have you heard anything about it? Is it still practiced or maybe we’re talking about something from the past?” 
Have to say I’ve never heard of it, and thinking about how recently recorded music has become a feature of pubs, I can’t see it being a tradition unless it was the landlord singing or someone playing it on the piano.  Can anyone prove me wrong?

That got me thinking – anyone know any other quirky old pub rituals, last orders and time-calling eccentricities?  The pub is losing a little of its individuality thanks to transitory bar staff who see it as just a job and often seem to expect you to know when last orders and time is called by nothing other than telepathy.  It would be great to capture a few stories…

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Buy the Big Issue!

No, I haven’t fallen on hard times.

This week’s edition, the one with this cover:
has a piece by me on ‘the death of the pub’, and what’s really happening, and why The Pub will never die as a concept.
Oh, and it helps the homeless as well – the only people (apart from skint pensioners) to have a decent excuse for not liking the snow.

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Drink beer and carry on

I’m not above using my status as Britain’s Second Best Beer BloggerTM in the cause of commerce, so long as it’s for something I like.

The guys who make these T-shirts contacted me and asked me what I thought, and I think they’re rather fine – a message that both supports the beer and pub industry and gives sensible advice to everyone else who thinks the sky’s falling in.
If you like them too, go here and buy one.  

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