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Wikio Rankings for February

The algorithms are in, and the rankings have been compiled for beer and wine blog rankings for February 2010. Lot’s of jostling and ooh look, I’m back on top! Barry M’s bitten bullet is rising steadily, and the fact that Jeff has finished his blog is starting to make an impact as it slides down three.

If you’d like to be included in the rankings and currently aren’t – or if you would like to exclusively reveal the monthly rankings on your blog next month – please drop me a line…

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Exclusive – more details about the future of Tetley’s

I’ve blogged in the past about how Tetley’s was my trainer beer, my local pint, and how even though its star has fallen, it retains a special place in my heart.

In 2008 Carlsberg UK announced that the brewery in Leeds would be closing. Today they’ve announced that from 2011, Marstons will brew Tetley’s Cask in Wolverhampton, while Smoothflow will be brewed by Molson Coors in Tadcaster. Carlsberg say they are delighted that most of the volume brewed will be remaing in Yorkshire, and that with cask, they looked into every option for keeping it in Yorkshire but this proved not to be possible.

I’ve just had a chat with Darran Britton, Carlsberg UK’s marketing director, and got a bit more background. I’ll scribble down what he said first, and reserve some personal reflections till the end of this post.

The most contentious part of the whole deal is the move of cask out of Yorkshire. Was there really ‘no other option?’

“It may not be as fashionable as it once was, but Tetley’s is a still a very sizeable cask ale,” replied Britton, “it needed somewhere with enough excess capacity. But it also needed someone who is experienced in brewing other people’s beers, someone who is technically excellent.”

Lots of names have been speculated – Black Sheep, Timothy Taylor’s, Heineken (as in John Smith’s in Tadcaster) but if you agree with those criteria – and it’s hard not to – then it’s difficult to disagree with the conclusion, however unpalatable it may be.

So why Marston’s?

“They have a great reputation for their ales, and they’re an experienced contract brewer. In Wolverhampton they have traditional square fermenters, which Tetley’s has always been brewed in. We’ll work with them to keep the same recipe, the same ingredients, and we’ll continue using Tetley’s unique two-strain yeast.”

And what about Leeds? What are the plans for the brewery site?

“Production in Leeds will end mid-2011. We’ll be transferring the brewing earlier in the year. We’re in talks with Leeds council about their plans for the city, but there are no plans for the site yet.”

Tetley’s – like its counterparts Worthington’s, John Smiths and Boddington’s – has been in a phase of managed decline for several years now, ceding the cask ale market to regionals and local brewers. Now that cask ale is back in growth – tiny, tiny growth, but growth nonetheless – will this move coincide with renewed support behind the brand? To be clear, Carlsberg is retaining ownership of Tetley’s for the foreseeable future, with Molson Coors and Marston’s brewing on a contract basis. Despite this, I’m reminded of when Courage brands moved from S&N, who clearly didn’t want them, to Well’s & Young’s, who did. In that case there was a change of ownership, but it saw the beers being revitalised to a dramatic extent. As I said, this move for Tetley’s is different, but after reports of new investment and the return of the huntsman to the brand’s identity, I wondered if this was a cue for somer kind of relaunch.

Britton refused to be drawn, saying more that this was “business as usual”. Rather than there being any renewed energy behind the brand, he insisted that there wouldn’t be any less support behind it, that investment will continue, and that there’ll be a new sampling campaign later this year.

So there we go.

In my job, I get to see both sides of stories like this. Sometimes I’m with the marketers when difficult decisions have to be made, when the harsh realities of modern business and the demands of shareholders make unpalatable choices inevitable. Other times I get to be a beer fan, and to be able to say “Fuck the shareholders, this is beer we’re talking about! A short term view not only betrays the core drinkers of the brand, it actually doesn’t make sound business sense in the long view.”

In this case, I’m torn. I am grief-stricken at what has happened to Tetley’s, appalled that the link between the brand and the city of Leeds will be broken. (“Tetley’s will always have a relationship with Leeds”, insists Britton, but that relationship will only exist in an abstract, emotional sense). I’m frustrated that for one of the biggest beer brands in the country, Carlsberg seems unable to make the huge power of provenance and place of origin make commercial sense for them. Lots of people will say that Tetley’s can never taste the same if it’s brewed in Wolverhampton but I’m not one of them – it’ll taste exactly the same. But it’s not about that – it’s about the story, the soul of the beer.

On the other hand, I feel we have to accept the commercial reality that it no longer makes business sense for big breweries to sit on lots of expensive land in city centres. We don’t have to like it. We can rage against it. But that doesn’t stop it from being true. It’s difficult enough to make money in brewing.

I think that to fairly criticise Carlsberg for what they’ve announced today, you have to be able to suggest something they could have done instead.

Keeping the Leeds brewery open was not an option. Moving cask to another brewery in Yorkshire was – if we take Britton at his word – not an option.

The one thing I think may have been an option, and which I’m disappointed by, is not keeping a small part of the space in Leeds and continuing to brew cask there. Most of the land is a massive distribution centre, which would be way better somewhere else. It doesn’t make much difference at all where Smoothflow is brewed and I’m not sure any0ne cares. But if you sold off all that lot, and kept hold of the old brewery bit or redeveloped a new purpose-built cask ale brewery for a few million quid, this could only have enhanced whatever plans Leeds will eventually have for the space (I’m guessing “luxury apartments” with the odd Starbucks and panini shop.) It would add heritage, character and romance, something uniquely Leeds, to what is sure to be a development that will look identical to any city in the UK. This would have sent the right signals to the ale community, given the city a stake, mollified hardcore Tetley’s fans. Maybe they looked at this option and found reasons why it wasn’t viable. Maybe not. But the fact that it is not happening is a crying shame.

I have no problem whatsoever with Marston’s – they certainly know how to brew beer.

I think Britton is right – it will be business as usual. Nothing will change in the beer itself. And it has always been a decent cask pint, brewed with love and care, no matter what anyone thinks.

But I had hoped that this would be more than business as usual. It’s emotional and sentimental because that’s what beer is, but when Tetley’s cask is no longer brewed in Leeds, I for one will have one less reason to drink the beer. I’d rather been hoping for new reasons to drink it instead. Sadly, I’ve heard nothing to suggest that there will be.

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Raise a glass to St David’s Day

Why do we think it’s still acceptable to take the piss out of the Welsh in a way that’s no longer acceptable with any other nation?

OK, I’ll admit they talk a bit funny, and maybe we don’t have the same sense of them being a nation that we do with the Scots and Irish, who both fought more robustly to avoid being absorbed by England than their south-westerly Celtic cousins. ‘England and Wales’ is still often said on one breath even in this devolutionary age where Scotland has regained a considerable measure of national pride and identity.

But I love Wales. I mean, just look at it:

The fact that The Beer Widow is a closet Taff has a lot to do with that (you’d never guess to hear her talk, unless you make her really mad and really drunk at the same time) but I hope to divide my time between South Wales and London to an increasing extent. It’s stunning scenery in the valleys, the kind you drink in. The pubs around Abergavenny are some of the best I’ve ever been to, delivering the quality you’d expect from a gastropub with none of the pretension. And the Abergavenny Food Festival is one of the culinary highlights of my year.

I did two talks/tutored tastings at last year’s festival. I got a kick out of the fact that they both sold out a month or so in advance, when tickets for other events were still available on the day. OK, so one of those was an audience with Michael Winner so it’s not fair to compare, but still.
One of my events was a tasting of locally brewed beers. Four years ago, when I was commissioned by the Mail on Sunday to do a piece on micros across Britain, I had trouble finding many breweries in Wales to talk about. I had Breconshire Brewery, and that was pretty much it. There’s no such problem now.
As with any region of the country, when I was selecting beers for the tasting I found several that were so bad I had to pour down the sink, but the good ones were sublime.
Otley is one of the most exciting breweries in the country. Founder and brewer Nick Otley shares the vision of peers like Dark Star and Thornbridge, always asking ‘What If…’, always giving trad beer styles a new and unique twist, and his branding is arguably the best in small-scale British brewing:
At the tasting we had O-Garden – yes, a Belgian-style wheat beer – and Columb-O, a 4% golden ale for which Nick bought up the entire UK supply of Columbus hops to create one of those peachy, zingy beers that makes you a bit giddy when you first taste it. At the end of the tasting we had to clear out so the next talk could set up, and we were dawdling, going “Hang on, I think there’s just a bit more left in the pin,” desperate not to leave any behind.
Otley also runs a mail order business supplying other Welsh beers, and he very kindly gave me a few other beers for the event.
Purple Moose is probably the most celebrated Welsh brewery right now, at least in terms of awards. I found their beers to be expertly made, nothing wrong with them at all, but I should have tasted them before the Otley beers. Nice pale ales, crisp and flavoursome, and maybe it was unfair of me to expect more than that, but with the hype and the funky name and branding, I kind of did.
Kingstone is a farmhouse brewery in Tintern who’d caught my attention the year before with 1503 – an ale based on a recipe from that year. Unfortunately I’ve had one or two dodgy bottles recently from shops, but on the day it didn’t disappoint – dark and carmelly, with that lovely sweet spot where hops and malt meet and synthesise in a rich fruitiness. (Kingstone also helped out the following day after Fedex played a game of football with the Jaipur intended for my IPA tasting, donating the festival stock of their IPA). They’ve got a fantastic and intriguing bottled range, nothing too wacky but very solid.
Breconshire kind of dominates the Welsh brewing scene now. Head Brewer Buster Grant is a striking figure, tall with a Victorian-size beard and often sporting a kilt. His beers are subtle – they make you work a bit before revealing their strengths, but it’s well worth the effort. He takes classic styles and tweaks them a little – a best bitter that’s paler than a golden ale (Cribyn, 4.5%), an old ale that has sherry notes and ages nicely despite being only 5% (Rambler’s Ruin), and a stunning stout made with peated malt that delivers the flavour profile of a whisky aged beer without pinning you to the ground and punching you repeatedly in the face with it (Night Beacon, 4.5%). These are beers that knock politely and ask if they can come in, before revealing themselves to be more than you first took them for.
My one big regret at the Festival was that I didn’t feature anything from the Tudor Brewery. This is a new operation in the heart of Abergavenny, a brew pub in the Kings Arms, a delightful, ancient pub with rooms and food that punches above its weight. When the brewery opened I tried to like the beers. I tried so hard. But they simply weren’t very good, so I didn’t put them into the tasting. And then, afterwards, I found out they had a new brewer who’d had a bit of help and completely turned them around. If you see Skirrid, Sugarloaf and Blorenge – named after the mountains that overlook Abergavenny – please give them a go. They’re well worth it, especially the slightly spiced toffee warmth of the Sugarloaf.
Apart from it being St David’s Day, and the fact that it’s easy to overlook Welsh beers, and that have been meaning to write about Abergavenny for months, the other reason for posting this today is that there’s a Welsh Beer Festival on down at the Rake this week. We went down yesterday, attending a tasting of Breconshire beers by Buster – including the excellent Rambler’s Ruin and Night Beacon.
Then we shared a couple of pints with Nick Otley, who talked us through O Rosie (blonde ale brewed with rosemary ) and Motley Brew, the full-on IPA brewed with Glyn from the Rake. It’s a beer that stops you in your tracks and makes you see the wisdom of ordering halves. It’s pretty much Glyn’s favourite beer. I mean, it would be, but after doing it as a one off, there is now talk of it being made a permanent Otley beer and rightly so.
If you’re anywhere near London the Welshfest worth checking out – the decking area is full of racked beers, I reckon there’s over 20 on in total.
So, Wales then. The country is about the same size as Belgium. And while chances of it competing with the continental surrealists in beer terms remain remote, in beer – as in so much else these days – when you start to scratch the surface, it has a burgeoning beer culture all of its own – a distinctively Welsh beer culture.
Lots occurin’.

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Apologies…

Dropped out of circulation for a few weeks there while I was rewriting Man Walks into a Pub. Just got final rewrites off to the editor and am now resuming normal service.

Apologies if you entered the Budvar/Publican Why Beer Matters competition – it’s a month since closing date and it’s very remiss of me not to have done the judging by now. I’ll be resolving that asap.
Lots of great stuff happening over the next few weeks though – I’ll be posting about my recent trip to Denmark, the Welsh beer revolution, lager, and plans for Cask Ale Week over the next week or two.
In the meantime, here’s a column I did for the Publican when I was out after the Liverpool Beer Festival last week.

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I remember when it were all fields round here

Wading through mud at the moment trying to finish off the rewrites for the new edition of Man Walks into a Pub, due out 4th June with a spanking new cover from the fella who did Hops & Glory. Making up the trilogy with the H&G paperback will be a newly covered Three Sheets, which isn’t changing apart from that cover, but it’s lovely to see them all together looking like a set – my beer trilogy. It makes me feel like a proper grown-up writer.

I had lunch yesterday with someone I knew from the beer world before I’d had a single word published, and it made me think how rapidly everything has changed – when we knew each other I was working full-time in an ad agency, Stella Artois was widely respected as a quality beer and in double digit growth, Progressive Beer Duty didn’t exist so, therefore, neither did the British craft brewing revolution. Cask ale was in terminal decline and seemingly drunk by no one under 50. CAMRA had half the membership it does now and the mere thought of them as an organisation and the terrible image they were giving beer at the time made me seethe with rage and frustration – as did the fact that not a single beer writer seemed to criticise them in print.
Google was new, and most of us accessed it via a dial-up modem. Around the time I finally finished my first manuscript of MWIAP, I was in a meeting with someone who had a laptop on his desk that wasn’t plugged into anything. Nevertheless, at one point he said “I’ll just print that” and pressed some buttons. Christ, I thought, he’s pretending to print something. Why would he do that?
It was only when he returned with the printed document that I realised I’d just seen wireless networking for the first time. This was 2002. 18 months before, I’d read a cyberpunk thriller centred around the (fictitious, impossible) idea.
Christ, I sound like an old fart. But this is my point – it only seems like five minutes ago really. I still think of myself most of the time as a new kid on the beer writing block. It’s disorientating when I get a brief glimpse of self-awareness that I might be one of the old guard.
Do I feel like an old fart?
Well, today I had a quick look at Twitter and my blog roll – I’m trying to ration myself while I get this bloody book finished – and in the middle of overhauling some very outdated text I was struck by the sheer scale of what’s happening in beer now, loving it and at the same time feeling slightly panicked by the fact that, as Beer Writer of the Year, I should be somehow attempting to keep on top of everything and have a comment on everything, and that is utterly impossible now.
So I’m surprised to find that I have no view one way or the other on the wisdom of Brew Dog’s latest venture: I’d like to taste a 41% IPA and think it’s a fresh departure for super-strong beers, but I still had to roll my eyes when it was announced. I think Sink the Bismarck is a shit and self-indulgent name for the beer, but at the same time I really struggle to work up any moral outrage at making fun of the Germans and referencing the war.
I fins myself applauding Cooking Lager’s lout ticking post, but have no new comment to make on the whole ticking issue.
And on the neoprohibition stuff, I’m delighted to see Phil Mellows continuing to bring some excellent new findings and developments to light, but have to curtail myself from spending another entire month digging into the issue.
There are so many people writing about these things now, and they’re all worthy of coverage. So I’m not complaining – I’m just a bit overwhelmed at how much the collision of craft beer passion and new media has generated and wondering – both from a beer worlds and a personal point of view – where do we go next?
In the short term – back to revising chapter ten – the one that slagged off CAMRA…

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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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